Imagine a primary geography curriculum that included loads of interesting stuff, but sought principally to ensure the following:
children know that geography is the study of how people and places interact
children know where they live (locality, county, country and continent)
children know the names and locations of the world’s continents and oceans
children know what rivers, mountains, coasts, rainforests and volcanoes are, including one notable example of each and a simple grasp of the impact each of these can have on communities
children know key differences between rural and urban areas
children know that some places are very different to others
children know basic map & fieldwork skills
children enjoy geography
I’m pretty sure of two things:
(1) This geography curriculum would be seen by many as laughably unambitious.
(2) A decade from now, most Year 6s will continue to leave primary school without achieving these objectives.
The apparent contradiction between (1) and (2) says a lot about the predicament faced by primary schools. They are incentivised by the current education climate to spell out the breadth of their curriculum. This is no bad thing. Unfortunately, this same incentive is likely to discourage schools from spelling out the much shorter list of the most important knowledge and skills that almost all children should possess by the time they leave in Year 6. If everything is a priority, then nothing is.
This doesn’t just impact geography, of course. It’s easy to say, “Our Year 3 children can all recall the formula for photosynthesis because we are just much more ambitious than other schools; we know what children can really achieve.”
It’s much harder to say, “Unrealistic ambitions for what children will retain tend to leave many of them without a solid grasp of the most important stuff.”
Unfashionable an idea though this might be, it is obviously possible to have expectations that are so high as to be counter-productive. School leaders across the country are building curricula with two purposes in mind: impressing Ofsted and securing better outcomes for children. My fear is that these two purposes are not always aligned, and this is particularly apparent with regards to the ambition of a curriculum.
This all might seem pretty rich coming from me. I recently shared curriculum packages for science, history and geography, which can be found here: https://primarycolour.home.blog/2019/11/02/one-stop-shop-for-suchmo83-resources/ These curriculum packages contained far more knowledge and skills than we can expect the majority of children to learn in primary school. However, what we specify as the content of our curriculum is very different to the aspects of the curriculum that we should aim to guarantee are learned by almost every child. I care barely at all whether a Year 6 child can remember the names of particular inventors of the industrial revolution. I care quite a lot about whether that same child can remember, in basic terms, what the industrial revolution actually was and its effects. Alongside the full offer of the curriculum – including all the stories, maps, timelines, interesting nuggets of information, experiences, etc – we need to specify the essential stuff that every child should know when they leave primary school. Discussion of ‘core and hinterland’ over recent years has helped, but we need to go further.
My suggestion? We need an A4 curriculum. For the foundation subjects, we should spell out on one side of A4 only the knowledge and skills that almost every child will grasp before leaving primary school. We should then share this with teachers so they know which bits of the curriculum need to be referred to again and again from different angles with different connections.
And we need to assess the stuff on this A4 curriculum at the end of Year 6. The only way an unstandardised assessment can have meaning is if it is one on which we expect all children to know everything (give or take the odd silly error). Without standardisation, it is a fool’s errand to try to determine whether a score of 30% or 60% or 90% indicates a curriculum well learned. In contrast, an assessment on which we expect almost all children to know everything is one that can be used to make useful judgements about a curriculum. Over time, a school could even begin to cautiously expand the breadth of content on the A4 curriculum, but not before ensuring that children consistently leave school in possession of it all.
To reiterate, this is not a call to limit what children are taught and what they experience in foundation subjects. It is a call to realign our expectations of what the majority of children will retain. It is a call to temper the curriculum conversations that are so rarely encumbered by the inconvenience of reality as experienced by classroom teachers. Most of all, it is a call to ensure that the masonry of our curriculum is solid, despite the temptation to focus as much on the décor that we suspect will impress Ofsted.
