Best Practice

Curriculum design and delivery (part 6)

Curriculum Whole-school issues
In the penultimate part of his curriculum design series, Matt Bromley considers how we can ensure our curriculum builds on what pupils have learnt in primary, and also looks at how we should approach key stage 3

In last week’s instalment I modelled how to use GCSE outcomes (in the form of assessment objectives) to determine some of the foundational concepts (or content knowledge) that should underpin our secondary curriculum.

For example, I said that, to succeed at GCSE English language, pupils need to be able to identify and explain explicit and implicit meanings and, as such, we should introduce pupils to the words “explicit” and “implicit” in year 7 and revisit these concepts throughout key stages 3 and 4, albeit with increasing complexity each time.

In other words, I said we should teach the same concepts throughout key stages 3 and 4 – building in time for repetition and reinforcement as retrieval practice – but develop pupils’ knowledge and understanding of these concepts as they travel through the school curriculum.

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