What is a curriculum?

An extract from ‘Intent Implementation Impact: How to Design and Deliver an Ambitious School Curriculum’ by Matt Bromley

Before we can embark on the complicated process of curriculum design, we must first understand what a curriculum is. After all, we wouldn’t try to manufacture a widget without first knowing what a widget looks like, what it does, and how it works.

The curriculum has long been synonymous with a timetable (the lessons we teach in structured blocks) and yet it is much more than this…

According to the schools’ inspectorate in England, Ofsted, the curriculum is “a framework for setting out the aims of the programme of education, including the knowledge and understanding to be gained at each stage” – what the inspectorate calls ‘intent’.

The curriculum is also a means of “translating that framework over time into a structure and narrative, within an instructional context” – what the inspectorate calls ‘implementation’.

And the curriculum is a means of “evaluating what knowledge and understanding learners have gained against expectations” – what the inspectorate calls ‘impact’.

Even with this more detailed definition, many may regard the school curriculum solely through the lens of the national curriculum and the further education curriculum as synonymous with an awarding body specification. A curriculum is much more than what is prescribed in an exam specification or in the national curriculum – as we will discover shortly. But, as a useful starting point, let’s define what is meant by the ‘national curriculum’…

We can trace the evolution of the national curriculum in England back to a speech by Sir James Callaghan at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1976. Certainly, this speech signalled the state’s intention to assume a greater role in deciding, not just funding and facilities, but what was taught in its schools.

In his so-called ‘Great Debate’ speech, Callaghan argued that education should “equip children to the best of their ability for a lively, constructive place in society, and to fit them to do a job of work. Not one or the other but both.”

It took until the Education Reform Act of 1988 for Callaghan’s dream to be realised. The 1988 Act led to the publication of a national curriculum which was officially introduced in schools in 1989.

The original national curriculum was a substantial document and contained attainment targets, programmes of study, and assessment arrangements. When it was first published, prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously decried she “never meant it to be this big”. As such, each subsequent review of the national curriculum – including in 1995, 2008 and 2013 (with updates in 2014), has seen the documents slimmed down and simplified.

The current (2014) version of the national curriculum says that “Every state-funded school must offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based and which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of learners at the school and of society, and prepares learners at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.”

Furthermore, the national curriculum provides learners with “an introduction to the core knowledge that they need to be educated citizens. It introduces learners to the best that has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.”

With this last sentence, the curriculum borrows from Matthew Arnold who said that “a good modern society can only come about when all of its citizens are educated in “the best that has been thought and said in the world”.

In conclusion, then, the purpose of the national curriculum is to set out the principles, aims and content of the subjects to be studied by learners in primary and secondary schools, and to ensure all learners nationally encounter the same content and material that’s considered important.

As such, the national curriculum, though certainly more insightful than a timetable, is still not the entirety of a school’s curriculum; it is only those aspects afforded to all learners nationally.

Dylan Wiliam, in his SSAT pamphlet, Principled Curriculum Design (2013), said that “In recent years in England, discussion of the school curriculum has been all but absent. This neglect has been largely driven by the adoption in 1988 of a national curriculum for schools in England and Wales. Many teachers, leaders and policymakers assumed that because the government had specified what schools were required to teach, then no further discussion of the issue of curriculum was necessary.”

Wiliam argued that this belief is mistaken for two reasons:

“The first is that the legal framework of the national curriculum specified only what schools were legally required to teach – any school was entirely free to teach whatever it wished in addition to the prescribed national curriculum.

“The second is that the real curriculum – the lived daily experience of young people in classrooms – requires the creative input of teachers. For example, the national curriculum may require that students learn about negative numbers, but the kinds of analogy that a teacher might use to teach this topic (e.g. heights above and below sea level, temperatures above and below zero, positive and negative bank balances, and so on) must be chosen with an understanding of the students, their experiences, and a range of other contextual factors.”

The real curriculum, then, is created by teachers every day.

In fact, the ‘real’ curriculum in maintained schools consists of at least three distinct elements of which the national curriculum is but one:

1. The national curriculum which, as I explained above, is that prescribed by statute and consists of the core and foundation subjects.
2. The basic curriculum which describes the statutory requirements for curricular provision beyond the national curriculum, comprising the requirements in current legislation for the teaching of RE (within the guidelines of the local Standing Advisory Committee for Religious Education), sex education, careers education, and opportunities for work-related learning. These are compulsory requirements, but schools are able to determine for themselves the specific nature of this provision.
3. The local curriculum which is one that schools are free to adopt in order to complement the national and basic curriculums with other curricular elements that are determined at school or community level. Often, these will reflect the individual nature of the school and its community, and perhaps its subject specialism(s).