In my science, history and geography curriculum packages, I tried my best to spell out the breadth of knowledge and skills that teachers will use in their lessons so that they can focus more on the ‘how’ of teaching than on the ‘what’. My next job is to spell out an A4 Curriculum for each of these subjects at my school and to assess the efficacy of our curriculum primarily on this basis. If what I have said in this blog has struck a chord, perhaps you will consider doing the same with your foundation curricula.
Here is a link to the third curriculum package of a series (following science and geography). I am absolutely certain that is is the best of three curriculum packages by some considerable distance:
As with the previous curriculum packages, this includes…
+ Curriculum overviews for each year group, organised to facilitate and simplify planning and teaching.
+ The knowledge and skills to be taught across the primary phase and those to be retrieved from prior topics.
+ The key concepts to be taught and built upon in each topic.
+ The vocabulary to be taught and retrieved from previous topics.
+ Cumulative revision of the scope of history taught at each stage.
+ Basic information texts, written to match each topic.
In addition, this history curriculum package includes…
+ Resources, activities and questions designed to elicit thinking and develop children’s grasp of the disciplinary knowledge and skills of history.
+ Cumulative timelines that build a sense of chronology across the school (more on this below).
+Varied maps that situate each topic of study
How appropriate is this curriculum package for other schools?
Naturally, as with the other curriculum packages, this curriculum is made for a particular school, specifically one in the heart of Peterborough. It was put together with our community and our city in mind at all times. However, in terms of sharing this with the wider world, this is actually an advantage as it makes clear exactly how a history curriculum can and should be adapted to a specific community. Regardless, it would be perfectly possible to take this curriculum package and adapt it to suit the needs of a very different community. To this end, this curriculum package is designed to meet (and in my view exceed) the expectations of the National Curriculum in breadth, depth and ambition.
How is this curriculum organised?
In the simplest terms, Key Stage 1 is used to introduce children to the basic ideas of history as study of the past, looking at the development over time of certain aspects of society and some influential figures. Key Stage 1 ends with a study of Peterborough from the neolithic era to the modern day, sensitising children to the scope of the British history aspect of the curriculum that is to come. In Key Stage 2, the curriculum progresses chronologically, from the Stone Age to the modern day. This is only one way to organise a curriculum, of course, though the advantages of a simple chronology, the repeated retrieval of preceding topics and the cumulative development of a core timeline were all seen as advantages that made this particular organisation sensible.
This curriculum seems to cover a lot of ground. Why?
Any curriculum reflects the views of those who create it. Unashamedly, my view of primary history is that, first and foremost, children are entitled to leave primary school with a basic grasp of the broad sweep of British history and an understanding of history across the wider world. While inevitably certain aspects have to be prioritised, I think it more sensible, for example, for children to know the key aspects of several ancient civilisations (and their commonalities and differences) than for them to know a great deal about just one or two. While there are thematic studies and opportunities to look at key ideas in more depth, this curriculum attempts to show British history (and to an extent world history) as an interconnected narrative rather than just as discrete topics. The use of the time lines is key here.
Why are some parts in the curriculum overviews written in bold type?
There is a lot of information in the curriculum overviews. It is important that we recognise that some aspects of the curriculum are essential for children to remember while others are merely useful. Labelling the essential aspects in bold allows teachers to prioritise what is being learned in each topic; it also allows curriculum leaders to more effectively structure conversations with teachers and pupils that support the evolution of the curriculum.
There are some bits missing that I am surprised by. Why is this?
In all cases, decisions were based on the connections of the knowledge to key historical concepts (e.g. hierarchy) and the significance of this knowledge to children’s understanding of key events and people throughout history. This naturally involved trade-offs. For example, the names of all of Henry VIII’s wives are not included while the impact of the English reformation is explored in at least a little depth. Of course, people will have different ideas about what makes certain aspects of history more or less significant (which is another key theme of the curriculum), so I appreciate that not everyone will agree with the choices made.
Is there any way to supplement this history curriculum?
