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…)

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…)