Anne Stead’s school has just completed a review of its curriculum. “Primary has to be about more than English, maths and science,” the head of Warley Town School in Halifax explains. “We have been using the same curriculum for four years, and we have had some changes in staff, so we just wanted to review everything that we were teaching.

“We were making sure we covered all the objectives in the national curriculum in a way that the pupils found interesting.”

For Stead, the curriculum is not just core subjects or a list of targets to be hit. She wants to be sure that her school teaches children in a way that will benefit them in secondary and also in later life.

But Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman fears that heads like Stead may be in a dwindling minority; that skills in curriculum planning are being lost. And she wants that to change.

A school’s curriculum - the decisions it makes about what it teaches, and how - is about to become much more high-stakes. In less than 12 months’ time, it could be the central focus of Ofsted inspections.

A new inspection framework, due to be in place from next September, will put a much greater weight on how a school designs and delivers its curriculum. Ofsted’s intention is to move away from a system that rewards schools only for their results, which it says has led to a narrowing of the curriculum. But is worrying about exactly what is taught in schools really Ofsted’s job?

The fact that the inspectorate’s plan is already highly controversial should come as no surprise. This territory has been vigorously contested ever since the 1970s, when prime minister James Callaghan trespassed on schools’ “secret garden” and began the process that eventually transferred much of the power over the curriculum from teachers to ministers. Now, more than 40 years later, Ofsted’s intervention threatens another shake-up, once again begging the question, just whose curriculum is it?

The motivation for the inspectorate’s interest is transparent. Concerns have been growing about the end of primary school becoming dominated by the preparation for Sats tests. And at secondary level, stories have emerged of pupils being asked to pick GCSE subjects and sit tests based on the exams when they are just 11 or 12 years old.

That is why Ofsted wants to get to “the real substance of education”. As Spielman puts it, “At the very heart of education sits the vast accumulated wealth of human knowledge and what we choose to impart to the next generation: the curriculum.”

This, in itself, is not a particularly controversial statement. But the fact that it is coming from Ofsted is likely to signal a major change to the education landscape.

It means that schools and teachers used to decades of high-stakes accountability are set to be judged on a new set of criteria. But Ofsted wants its changes to be more than the introduction of just another set of targets. It wants to challenge schools’ whole target- and table-driven approach. So, many of the decisions that schools have taken in order to ensure that they hit their targets could now be criticised on exactly that basis, even if they were successful.

Stead is unsure whether schools are ready for the change. “I think some schools have designed their curriculum around getting the right Sats results, because if you have a dip in your results, you know Ofsted will be coming in,” she says. The head welcomes Ofsted placing less importance on exam results, but says that schools need to understand what is going to be expected of them under the new inspection framework.

“Heads are not really talking about [Ofsted’s plans for the curriculum] yet, but I have started to get emails from companies offering their curriculum packages, so it is an issue that is out there,” she adds.

National vs local

But should it be Ofsted’s responsibility to decide what a good school curriculum looks like? The last time the issue took centre stage was when Michael Gove, as education secretary, commissioned a review of the national curriculum at the start of the decade.

Tim Oates, the Cambridge Assessment exam board research chief who led the review, is keen to stress the distinction between the national curriculum (which sets out the knowledge that should be available to all pupils) and a school’s curriculum (the decisions that are made in each institution about what they teach and why). That distinction and a focus on essential core knowledge - which doesn’t need constant updating - was behind the lofty ambition that if the curriculum review did its job properly, then it would be the last one ever needed.

The resulting reformed national curriculum was introduced in 2014, hailed by Gove as introducing more rigour in an attempt to arrest the country’s slide down the international league tables. But while promoting the importance of its own curriculum on the one hand, on the other the coalition government undermined it by encouraging a proliferation of academies and free schools that were free ignore it. It is in this context that Oates believes Ofsted’s focus on the curriculum is welcome.

“The national curriculum gives us a common core that everybody should have access to,” he says. “The curriculum we have puts us in a leading position internationally on curriculum theory. Where we run into a few problems is in the implementation of the national curriculum in a diverse education system.”

Oates, who now sits on Ofsted’s curriculum advisory panel, says the inspectorate’s approach is the correct one. “It is right that the state and Parliament should be able to check the way in which the national curriculum is being implemented,” he says. “It is also right that there is a focus on identifying good practice and disseminating it. We are not very good in this country at sharing good practice.”

For Oates, the national curriculum is a policy instrument that the state can use to influence education. “It is part of a jigsaw,” he says, “along with qualification, assessment and inspection.” For a schools system to be successful, he argues, these elements need to be coherent and all “pulling in the same direction”.