At my school, the reading of other information texts supplements all aspects of the curriculum, and this is also true of our history curriculum. For example, the French revolution is arguably one of the most important events in European history, and yet there is no mention of this in the history curriculum. Equally, the curriculum doesn’t include a study of a South American civilisation. In both cases, in my school this is remedied by the use of information texts in reading sessions. (Information texts are used to complement as well as supplement the wider curriculum.)
Tell me more about the timelines. I see 4-digit numbers for dates in Key Stage 1. Is that an oversight?
No, this is not an oversight. Children’s gradual introduction to the timelines works as follows:
In Year 1, children are introduced to their first timeline. While it looks complicated, there is no expectation that children learn any dates or grasp the scale involved. The only expectation is that children learn that a timeline shows the past and that events proceed from left to right in this representation:
To re-emphasise this point, the exact same timeline scale (with the same magnified section) is repeated for a second topic in Year 1:
Again, children are still likely to be learning numbers inside 100, so there is no expectation that children will grasp the dates involved.
The core timeline from 4000 BCE to 2000 CE introduced in Y1 then forms the spine of all the timelines to be used in the history curriculum.
In Year 2, the children are gently introduced to a sense of scale. This is achieved by relating their own age in years to the age of the school. The age of the school – which notably is within their grasp of numbers inside 100 – is then visually comparable to the core timeline:
The main aim is for children to relate their own age to something else that we make familiar, the age of the school, and to grasp that things happened before they were born and that this can be visualised on a timeline. The idea of bars showing duration is introduced and children’s growing sense of multiplicative reasoning allows them to roughly grasp the relative scale of their life to that of our school. (Notice that as they grasp this key idea of scale and of a ‘zoomed in’ section, the rest of the timeline is kept exceptionally simple.) This is then emphasised in the next topic. Notice that this is the same core timeline with the same part magnified:
In the final topic in Year 2, the same core timeline is used with the same section magnified. In this case, the entire history of Peterborough is discussed, sensitising children to all of the topics of British history that are to follow. (Not all of these are included on the timeline as there is a trade-off between complexity and visual simplicity):
All of these ways in which the history of Peterborough overlaps with the periods of British history are then retrieved in the later topics in Key Stage 2.
It is worth re-emphasising that at each stage, the expectation of what children will grasp from the timeline is specific and limited. By the end of Year 2, we want children to recognise that timelines visualise the passage of time using distance and direction (usually left to right) and to visually grasp that their life to date is short relative to the age of the school, which is also short relative to the span of history discussed so far. We also want them to recognise that events and periods can be shown on a timeline.
All of the above lays the groundwork for the timeline learning that will follow in Key Stage 2.
At the start of Year 3, the now-familiar core timeline is related to the timeline of human pre-history:
What do we want children to take from the timeline above? Only that all of history is relatively brief when compared to the time that modern humans have been recognisable as such.
After this, the process of building up the core timeline begins with the second topic in Year 3:
From now on, with every topic that is encountered, a new period is added to the core timeline so that it incrementally builds up:
Each new topic after this adds a new period to the timeline:
And so on. (Note the colour-coding of British history and history of the rest of the world.)
It is important to add that children will grasp that the periods studied are not the sum total of history, and that history didn’t begin or end at these points in these places. Instead, they will be guided to understand that these are merely the aspects we have chosen to study and that there are other fascinating and valuable periods of history in various places that we could have chosen. (In upper Key Stage 2, this leads into a discussion about the limitations of any history curriculum and the periods of time and locations that, inevitably, were left mostly unexplored in ours.) Maps are used in conjunction with the timeline in each topic to ensure that the sense of time develops alongside a sense of location.
And that’s about it for now, except to repeat…
In making this, I was indebted to the ideas and inspiration of the wonderful people of EduTwitter, especially @MrsSTeaches, @Mr_AlmondED and @ClareSealy. Any strengths in this work are credit to them; any weaknesses are all on me.
