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? (more…)

Credit: Cavan for Adobe via Adobe Stock.

23 October 2025

By Yana Manyukhina

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Education recently launched a call for evidence into the loss of children’s “love of learning” across the UK. It reflects growing concern about what many educators have observed: that increasing anxiety, falling attendance and assessment-driven pressures are eroding curiosity and joy in learning.

At the same time, England’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, led by Professor Becky Francis, is examining whether the national curriculum is fit for purpose in a rapidly changing world. Its interim report acknowledges deep tensions in current practice, from narrow accountability systems to limited teacher autonomy, and calls for a curriculum that is “rich and broad, inclusive, and innovative”. (more…)

Credit: WavebreakMediaMicro via Adobe Stock.

24 September 2024

By John White

‘Major surgery, not sticking plasters.’ What Keir Starmer said recently about NHS reforms applies also to school education in England. For nearly 40 years we have been blighted by a National Curriculum whose main rationale is as the central pillar of a selective system as indefensible as the eugenics-based binary system of the post-war years but all the more effective for being less visible. (more…)

Credit: Phil Meech for UCL

20 June 2024

By John White

I agree so much with the arguments running through the four recent blog posts on primary education from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy. Today, curriculum and pedagogy are dominated by assessment requirements. This explains why so much of the curriculum is about knowledge acquisition and regurgitation – and, as Alice Bradbury’s piece points out, why so many pupils are bored or anxious about their Sats performance. Children are, after all, active, inquisitive, creative creatures. They need a curriculum, pedagogy and assessment system befitting these qualities. (more…)

Credit: Cavan for Adobe via Adobe Stock.

5 June 2024

By Yana Manyukhina

This is the second of four blog posts about primary education from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (HHCP) at IOE. Each post addresses key points that are included in a new HHCP briefing paper written to inform debate about education in England as we approach the general election. The four posts are:

1. In the hands of a new government: the future of primary education in England.
2. Children, choice and the curriculum.
3. Hands on learning: a progressive pedagogy.
4. Assessment in primary schools: reducing the ‘Sats effect’.

Curriculum is a fundamental aspect of schooling as it dictates what children learn. Behind each curriculum is a set of significant assumptions about what we intend for our children to achieve by the time they complete their schooling. These assumptions reflect our societal values and the kind of citizens we aspire to nurture. (more…)

Secondary school students in a drama class. Phil Meech for UCL.

1 February 2024

By David Scott

This blog post is not just an opinion piece but also, I hope, a reasoned argument about the curriculum, and for the introduction of a ‘true’ Baccalaureate into the English Education System – with all the implications this has, not just for the 16-19 phase, but for the system as a whole. A more detailed account of this argument is available in my edited book, On Learning: volume 2, Philosophy, Concepts and Practices, which is free to download at UCL Press.

The call for England to adopt a broader curriculum for the 16-19 phase is one that has surfaced intermittently. It is echoed in the government’s plans to introduce an ‘Advanced British Standard’ (more…)

Six women curriculum theorists, clockwise from top left: Maria Montessori, Lucy Diggs Slowe, Susan Isaacs, Susan Haack, Martha Nussbaum, Maxine Greene (Credit: public domain; Alpha Kappa Alpha; IOE Institute Archives; zooterkin; Robin Holland; Ryan Brenizer, all Wikimedia Commons)

8 June 2023

By Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott

At David’s retirement party, after all the toasts and speeches, we started discussing something that represents a still accumulating problem in the field of curriculum studies: how is it that so many of the seminal works relating to curriculum theory focus exclusively on the contributions of men, given that there are many such female theorists (and professional educators are more likely to be women)? To that end, recently we have been giving a great deal of thought to different formations and interpretations of feminism, as a way of gaining new insights into the field. (more…)

22 April 2022

By John White

What are England’s schools for? Many parents and other citizens may well assume the authorities have a good answer to this. But have they?

Well-known philosophers from both sides of the Atlantic interested in education – from Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and Illinois as well as from UCL IOE – are broadly agreed that a worthwhile education has three or four key aims: self-maintenance through work, personal fulfilment, citizenship and moral concern. Their discussions of each aim differ in detail but there is consensus both that there are complex interconnections among the aims and that expounding what each involves painstaking elucidation. Philip Kitcher, for instance, an eminent philosopher from Columbia University in New York, devotes just over half his new book The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (2022 ) to what its aims should be.
These 201 pages are mainly about the four mentioned above.

Compare this to the 41 words on the aims of the English National Curriculum: (more…)

JESHOOTS-com / Pixabay

19 April 2022

By Norbert Pachler and Elspeth Broady

During 2021 and 2022, OFSTED has published a number of curriculum research reviews seemingly with the aim of identifying factors contributing to high quality school curricula and how subjects can best be taught with the help of research findings.

Whilst attempts to leverage research findings to underpin, inform and improve subject pedagogy must be viewed as laudable and desirable, the curriculum research reviews raise a number of important questions and issues, certainly if the recent furore over the maths review is anything to go by (see e.g. Schools Week but see also the journal Routes for a discussion of the review for geography). While controversy is seemingly more intense in some subjects than others, common problematic features emerge from the reviews in general: (more…)

15 November 2018

By David Lambert

Teachers, generally speaking, work incredibly hard. They work under highly controlled and high stakes conditions, and very publicly. So how do teachers feel about their work? Is teaching a confident profession?

I believe that the profession, at least in secondary schools, may have collectively lost the plot in terms of its core values and purposes. It is buffeted this way, then that way, and in trying to keep up it has lost its heart to the empty process of delivering performance indicators. I don’t blame the teachers themselves, but I do argue that teachers can and should take a more active role in curriculum leadership – a theme in a forthcoming special feature of the London Review of Education (16.3) which I have had the privilege of guest editing.

Recently, I had the great pleasure to spend the afternoon with some enormously impressive, mostly young, new teachers. I spent the entire time challenging their expectations, sometimes showing and explaining, often debating with them … as to what it means to teach geography well, and why this is so important. Possibly not the geography you remember from school. Maybe not even the geography they experienced as students. But worthwhile, engaging geography lessons exhibiting the highest quality (more…)