“Imagine there’s no courses, it’s easy if you try. No qualifications to aim for, above us, only sky. Imagine all the students, learning for today…”

Have you ever wondered what post-16 education would look like if we were suddenly free of the need to enrol our students on qualification-based courses?

Even entertaining such a thought probably classes you as a “dreamer”, floating on a cloud far from reality or, like John Lennon, a voice from a different time.

The fact that this seems a bit mind-blowing shows how dependent we are on the idea that qualifications are the building blocks of a curriculum.

This view leads us to define people’s education as the sum of the accreditation they have accumulated, rather than the product of what they have learnt, what they can do and how this has changed them.

So, however unlikely and scary such a qualification-free scenario might be, it can be helpful to imagine going back to the drawing board and asking ourselves what we think our students should study. This means starting from first principles and reminding ourselves of which knowledge, skills, attributes and values we want to pass on to our students to help them contribute to society, find fulfilling and satisfying work, and enjoy a good life.

Given such a fresh start, which principles should shape educational programmes for young people?

Curriculum queries

Here are some questions we might ask about our curriculum offer:

• Does it include all students? Does it build on their starting points, address their interests and aspirations, and motivate them?
• Does it develop their confidence, their foundational knowledge and skills, their literacy and their numeracy? Does it move them on towards expertise and fluency in their field of study and help to prepare them for progression and a lifetime of useful and enjoyable learning?
• Does it prepare them for employment and participation in professional practice? Does it help them to develop as well-informed and critical citizens and valued members of their communities?
• Does it open up their access to the full range of what human culture has to offer? Does it support their creativity, their adaptability and their resilience? Does it promote their all-round wellbeing, and ability to respect and care for others?

The “what” of these aims should then drive the “how” of pedagogy and curriculum organisation.

• What sequence of activities would best support learning?
• What is the right balance of challenge, consolidation and exploration to maximise learning?
• How do we help students make sense of, and integrate, what they are learning?
• What blend of teaching methods and contexts best promotes our learning aims?
• How do we build connections and bridges between the various educational journeys available to students?

Imagination

Ofsted’s proposed new inspection framework encourages us in this by placing curriculum aims at the heart of our work: the knowledge and understanding to be gained at each stage (intent), how that translates into a structure and narrative within a particular context (implementation) and an evaluation of what knowledge and understanding students have gained against expectations (impact).

We will be expected to make visible what we want to achieve through the curriculum, how it is delivered and what difference it is making to students’ learning.

This refreshing shift in emphasis won’t in itself radically transform pedagogy or bring about the end of high-stakes testing, but it does mean that exam results cannot be seen as the be-all and end-all, and it could herald a renaissance in curriculum design and allow us to make the case for fuller and more expansive programmes.

To Ofsted’s “three i’s” we could add another requirement: imagination. We’ll need plenty of that to help us define our purpose and imagine a richer curriculum.

What do we want for our students?

Imagination is also a disposition we should aim to nurture in our students, in preference to exam-grade chasing.

Once we are clear about purpose and organisation or “intent and implementation”, as Ofsted would have it, we can then shift our attention back to qualifications and make them our servants rather than our masters; useful instruments to accredit the learning we want our students to demonstrate; and the skills that we want them to acquire.

Talk of curriculum and pedagogy may feel novel in the further education sector, but it’s core to our mission and key to our success.

What could be more important than asking ourselves what we want for our students? We need to rediscover the art of holistic curriculum design and contribute to making it a reality. And if that makes us all dreamers, at least none of us would be “the only one”.

Eddie Playfair is a senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges and a former college principal