If you are wondering how I have gained permission from my school to share these, then allow me to explain: Firstly, I have the privilege of working with people who see the education system as I do (i.e. an essentially collaborative enterprise, regardless of the systemic forces that impel schools to compete with one another). Secondly, I have done a lot of unpaid work on these curriculum documents in my own time. The schools I have worked for have always been aware that part of the deal of me doing this is that I am then free to share the results as I see fit.
I hope you find this stuff to be useful. If you do, please direct other teachers you know to these resources in the hope that we might save teachers some time and support some schools in their curriculum development.
As with any writing I do, all royalties/fees will be going to the Malaria Consortium, a GiveWell-recommended charity. More details about the Malaria Consortium can be found here:
Of the three curriculum packages that I intend to release, this is the one that is the least developed. I think it is in a perfectly functional state (i.e. content chosen carefully, sensibly ordered, etc), but there are definitely some aspects that could use – and will receive – further development in the coming year or so (e.g. geographical enquiries, resources to support individual lessons, etc). Naturally, a curriculum is never truly finished, and I thought it more useful to release this now than to wait until I’m much more satisfied with it.
The order of the individual topics is not exactly what I would choose if I were to create a geography curriculum document from scratch with a completely free hand. (There were some constraints that affected topic sequencing that I won’t bore you with here.) That said, the order is still, I hope, sensible, with the key concepts and vocabulary building on what has come before. Potential niggles, for example the teaching of rivers before mountains, may seem less than ideal, but children really only need to understand the idea of higher ground in order to understand rivers and the water cycle; they don’t necessarily need to know the difference between a fault-block mountain and a plateau mountain before they can grasp the idea that water tends to move downhill. It is easy for those developing curricula, once they have made up their mind, to assume that the way they have ordered things is the only sensible way. In more hierarchical subjects, like mathematics, there is some truth in this, but in geography the ordering of topics is much more a matter of preference. One person’s “poor sequencing” is another person’s “artful sensitisation to later topics”. That said, there are definitely certain concepts that require extra thought when it comes to ordering. (It seems more sensible, say, for children to learn what trade is before they learn what an economy is.) I hope that this has been achieved in these overviews, and I am happy to take constructive feedback.
Naturally, any curriculum – especially one relating to people’s interactions with places – is bound to be built to suit the needs of a particular community. It is also built to complement other aspects of the wider curriculum (e.g. science, history), making connections and filling gaps. (An example of this is the water cycle which is primarily taught in the science curriculum and then retrieved in the geography curriculum.) Nevertheless, I hope that this curriculum work can still be supportive for those developing their own curriculum and can perhaps even signpost some of the ways that a geography curriculum can be personalised to fit with a specific school. If you want to discuss this with me, please get in touch.
In making this, I was indebted to the ideas and inspiration of the wonderful people of EduTwitter, especially @MrsSTeaches, @Mr_AlmondED and @ClareSealy. Any strengths in this work are credit to them; any weaknesses are all on me.
If you are wondering how I have gained permission from my school to share these, then allow me to explain: Firstly, I have the privilege of working with people who see the education system as I do (i.e. an essentially collaborative enterprise, regardless of the systemic forces that impel schools to compete with one another). Secondly, I have done a lot of unpaid work on these curriculum documents in my own time. The schools I have worked for have always been aware that part of the deal of me doing this is that I am then free to share the results as I see fit.
I hope you find this stuff to be useful. If you do, please direct other teachers you know to these resources in the hope that we might save teachers some time and support some schools in their curriculum development.
As with any writing I do, all royalties/fees will be going to the Malaria Consortium, a GiveWell-recommended charity. More details about the Malaria Consortium can be found here:
A while back I shared a science curriculum document that attempted to spell out the knowledge and skills of a primary science curriculum in a way that I hoped would save schools lots of time and, at least, provide a solid jumping off point for the curriculum work of others. It was well received, and it made me determined to improve upon it. The result is in this folder and is freely available to be used in any way that might support your school:
In the folder above, you will find curriculum overviews that spell out the knowledge and skills to be taught for each year group in primary science and information texts for the various topics.
