The Curriculum and Assessment Review launched by the new government (DfE, 2024) once again provides an opportunity to think deeply about what we want to teach and why – and how we might assess student progress.
Discussion is often dominated by two extremes. There are those who are proponents of a traditional approach, with a rigid subject knowledge-led curriculum, high-stakes examinations, and pedagogies that promote the recitation of facts. This has links to what educationalists Michael Young and Johan Muller (2010) have called their “Future 1” (F1) curriculum.
Others promote a more progressive view led by the perceived needs of the student and with so-called soft skills dominating the curriculum, with possible pedagogies of experiential learning and group work, similar to what Young and Muller (2010) dub their “Future 2” (F2) curriculum.
Under F1 curriculum thinking, knowledge is reduced to a set of facts, as if every subject has a canon of knowledge to be learnt, and the job of a teacher is to pass that on to students. Assessment could take the form of factual recall, or the writing of formulaic essays at varying levels of complexity.
Under F2 thinking, subject knowledge plays a small role; at best it is a vehicle with which to achieve a perceived greater educational goal and at worst it is a distraction getting in the way of a perception of what is truly valued in education. Assessment could take the form of learning journals, personal narratives, or interdisciplinary projects.
Young and Muller’s “Future 3” (F3) curriculum moves the debate beyond this simple dualism. Under F3 thinking, subject knowledge plays a central role in the curriculum; not in a reductive way that requires students to learn loads of facts to pass an exam, but one in which the inherent value of studying that subject is central to our thinking.
At the heart of F3 thinking is the empowering knowledge, skills and values that come from the rigorous study of subjects. Subject specialisms each have their own claims to truth, and own ways of generating meaning, often developed over millennia as the best ways to make sense of the world.
Teachers can draw on this wisdom to develop a rigorous and engaging curriculum for their students. This is not a straightforward task, as I discuss in my book What Are We Teaching? (Bustin 2024).
In the book, I ask subject specialist teachers across three schools to identify what makes their subject educationally significant for young people, using the idea of “powerful knowledge” – as developed by Michael Young (see Young & Lambert, 2014) – as a framework.
This is not about a list of facts to learn (which would take us back to F1 thinking), nor how it contributes to generic competencies (like “responsibility”, an F2 concern), it is about asking what the subject’s unique contribution is to an educated person.
Despite teaching the same subject, teachers in the different schools often articulate the subject’s value in different ways. This could be down to a range of factors, from the overbearing control of exam content dictating a version of curriculum to differences in educational ideological perspectives.
Despite the challenges of identifying exactly what F3 thinking might mean in practice, embracing it will rid us of our obsession with exam pass rates and won’t allow us to be distracted by the lure of teaching generic competencies (important though these both are).
It allows teachers to articulate why their subject is educationally important for young people. It is this that should drive teaching and learning, to allow students to understand the disciplined thinking that derives from each subject.
Engaging with this enables young people to develop educational “capabilities” (see Walker & Unterhalter, 2007) which I suggest could include critical thinking, discerning fact from fiction, or developing agency.
This will, of course, look different in each subject. Developing critical scientific thinking is a fundamentally different thought process to thinking critically about a piece of art, or language.
Very little has been written about what assessment might look like under F3 curriculum thinking. Hargreaves et al (2014) note that we have learnt to value what we know we can measure, rather than trying to find a way of measuring what we truly value.
If we value what a F3 curriculum might mean, then our assessment systems need to reflect this ambition. It could take us beyond the high-stakes, one-size-fits-all terminal exams that dominate our current system.
Under F3 thinking, the empowering nature of subjects requires us as teachers to identify what makes a young person good at our subject, and how we can tell when they are getting better at it. This might include a greater ability to remember a range of factual information, but it might also go beyond this, to be able to place facts within a broader framework of understanding.
Being able to capture this opens a range of other considerations, such as the importance of articulating a complex set of ideas on paper when an interview or “viva voce” might be a more appropriate measure of progress. There might be a role for continuous assessment, project work, or group work. The answers to these questions will vary by subject.
At a time of national curriculum and assessment review, these debates are more significant than ever.
- Dr Richard Bustin teaches geography and leads the department at Lancing College, where he is responsible for staff development and teacher training. Richard’s research on curriculum has resulted in multiple publications and work with trainee teachers around the world. His new book, What Are We Teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum (Crown House Publishing, 2024) is out now. Visit www.crownhouse.co.uk/what-are-we-teaching
Further information & references
- Bustin: What Are We Teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum, Crown House Publishing, 2024.
- DfE: Curriculum and Assessment Review, 2024: www.gov.uk/government/groups/curriculum-and-assessment-review
- Hargreaves, Boyle & Harris: Uplifting Leadership: How organisations, teams and communities raise performance, Jossey Bass, 2014.
- Walker & Unterhalter (eds): Amaryta Sen’s Capability Approach and Social Justice in Education, Palgrave MacMillian, 2007.
- Young & Lambert: Knowledge and the Future School: Curriculum and social justice, Bloomsbury, 2014.
- Young & Muller: Three educational scenarios for the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge, European Journal of Education (45,1), 2010.