On wasted afternoons in the primary school: why the cross-curricular approach to curriculum doesn’t work

When I first started teaching, our school curriculum was focussed on helping our pupils learn the skills that our pupils needed to develop. The rationale for this approach was that the most important thing for our pupils was to be able to think critically, problem-solve, create and develop new ideas and products, communicate effectively and…

Why is powerful knowledge essential to curriculum? Reflections on Social Mobility

Young suggests that the powerful knowledge principle can provide improvements to school curriculum decision making. His first argument is that by using it as a guiding principle, leaders can ‘return’ to one of the core purposes of schooling: ‘to enable students to acquire knowledge that takes them beyond their own experiences’. (Young, 2014, p7). What…