Tim Oates et al (2011) argued that “Education can be seen, at its simplest, as the product of [an] interaction between socially valued knowledge and individual development. It occurs through learner experience of both of these key elements. The school curriculum structures these processes.”

The QCA (2000), meanwhile, offered a broader definition which included “everything children do, see, hear or feel in their setting, both planned and unplanned.”

The unplanned parts of the curriculum are often referred to as the ‘hidden curriculum’, a term first used by Philip Jackson in A Life in Classrooms (1968). Jackson argued that what is taught in schools is more than just the formal curriculum and that schooling should be understood as a socialisation process whereby learners receive messages through the experience of being in school, not just from what they’re explicitly taught in lessons. The hidden curriculum, therefore, includes learning from other learners, and learning that arises from an accidental juxtaposition of the school’s stated values and its actual practice.

When designing a curriculum, therefore, we need to think carefully about all the ways in which learners learn, not solely in structured lessons but also in the space between lessons and in the behaviours and values of the adults working in the school. As John Dunford (2012) puts it, “The school curriculum is not only the subjects on the timetable; it is the whole experience of education.”

The curriculum, therefore, can be found, not just in a policy statement, and certainly not in the timetable or even in the national curriculum, but in the subjects and qualifications on the timetable, in the pedagogy and behaviours teachers and other adults use, in the space between lessons when learners interact with each other, in approaches to managing behaviour, uniform, and attendance and punctuality, in assemblies and extra-curricular activities, and in the pastoral care and support offered to learners… in short, in the holistic experience every child is afforded in school.

As well as the national, basic, local, and hidden curriculums, it may be helpful to think in terms of the intended, enacted, and real curriculums. The intended curriculum is that which is planned and written down in curriculum statements, schemes of work, lesson plans, resources and so on. The enacted curriculum is that which is actually taught and transmitted to learners by teachers in lessons. And the real curriculum is that which is received and learnt, both in and out of lessons. Together, they form a learner’s whole experience of education.

Once we have clearly defined what is meant by the term ‘curriculum’ in our school, the next step, I think, is to agree and articulate a clear and shared vision setting out what we think is important and what we regard as the purpose of education.

The vision should, I think, comprise a list of the broad and rich learning experiences each learner can expect in each subject as well as outside of lessons. This vision should refer to the hidden curriculum and be cognisant of the fact that learning is not confined to the classroom; learners learn from each other and from the way in which all the adults behave.

The reason I recommend we start the process of curriculum design with a vision is because this vision will provide the benchmark against which all subsequent decisions about curriculum content, structure, sequence, monitoring, evaluation, and review can be tested.

As such, I do not advocate the writing of a vision statement which is then locked away in a dusty drawer, but of engaging in a meaningful debate about why our school exists and what it seeks to achieve for its learners and community, and why these purposes and aims are important.

Finnish education experts attribute much of their success to the driving force and guiding power of their curriculum vision which is: to improve access to previously under-represented groups excluded or restrained by poverty, ethnicity, [and] gender, [and] to provide for broader meta-cognitive and interpersonal skills requiring deeper learning to meet the needs of an emerging knowledge society with more sophisticated labour requirements and built-in instability.

Here are some questions to consider when drafting your vision:

• What are the desired outcomes of our curriculum? Are academic outcomes – including high grades and value added – enough on their own? What of progress from individual starting points? What else do we desire for our learners?
• What will excellence look like? Will it always look this way? Will it be the same for all learners?
• What does social, moral, spiritual and cultural development mean for our learners?
• What does employability mean for our learners? How can we support its development at all stages of education and beyond school?
• What do we really believe about our learners, their potential, and their destiny? How does this translate in practice? How can we ensure high expectations – and high challenge – for all learners not just the higher performing, compliant ones?
• What, ultimately, is the purpose of education at our school? Why?

For more top tips on curriculum design, take a look at Matt’s book ‘Intent Implementation Impact: How to Design and Deliver an Ambitious School Curriculum’, which is available in paperback and ebook now. Visit our bookstore for details.

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