What is a curriculum? I’ve heard a whole raft of suggestions about that this week, and sensed a lot of fear in the people talking to me about it. It’s a wondrous time in education, to be thinking deeply about these things, but it’s also a turbulent one - not least because of who’s driving that thinking.

The long and short of it, for me, is that education is curriculum, and curriculum is education.

It’s not even that a school without a curriculum is like a car without wheels. It’s more fundamental than that. How many parts of a car would you have to remove before you couldn’t call it a car any more? You could have nothing but a key, and that would still conjure one up in your mind that the key must, should, could open.

That’s pretty much where I think the culture of accountability has left us: holding a key and imagining the car it opens, while sitting on the driveway and getting nowhere fast. There was a problem with our timing belt some time ago, and a succession of mechanics have taken bits out, put other bits back in, sucked through their teeth, muttered about cost, found other problems under the hood, repeatedly changed the MOT thresholds and, while we were distracted chatting to them, towed the bloody thing away.

Rebuilding the curriculum

Here we are, then. We need to get to work and get the kids to school, and all we have is a key, a distant memory, and the expectation of a call from the garage, at their leisure. Our less fortunate neighbours still have mechanics parked on the drive, showing no sign of leaving.

The Joneses across the way have a courtesy car - MOT’ed, and with outstanding mileage, but too small to fit the whole family, and decidedly lacking va-va-voom.

Many schools don’t have the capacity to rebuild their curriculum from scratch, precisely because of the demands of accountability relative to their contexts. In these schools, curriculum equals timetable. Transitioning to a different way of doing things is going to be an arduous journey that’ll cost them good teachers and middle leaders.

Ofsted has already accepted this, generously acquiesced that it’ll take an extra year for them to catch up. Given that Ofsted frameworks have an average lifespan of under four years, that gives them under three years to get their curricula validated, before priorities change again.

But let’s park that, because we’re imagineering. Just like Ofsted does.

We can be bold. We can develop a concept curriculum. A steampunk neotraditionalist affair, or perhaps a self-driving techno-progressive design. If we can’t be bothered to do the hard work, someone is going to sell us one anyway, so don’t worry too much. Let the creativity flow. Where do we want to go? What’s the best way to get there? How do we want to look when we rock up? These are important questions.

On the road again

Now that we’ve chosen, we’re going to have to negotiate with the realities of the terrain. National curriculum. Standardised tests. No budget.

We’ll get the history department to design the history curriculum, the English department to design the English curriculum, and so on and so forth. No alarms and no surprises, as the song goes. They’re going to do the hard work of keeping us within the lines, moving bits from schemes of work to knowledge organisers, planning lots of regular low-stakes tests, and having another go at making key stage 3 wonderful in its own right and not at all a long run-in to key stage 4.

Next, we’re going to create a curriculum map and identify links between subjects. We’re not going to force it, but where they exist, we’ll move things around for timing’s sake. Remember, this isn’t about transferable skills - they don’t exist any more - but about reinforcing knowledge, which matters a great deal.

Then, someone’s going to ask the awkward question about where PSHE, SRE, citizenship and character fit in. At this stage, it’s easier to send everyone back to the starting line. If there’s resistance, it’s decidedly second-best, but we can probably gaffer tape it on, make it someone else’s responsibility, and convince any onlookers that it’s working fine. Like a second-hand spoiler.

By the time we’ve done all that, we might get asked if we’ve done anything new. In leadership terms, resoundingly no. But all the teachers will be, and that’s kind of the point.

Our concept curriculum is ready, and it’s not dissimilar to the one we had before. Weirdly, it looks exactly like the neighbour’s curriculum. Come to think of it, there only seems to be one model of curriculum any more. Everyone is so lacking in imagination, they just copied ours.

Hit the road, Jack

Maybe, after all, it would be better to imagineer something else altogether.

A curriculum is more than the sum of its parts. You, I and every school leader knows this. Every teacher with enough time to look up from their SIMS marksheets knows this. I dare say, even Ofsted knows this.

It’s a culture, organic and evolving. Trying to manufacture it can only result in clones or monsters. While the best leaders are trying to nurture it, to sustain it, to harness it for the good of all - conscious all the while of their privilege - there’ll always be rarities in a climate of competition, coercion and control. Nobody is going to invent the flying car without the safety of a test track and a whole lot of investment.

If we’re serious about curriculum, we have to be serious about accountability. The Ofsted framework is a curriculum, too - a false, manufactured one - and we are its monsters and clones. If education is curriculum and curriculum is education, then we have to ask why Ofsted has taken us so far off-road that it’s necessary to tow us back there now.

If it had found us to be doing the same to our students, would it have hesitated to put us in special measures?

Just as Ofsted’s consultation is transparently insufficient to deal with its underlying problems, so is our means of engaging with each other and our communities insufficient to deal with ours. The key to truly developing curriculum is in our hands, but to do it, we have to stop looking up to Ofsted and down at our shoes. We have to look across to our communities, behind us for the lessons of the past, and ahead to a sustainable future.

We have to tell Ofsted to hit the road, and not to come back no more.

JL Dutaut is co-editor of Flip the System UK: a teachers’ manifesto (Routledge). He is currently on a career break from teaching to research school accountability systems around the world. He hasn’t found one he likes yet, and he doesn’t think you would either