Curriculum: Navigating Conditions, Holding Course

Blog from Sallie Stanton, Chief Education Officer, Advantage Schools 

I have been thinking, writing and speaking about curriculum for a while now. Back in 2018, when I first tried to put my thinking down on paper, the central argument I made was a simple: what we teach matters at least as much as how we teach. The subject - its content, its sequencing, its coherence - is not the backdrop to learning, but the thing itself. 

However, I spent the first few years of my career doing the opposite of this. My lessons prioritised creativity and fun, and my evenings and weekends were spent making videos and gif-laden PowerPoints to accompany elaborate activities designed to entertain. Often, it was lots of fun. But, whilst my pupils remembered the activities, they did not remember what they were supposed to learn. It was only when I stopped building a funfair around my subject and put the knowledge back at the centre of my teaching and department planning - trusting the subject itself to be interesting - that pupils began to excel. 

On curriculum as a ‘wave’, and why we are not surfing 

When Becky Allen, Matthew Evans and Ben White published their excellent book, The Next Big Thing in School Improvement, I read it with recognition. Their argument was that English education is subject to perpetual waves of novelty. Big ideas come and go. The Last Big Thing makes way for the Next Big Thing. Allen and her co-authors identified curriculum as the most recent wave, following on from the data wave and the pedagogy wave that those working in education long enough still remember.  The authors asked, with refreshing candour, whether the curriculum wave would succumb to the same fate as those that came before. 

They were right in identifying that curriculum became fashionable. It was taken up widely - by Ofsted, by government, by schools and trusts - with varying degrees of genuine understanding.  

But at Advantage Schools, we did not care about curriculum because it was fashionable, or because Ofsted told us to. We cared about curriculum because we believed it mattered for children.  Our CEO, Stuart Lock, was making the argument for curriculum from a stage at the Festival of Education in 2017, at a time when schools were still riding the pedagogy wave. His talk, Pedagogy is Overrated, was not an argument against good teaching. It was an argument that endlessly refining generic pedagogical technique, while leaving the curriculum largely unexamined, puts the cart before the horse. Those ideas shaped our trust’s approach to education from its earliest days, and they still do. Curriculum quality is the foundation on which Advantage Schools is built. 

If the wider discourse has moved on from curriculum - and there are clear signs that it has – we are clear that we have not.  A change in fashion does not change what we know about how children learn, about powerful knowledge, and about what a good education looks like. It only changes the noise around us.  

Commitment to curriculum and social justice 

Education’s power lies in offering people future choices. I mean something broader than career choices, important as those are. I mean the choice to be the kind of person you want to be, with interests and beliefs of your own. A knowledge-rich curriculum is one of the most powerful tools we have to open those futures up for children, especially for those who arrive at our doors with fewer advantages. Poor curriculum is a cul-de-sac. Good curriculum is an open horizon. 

A common misconception is that a “knowledge-rich curriculum” merely reduces teaching to rote-learning chunks of information. In 2019, I wrote a blog pushing back on this idea, saying, “A curriculum cannot be reduced to a list of facts children must learn, chant, and self-quiz their way through.” This insight is one I still hold as firmly as ever: we cannot expect children to leave school equipped to navigate the world of educated adults if we merely furnish them with disconnected facts and ideas. A coherent curriculum is one that has been deliberately sequenced, that considers what children already know, that asks honestly what they must know by the time they leave us. This is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is an act of profound educational justice. 

In acknowledging this, we have to be honest about something: good curriculum development is hard to do well, and we still have work to do. The conditions in which schools operate make this tough. Time is scarce. The demands of deep, sustained curriculum thinking sit awkwardly alongside the pace and immediate, vibrant demands of school life. The national curriculum is in revision leaving subject leaders in a place of uncertainty, and the expertise needed to marry academic disciplines with school subjects - to think seriously about the relationship between substantive and disciplinary knowledge when considering sequencing and coherence - takes years to build. 

At Advantage Schools we care about curriculum too much to let conditions dilute quality. Despite these challenges, we are committed to investment in long-term investment in curriculum development and will continue to place it central to our work. 

What that means for us. 

First, we are in this for the long term. Our investment in curriculum is not a response to an inspection framework or a policy moment. It is a structural commitment, resourced, sustained, and built into how we develop our people. When the national conversation moves on, as it will, our work will continue. 

Second, we believe curriculum quality lives at the level of the subject. Generic whole-school approaches have their place, but the real intellectual work happens when a historian thinks carefully about what Year 8 needs to know and why, or when a scientist sequences concepts with the discipline's own logic in mind. We are investing in that kind of subject-level expertise deliberately, and over time. 

Third, we are being patient. The national curriculum is under revision, with subject-level detail not expected until 2027. We could rush ahead. We are choosing not to. Alignment done properly, on secure foundations, is worth waiting for. 

And finally, we do not think we have all the answers. The questions curriculum asks of us are genuinely hard: what knowledge is worth teaching, in what order, and to what end? We are still thinking carefully about those questions at Advantage Schools, and we are interested in thinking about them alongside others. If this piece has prompted a thought, a challenge, or a conversation, we would welcome it. 

The curriculum wave may have broken. Our curriculum work has not.