The Adventure Has Begun!

Nick Hart talks powerfully about the notion of horizons being useful to make sense of school improvement. I have found his thinking really powerful when I have considered curriculum development too. In our Astrea Academy Trust secondary schools, we have had competing horizons. For my brilliant curriculum team, we have worked to support our schools in any way that we can through Ofsted inspections moving from 1/9 good to 8/9 good. The trek towards this horizon has been monumental, but we’re not there – we haven’t reached the horizon. The landscape has changed and now we want more for our schools and the children entrusted to them. This is what I find so powerful about the horizon idea. We’ve moved along on our journey, but we’ve now got a different horizon because the landscape around us has changed. Our new horizon is implementing our new common curriculum across our secondary schools – we want to support good schools to become great schools. This is an equally daunting, but exciting horizon to chase. 

Internally, we talk about our journey towards the horizon as an adventure. Lord of the Ringsesque! We’ve had an ambition to co-design a common curriculum for some time. We’ve been doing what Robinson (2017) articulates as ‘Do not design the future until you deeply understand the present’. It’s true to say that in building our subject communities we have engaged in this understanding of the present. Furthermore, these communities of experts have engaged in the fruitful debate at the heart of subject disciplines to think about what the what and the how in each subject area. Our superstars in this work have been our Heads of Department and our National Leads. You can read loads more about how we have done this here.

‘Do not design the future until you deeply understand the present’.

Robinson (2017)

The 28^th of June fixes the new horizon for us in our secondary schools at Astrea Academy Trust. The curriculum moves from intent to implementation. All of the thinking that has taken place is launched and shared, in detail, with our most important stakeholders – our wonderful teams of teachers. This is a new horizon for us because it marks the moment, we iterate our subject communities to deeply involve our teachers as curriculum makers.

To deeply understand the present, it has been necessary to build systems across the year which have provided space, time and licence to do the thinking. For example, we have built and implemented considerate systems to ensure that leaders at all levels understand what we are doing and why we are doing it. One critical element of our common approach to curriculum, which was fed through this system, has been the design of our curriculum design principles. It is our view that we wanted to provide a framework to judge the quality of thinking, rather than trying to just provide materials to deliver. We did this because we believe in the creativity and craft of the teacher in curriculum design. As Stenhouse said: ‘Curriculum development is teacher development.’ We utilised our meeting cycles to ensure that colleagues at all levels understood them but could also feed in and adapt them. So, with that in mind, we wrote the following: 

Astrea Academy Trust: Curriculum Design Principles 

Astrea Academy Trust’s secondary schools are setting out to co-design a common curriculum. We draw on the expertise and skill of our brilliant teachers and leaders to co-design a curriculum which makes the most of our trust dividend. 

Our curriculum is: 

Knowledge rich: Our curriculum identifies the knowledge that our children should know. It is a body of knowledge that is ambitious and empowering – and an entitlement for all children in our secondary schools. By providing children with this backdrop of knowledge, we allow them to think through and apply new content and concepts in the subjects they study. 

True to the disciplines: Subject disciplines are different, and they make meaning in different ways. Furthermore, we know that the knowledge in each subject is always under revision. Therefore, we empower our subject communities to be responsible for selecting knowledge which allow our children to best understand the subjects they study and enter the great conversations of humankind. 

Common core: The core knowledge we teach is selected collaboratively by our subject communities and is therefore common. This selection reflects the wisdom and expertise of our teachers and leaders and takes account of the wider recontextualization of academic disciplines into school subjects. It is an agreement regarding the minimum entitlement for our children. 

Representative: While most of our curriculum has a common core, there are instances where our schools should be able to make curricular decisions which reflect and are responsive to their local, geographic, and social contexts. Representative decisions must balance scholarly rigour with a focus on the curriculum being both a window and a mirror; children should be provided with both opportunities to be taken beyond their experiences, but also opportunities to see themselves. 

Coherently sequenced: We understand that schemata are developed by the process of knowledge building on knowledge, so our curriculum is structured as a narrative over time. This build children’s understanding of the subject across the wider curriculum. Therefore, we will carefully consider the questions of: why this and why now. 

Designed to support memory: When we implement curriculum, we are battling Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. Therefore, we ensure that knowledge is revisited regularly to ensure it is retained and available for future study. We also understand the power of storytelling and use carefully selected examples to ensure that knowledge is contextualised and understandable. 

We also want to be really clear about the language we use to talk about curriculum. Although the language above captures and, we feel, helpfully defines ideas that we think are important when thinking about curriculum, we wanted to go further. One question we wanted to answer was: where do we all expect fidelity and where is there agency? To answer this question, we clarified the language of curriculum and product. By curriculum, we mean the intent, the rationale, the sequence and the content. By product we mean anything that is borne from the curriculum, such as a booklet, teacher guide or other resource. By being clear that we want to maintain fidelity at the level of the curriculum it means that we can create space for critical thinking, reflection and adaptation of products to achieve the intent. We have a commitment to produce products centrally which are a departments at point of download to adapt, amend and improve. This is why having guiding curriculum principles is so important: they act as the candle by which we can judge the quality of our products. In our view, this ensures that we can think about curriculum in high resolution and consider the connections and narratives. While supporting this with thinking about products means that we create the right space for agency and adaptation.

Robinson, V. (2017) Reduce change to increase improvement