Is it time to drop the terminology of ‘powerful knowledge’ in talking about the school curriculum?

Credit: Richard Stonehouse for UCL IOE.

25 November 2025

By John White

At the heart of the Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report, Building a world-class curriculum for all, is the claim that the curriculum should be ‘knowledge-rich’ and ‘centred on powerful knowledge’. The government response endorses this, using the same two expressions. These terms were also used, in the same closely related way, in an address on ‘The importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum’ by the former Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, in 2021.

The idea that the curriculum should be rich in knowledge and based on powerful knowledge has been around since the Gove reforms of the earlier part of the last decade. How far will it shape curriculum policy in the last half of this one?

What do these two terms mean? For their licence, London black cab drivers are tested on what is called ‘the Knowledge’: they have to learn the locations of all streets in central London within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. What they learn is ‘knowledge-rich’ indeed, but the use of the term in a curriculum context is clearly different. Does it mean that acquiring important types of knowledge should be at the heart of the curriculum? If so, what are these? And why should they be central? Or are we, in light of the close connexion so often made between ‘knowledge-rich’ and ‘centred on powerful knowledge’, to take these terms as synonymous? But, if so, ‘what is powerful knowledge?’

The term is associated with Michael Young. In 2015 he wrote that “powerful knowledge is systematic. Its concepts are systematically related to one another and shared in groups, such as subject or disciplinary associations. It is not, like common sense, rooted in the specific contexts of our experience.” At that time, Young held that every academic subject manifests powerful knowledge, “from maths to dance”.

But by 2019, broadly accepting the criticism that only some subjects, e.g. maths and science, are built around systematically related concepts (history, for instance, is not, neither is literature), Young, now with Johan Muller, changed the earlier account of powerful knowledge. They now relied on a distinction found in Spinoza, between ‘potestas’ and ‘potentia’, between power over people, and power – or ability – to do things. In their view, “potentia is productive or creative, it extends horizons, it imagines new futures … involves the capacity to achieve something of value. In this sense, highly specialised knowledge as produced by universities confers a very specialised capacity to its holders.”

But this second account of powerful knowledge is arguably as flawed as the first. I may have the power or ability to wiggle my ears, but this does not extend horizons or imagine new futures. In addition, there is still a gap between imagining new futures and abilities developed via school curricula. A paranoic may imagine that his enemies will seek to kill him.

The notion of powerful knowledge is murky at best. It is not at all clear what it means, if indeed it means anything at all. What we can say about it is that it is an emotionally charged term. It suggests something positive, something that it would be better to have than be without. Used in a curriculum context, it might well appear to some to be obviously desirable and thereby in no need of further justification. Who would not prefer a curriculum based on knowledge that is powerful rather than feeble?

We do not know what those responsible for the Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report understand by ‘powerful knowledge’. Have they asked what descriptive meaning, if any, the term has? Or do they, affected by powerful knowledge’s positive charge, take it that it must be a good thing, no further justification needed?

In the government response, there is a footnote (no 4 on p12) stating that “powerful knowledge … can help build a shared frame of reference (such as historical reference to a space as ‘empty as the Marie Celeste’, quoting Shakespeare’s ‘break the ice’, or understanding supply and demand to understand how prices can unexpectedly change).” This hard-to-follow account of ‘powerful knowledge’ underlines the obscurity of the term. Whether it has anything in common with Michael Young’s ideas is also questionable.

If we pare away from the two documents the points made using the terms ‘knowledge-rich’ and ‘centred on powerful knowledge’, we seem to be left only with the view, carried over from Gove and Gibb, that the curriculum must primarily be based on the acquisition of academic knowledge under its conventional subject headings. In Gove’s time this seems to have been largely dictated by the demands of assessment: knowledge is more easily testable than other educational goals such as concern for others in the community or aesthetic appreciation.

It remains to be seen how far the curriculum will follow this paradigm built up between 2010 and 2024. There are many encouraging signs either in the final report or the government’s response that, in following this lead, they are not doing so slavishly. These include, for example, the introduction of citizenship education in primary schools, the greater focus on oracy, more attention to climate change, greater responsiveness to our diverse society, as well as promoting education in the arts and enrichment activities in such things as civic engagement, outdoor pursuits and sports, complemented by discontinuing the EBacc and reducing exam time.

The Curriculum and Assessment Review favoured ‘evolution, not revolution’. The questions now are: evolution towards what? And how quickly? I believe that on the way to this goal, the government would do well to jettison talk of knowledge richness and powerful knowledge.