Curriculum Primer 4 — What should be the aims of a subject’s curriculum?

This is the fourth in a short series that aims to support middle and senior leaders in improving the curriculum within specific subject areas in their schools. You can find a video explainer on this question below:

I wrote a blog about the ideas addressed in this video previously. You can read it in full here.

Step 1 — Curriculum Questions

The first thing I do when working with heads of department is to organise a curriculum intent meeting.

Ahead of this meeting, I share with them a series of questions, influenced by the questions Christine Counsell asks in the ResearchED Guide to the Curriculum. These are designed to prompt reflections on the following themes, amongst others:

• End points being aimed for.
• Starting points of students coming in.
• Nature of knowledge in the subject.
• The relationship between the subject and the academic disciplines.

You can read the full list of questions by clicking here.

I make it clear that I do not expect written answers to these questions. I share them purely to give them a flavour of the kind of things we will be talking about.

Step 2 — Curriculum Grid

The next step is to meet with the head of department. This usually takes around an hour.

During this meeting, I ask them a selection of the questions from the list shared above. There is no need to cover all these questions during the meeting; they are prompts for conversation rather than a comprehensive survey.

As the head of department shares their thoughts, I type up their ideas into a grid. This grid has three headings:

• Everyday understandings — this column maps out how we would expect most of our students to think about our discipline or practice when they enter school.
• General understandings — this column maps out how we would like students to think about our discipline or practice if they cease to study our subject at the end of the compulsory phase, either at the end of Year 9 or Year 11.
• Specialised understandings — this column maps out how we would like students to think about our discipline or practice if they are to pursue further study after they leave us.

The aim is to capture what we would like our students to be like when they leave us, whether they will one day specialise further or are studying our subject solely as part of a general education.

Specifying these end points is crucial, yet equally important is specifying the starting points of our students when they join us in Year 7. These comprise the everyday understandings (and perhaps misconceptions), that our curriculum aims to address.

An example of a curriculum grid can be seen below.

Step 3 — Intent Document

After the meeting with the head of department, I ask them to review their curriculum grid and use the list of questions to add any further thoughts.

Once the grid is completed, they can use it to write a curriculum intent document. This document should answer two main questions:

1. What are the end points we want to achieve through our curriculum? Or, to put it another way, who do we want our students to be by the time they leave us? (The document must articulate both the specialised and the general educational aims described above.)
2. Given the starting points of our students, how will our KS3 teaching look different to that at KS4 and KS5? In what way will we approach each topic differently? How will this move students from their everyday understandings towards the specialised and general ones we’re aiming for?

For an example of an intent document, written by me for physics, click here.