Each year group is currently organised into six blocks of six lessons, though this can be easily adapted into six half-term blocks:
As before, every block begins with retrieval of the key content from previous blocks that needs to be embedded if children are to succeed with the new learning:
Twelve big ideas of science are spelled out at the start of each overview and are linked to the various topics:
The key repeating concepts are made explicit in each topic, along with the vocabulary, both that which is new to the topic and that which is to be retrieved from previous topics:
So… what’s new?
The layout has been changed to make it much more user-friendly for teachers.
2. If you look at the bottom of each year group’s document, every topic has an associated scientific enquiry, six for each year group. (How these link to the working scientifically statements of the national curriculum is made explicit.)
3. A diverse array of scientists have been added to the knowledge of the curriculum:
4. The curriculum links to the range of scientific careers that exist, ensuring that children leave primary school with an appropriate rich view of what it means to be a scientist:
5. I have written basic, age-appropriate information texts for every topic that fit exactly with this curriculum document.
6. You will also notice that some curriculum statements are in bold and others are not. It is often the case that schools do not prioritise certain aspects of their curriculum, leaving teachers in the dark about which bits are essential for children to grasp and which bits are merely beneficial. While this is very much a personal choice, I have bolded the aspects of the curriculum that are most essential for all children to grasp before they leave primary school. (Most of these are the aspects that are most frequently retrieved within the curriculum.) Feel free to adapt this as you see fit.
There are aspects of any curriculum that ideally should be chosen and adapted to fit exactly with your school context. (For example, when children are introduced to types of plants in key stage one, it is sensible to choose plants that live in your school grounds or nearby for children to see and touch. Equally, the diverse range of scientists have been chosen in some instances to marry with our history curriculum, which has been created to reflect our local community.) This means that you may well want to download these resources and then adapt them. If you want any assistance in how to adapt these resources, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I tend to respond most rapidly on Twitter.
In the coming weeks, I will be releasing a geography curriculum package (with basic information texts) and a history curriculum package (also with basic information texts). While each of these works perfectly well in isolation, they also complement one another with explicit links made between them.
If you are wondering how I have gained permission from my school to share these, then allow me explain: Firstly, I have the privilege of working with people who see the education system as I do (i.e. an essentially collaborative enterprise, regardless of the systemic forces that impel schools to compete with one another). Secondly, I have done a lot of unpaid work on these curriculum documents in my own time. The schools I have worked for have always been aware that part of the deal of me doing this is that I am then free to share the results as I see fit.
In making this, I was indebted to the ideas and inspiration of the wonderful people of EduTwitter, especially @MrsSTeaches, @Mr_AlmondED and @ClareSealy.
I hope you find this stuff to be useful. If you do, please direct other teachers you know to these resources in the hope that we might save teachers some time and support some collaborative curriculum discussions.
Finally, if you find this stuff really useful, and you decide you want to chuck a few quid somewhere out of a sense of unnecessary gratitude, why not give my new book on primary reading a chance? It’s available to pre-order here:
As with any writing I do, all royalties/fees will be going to the Malaria Consortium, a GiveWell-recommended charity. More details about the Malaria Consortium can be found here:
The current way that schools sell curriculum products to each other is absurd and speaks to an education system disconnected from its underlying moral purpose.
Across the country, schools with greater financial flexibility have created excellent curriculum resources with lesson plans, reading booklets, interactive presentations, etc. They’ve typically employed smart people to create this stuff, and the result is unsurprisingly impressive. The fact that these are not freely available to other schools is an indictment on the dysfunction of our seemingly zero-sum, competitive education system. These are not privately funded bodies we are talking about. Every one of these has used tax-payer money to create curriculum resources… and now they are sharing these resources at a price to other publicly funded bodies. This is an absurdly inefficient way of making use of the talent within the profession to benefit the nation’s children.
