I am not sure if I have ever had an original thought in my life. When it comes to curriculum, this much I have come to know from other people’s wisdom and research. Beyond a handful accrued through experience in the classroom, here are some of the aphorisms, principles, and ideas on curriculum which have shaped my thinking over the last decade or so: Learning is a permanent change to a child’s long-term memory (Daniel Willingham et al.). Retrieval of what has been learnt is essential to making the change in long-term memory permanent. (Kate Jones et al.) Teaching a class of 30 so that they al ..read more

Uckfield Post Office, 1955 Harry Tomsett, second row, centre But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. Francis Bacon A research study undertaken by the University of Chicago on the impact of loneliness upon our overall health presented some staggering findings.  Compared with the average person in the study, those who reported being lonely had a 14% greater risk of dying. The figure means that loneliness has around twice the impact on a ..read more

I led Huntington School from 2007 to 2021. During that time, school budgets were cut by 9% in real terms, the biggest reduction in 40 years. I wrote at length about how I managed the impact of the drop in funding in a way that minimised the impact upon both staff and students. And I have explained for new headteachers how to mange a school budget. Despite the Chancellor’s largesse, the Autumn statement provided little financial relief for hard-pressed schools. As Vic Goddard points out, the current financial year’s budget black hole remains deep. So, if school leaders are trying to decide wh ..read more

“What should be taught to whom, and with what pedagogical object in mind? That master question is threefold: what, to whom, and how?” Jerome Bruner What gives teachers the authority to decide what our children should be taught? Why don’t we keep the roles of curriculum designer and teacher separate? When it comes to the school curriculum, why is teacher autonomy such a contested issue? One possible answer to these questions lies in these two recent tweets by the ever-impressive Chris Such: His sentiments allude unwittingly to the thinking of the educationalist Jerome Bruner, who, in his intr ..read more

Dave Williams always makes me laugh. He is a very funny man. And I thought of him last weekend when I listened to Barbara Oakley’s keynote speech at researchED Dublin. With utter clarity, Barbara explained how our brains learn. What she described was ostensibly familiar, but such was the lucidity of her entertaining and challenging talk, I now understand in much greater depth how our brains make memories out of what we are taught and how we recall those memories when we need them to solve challenges. One thing that furthered my understanding was Barbara’s comments on current thinking about em ..read more

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Huh? is my usual response when I enter a Year 6 grammar class! But little did I know when I began working with the indefatigable Mary Myatt that Huh would prove to be the perfect title for our current curriculum project. In February 2021 I emailed Mary with a proposal. I wanted to write a book whose working title was, “The middle leaders’ guide to the curriculum for senior leaders so that when they have a line manager meeting and they discuss the curriculum, the senior leaders know what they are talking about.” Mary loved the idea. We interviewed 19 subject leaders and 2 senior leaders about ..read more

The triangulation of speaking to colleagues, being in lessons and looking at students’ work is crucial to appreciating the quality of the curriculum. When looking in books recently, I have seen two things which have made me think. Firstly, the obsession with getting students to write down definitions before they understand them. Ben Rogers explains brilliantly in this blog post why it is better to ask students to write down definitions once they have a good grasp of what the definition means. Secondly, the mountain of worksheets being stuck into books is remarkable. I see books rammed full of ..read more

“Through conversation…we may whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others.” Michel de Montaigne [1] Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration. He is the deity Mary Myatt and I have adopted as our god of the school curriculum. Our first book in the Huh series focused upon how school practitioners design the Key Stage 3 curriculum. Its popularity prompted calls from many quarters for a similar book on the primary curriculum. Consequently, we went about interviewing over 30 primary colleagues who have responsibility for curriculum develop ..read more

There is a lot of publicity about the DfE’s declaration that schools must be open for 32.5 hours a week. Accepting that most schools are already open for longer than 32.5 hours a week, what the DfE need to realise is that the impact of teaching time upon students’ learning depends upon quality not duration. In 2010 we decided to send our students home an hour early on alternate Mondays, so that we could have two hours every fortnight for staff training, in addition to our five annual training days. This reduced the contact time with students to 24.5 hours a week on average, below the 25 hours ..read more