Just over three years ago I sent this email to Mary Myatt. It resulted in five books about the curriculum in which we gave a platform to brilliant practitioners who were shaping curricula across the primary, secondary, special and alternative provision sectors. The series is called Huh, because, when we interviewed colleagues for the first book, they said, repeatedly, that designing the curriculum was a never ending process; Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration, in our view a perfect deity for the curriculum. As you can see from the DMs below, we nea ..read more

I wrote this post early yesterday morning, in anticipation of the day ahead. Anthony Christopher Knowles 25 May 1973 – 9 March 2024 Later today, I will help carry the coffin containing our dear friend Ant into the crematorium. It was approaching 9 pm on Saturday 9 March when Ant’s heart stopped beating without warning. He was 50 years old. I knew just one corner of Ant’s life, but this is what I knew. Ant was one of the kindest, gentlest people I’ve ever known. As my son Olly said, he was the ‘epitome of loveliness.’ I first met him twenty or more years back at interminably boring Learning ..read more

I’m a fan of a good sonnet, as was Seamus Heaney, who differentiated between poetic form and shape: ‘There is a mistaken equivalence being made nowadays in this kind of talk about a return to form. A lot of people mean they are using shapes. I think that a sonnet, for example, isn’t fourteen lines that rhyme. A sonnet is a system of muscles and enjambments and eight and six – it’s got a waist in the middle. It is a form. [In a shaped sonnet] there are indeed fourteen lines and there are indeed rhyme words at the end, but the actual move, or the movement, of the stanza isn’t there. So, I would ..read more

Earlier this year I catalogued the many insights gleaned from educational experts which have been most influential in my curriculum thinking, in a post entitled, This much I know about… the principles of curriculum planning in action. In a series of short essays I am exemplifying in more detail ten of those influential insights, and explaining why I think they are so important to progressing pupils’ learning. This post explores Dr Anita Devi’s suggestion that a learning model can help you plan and teach adaptively. I trained to teach in 1987-88 at the University of Sussex. Not once durin ..read more

Earlier this year I catalogued the many insights gleaned from educational experts which have been most influential in my curriculum thinking, in a post entitled, This much I know about… the principles of curriculum planning in action. In a series of short essays I am exemplifying in more detail ten of those influential insights, and explaining why I think they are so important to progressing pupils’ learning. This post explores the importance of Dylan Wiliam’s concept of the NEED to know and the NEAT to know when planning units of work. “How do you respond to colleagues who say that there ..read more

Earlier this year I catalogued the many insights gleaned from educational experts which have been most influential in my curriculum thinking, in a post entitled, This much I know about… the principles of curriculum planning in action. In a series of short essays I am exemplifying in more detail ten of those influential insights, and explaining why I think they are so important to progressing pupils’ learning. This post explores Dylan Wiliam’s insight that it is the enacted curriculum that matters most. If curriculum development concerns the complex, dynamic interplay between content, adaptive ..read more

Earlier this year I catalogued the many insights gleaned from educational experts which have been most influential in my curriculum thinking, in a post entitled, This much I know about… the principles of curriculum planning in action. In a series of short essays I am exemplifying in more detail ten of those influential insights, and explaining why I think they are so important to progressing pupils’ learning. This post explores Becky Allen’s insight that curriculum is the complex, dynamic interplay between content, adaptive teaching and assessment, and if any one of these three curriculum pill ..read more

Earlier this year I catalogued the many insights gleaned from educational experts which have been most influential in my curriculum thinking, in a post entitled, This much I know about… the principles of curriculum planning in action. In a series of short essays I am exemplifying in more detail ten of those influential insights, and explaining why I think they are so important to progressing pupils’ learning. This post explores Dylan Wiliam’s insight that “Opportunity cost” is one of the most important principles for people working and learning in schools. I am not obsessed with making every ..read more

In my career, I have had just two original ideas. One is the concept of Janus-faced sentences which are incredibly useful when answering, amongst other things, the writing question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 2. The other is to name the series of books on the curriculum I have written with Mary Myatt after Huh, the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration (we even have an online Academy for teachers named after our curriculum deity!). My lack of originality has not been a problem, however, because there are lots of people who, over a long period of time, h ..read more

Yesterday, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a report entitled, “Destitution in the UK 2023”. I, on the other hand, spent most of the afternoon trying to find a parcel return centre. Dodgy QR codes and broken scanners meant walking six miles through York’s streets before my parcel could begin its journey to whence it came. I was returning some cotton sheets which my mother-in-law had ordered. They’d cost £28.99. Later I took my son and his mate to see Manchester United play in the Champions League. The tickets were £127. Before I left, I booked two indoor tennis courts for £42.40, and ..read more