I totally understand why larger MATs and some local councils are doing this. We have all imbibed the idea of competition between schools to such an extent that it seems perfectly natural that the limited financial resources of the system should flow towards schools that have created curriculum resources. After all, think of the wonderful things they can do with the money they make. Think of the opportunities that they can provide to their students (and try your best not to think of the opportunities consequently deprived elsewhere).
I imagine the standard argument for the status quo is that it is just a sensible way for schools to pool their resources, and that surely this way is better than having every school create their own curriculum from scratch. Well, there is some truth in this argument. This way of doing things is definitely one rung up the ladder from the worst case scenario in which every small school’s history coordinator desperately throws something together in the couple of hours per term available for the job. But is this as far as our shared imagination extends? A short-sighted solution that further diminishes the open, collaborative spirit that defines the profession at its best? It’s genuinely a little disheartening that this way of doing things is supposedly the best solution that the powers that be could come up with. The whole thing screams systemic inertia rather than a thoughtful plan for enhancing outcomes for young people.
This isn’t some anti-capitalist rant. There are a lot of private companies making quality products for schools to buy, and the education system is all the better for their existence. However, private companies take risks with their own money. If these companies make poor decisions, they go bust. The tax-payer doesn’t then pick up the pieces and keep them afloat. I have no problem with private companies taking money from the public purse to provide a necessary service. It is the profit-seeking of public bodies that I find so disconcerting. If a curriculum product has been created with public money, and the product is so good that it would enrich the education of any children who use it, then what is the moral grounds upon which we limit its spread by charging schools for it unnecessarily? Once created, administration costs for the school that created it can be entirely avoided my making a downloadable version publicly available, ready for schools that might want some help in giving children the curriculum they deserve. Let me re-emphasise that this is not a critique of those institutions that have made these curriculum products. Their actions align perfectly sensibly with an overarching system that entirely lacks sense.
Essentially, the only other possible defence of this status quo that I can see comes from a superficial understanding of economics, specifically the idea that in every situation only the free competition of actors will allow money to be allocated where it can be put to best use. Forcing schools to operate more like businesses in this circumstance has one key problem: schools aren’t businesses and children aren’t customers. In the case of private companies, there is no moral imperative for us to ensure a fair distribution of resources and to ensure that every business thrives for the sake of its stakeholders. The opposite is true of schools. Some might argue that the schools who have created excellent curriculum products only invested the resources required to do so because they foresaw the subsequent financial recompense, and thus this competitive view of schools is necessary to promote innovation. Again, this speaks to our collective lack of imagination and the way in which a zero-sum, competitive interpretation of the school system has obscured our vision. There are other ways that this could have been achieved that didn’t so obviously disadvantage smaller schools with less financial flexibility. For example, a fund could have been made available from which schools could – following a successful application – take the required financial resources to create a curriculum, or components thereof, on the condition that this curriculum be made freely available, perhaps even with aspects that allow for schools to personalise it to their own school setting. If anyone doubts the practicability of such a thing, I have three words for you: Oak National Academy.
Recently, Solomon Kingsnorth (@SolomonTeach) wrote a typically interesting and provocative blog in which he suggested an alternative purpose for the government’s catch-up fund. I loved the idea, but I also wonder whether a small chunk of this money could buy the intellectual property to the various excellent primary curricula that already exist across the country so they could be made freely available. Don’t get me wrong; until it is explained to me why it is a stupid idea, I maintain that materials created by publicly funded bodies should be free for any school to use if they wish. However, in the absence of such sense, using some of the catch up fund in this way might be a decent alternative.
Simply put, there is no excuse for the current situation where a headteacher can honestly say, “I cannot afford that tax-payer-funded curriculum product, despite the fact it would improve the learning my school offers its students.”
We can do better than this, can’t we?
(I suspect what I have written above isn’t a particularly new set of thoughts. If, as is likely, someone has already made the argument with greater clarity, let me know, and I will happily link to their writing at the top of this blog-post. Thanks.)
Primary Colour 