From this perspective, it makes sense to Oates that the government sets the national standards on the curriculum and Ofsted inspects how it is being delivered. “If Ofsted doesn’t do this, who else will?” he asks.

But some fear that Ofsted’s plans will push the inspectorate beyond checking on delivery and result in it influencing what is actually taught and the methods used to teach it. There are already concerns that the preparatory research Ofsted has conducted for its new framework betrays a bias towards a knowledge-based rather than a skills-based approach to the curriculum (see box, below).

Is that appropriate? Should an unelected inspectorate seek to have such influence over a curriculum that ministers are supposed to set and schools are supposed to have the space and flexibility to decide how to deliver? An argument in Ofsted’s favour is the long-standing concerns that many schools have stopped taking the level of interest in the curriculum that they ought to.

In 2013, Profession Dylan Wiliam, who sat with Oates on the last government-commissioned curriculum review panel, warned that discussion of the school curriculum was “all but absent” in education circles.

He said many teachers, leaders and policymakers assumed that, because the government had specified what schools were required to teach through the national curriculum, “then no further discussion of the issue of curriculum was necessary”. Wiliam argued that the real curriculum was “the lived daily experience of young people in classrooms”, which required the input of teachers and was created by them every day.

Spielman is also concerned about this, warning last year that competence in curriculum planning had ebbed away. “This may be because it was generally not thought to be so important after the establishment of a national curriculum,” she said.

Ready and willing

So is Ofsted’s planned intervention just what the system needs? Is the inspectorate simply putting the ball back in schools’ court?

If so, Mark Lehain, the director of Parents and Teachers for Excellence, which campaigns for a fact-based approach to the curriculum, believes that many schools will be ready to play. He has seen rising interest in curriculum design this year.

“Since the start of term, I have seen a big increase in the number of heads who want to talk about a knowledge-rich curriculum,” Lehain says. “A knowledge-rich curriculum is where a school decides that some pieces of knowledge are more important than others, and it says that the sequence in which young people learn subjects is important, too.

“If we are honest, I think this is partly because Amanda Spielman and Ofsted have been talking about this. In the past, schools have not had much incentive to think about curriculum design.”

Lehain suggests that reformed Sats and GCSEs are also factors behind more schools considering knowledge-rich approaches. But not everyone will see this as a good thing. Some schools prefer to emphasise a more skills-based, thematic approach to the curriculum. One prominent critic of Ofsted’s plans has questioned whether the inspectorate can judge a school’s curriculum without coming down on one side of the knowledge versus skills debate.

Russell Hobby, chief executive of Teach First, has said: “You can’t say that ‘this is a good curriculum’ unless you have a view on what a good curriculum is, and I think that is incompatible with Ofsted’s stance on freedom and autonomy for the profession itself to determine these, given that we may have strong beliefs ourselves.”

‘Asking the right questions’

However, Oates begs to differ, insisting that Ofsted can reliably form unbiased judgements about the quality of a school’s curriculum. “An inspector will be able to tell whether what a school leader says about their curriculum is happening in the classroom very quickly by asking the right questions,” he says.

Oates also describes the idea of a knowledge versus skills debate as a “false opposition”. For him, the two are connected. Skills are acquired through knowledge and acquiring knowledge involves skills.

In Oates’ opinion, a major benefit of Ofsted’s plan is that it will allow the identification and dissemination of best practice on curriculum design. However, as the best ideas are rolled out to other schools, this will inevitably increase workload in the short term, he says. “We shouldn’t underestimate the demands on schools of designing and implementing a curriculum. If there are four or five models of school curriculum that are identified as being really good, it will still be quite a task for schools to adapt themselves to these models.”

But he argues that, in the long term, sharing good curriculum design across the system will actually reduce workload. Spielman contends that the new inspections will reduce workload because they will focus on the “substance” of education.

Many in education believe that, whatever the practical implications of Ofsted’s inspection framework plans, it is at the very least attempting to get to grips with some real and pressing issues. The narrowing of the curriculum, schools gaming the league tables and rising concerns about off-rolling pupils all point to a system where priorities are askew.

In the words of Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), Ofsted “has identified the right problem”. The question on some people’s minds, however, is whether the inspectorate can be part of the solution.

School leaders are somewhat divided on what happens next. The NAHT headteachers’ union has called for Ofsted to put its plan on hold, citing fears about the extra workload it will entail and the lack of time to carry out such a radical overhaul.

The ASCL has been more welcoming of Ofsted’s plans to focus on the curriculum, but Barton believes that this is an area where schools, and not politicians or accountability frameworks, should lead the decision-making. “For this to work, schools need to be given breathing space to take ownership of the leadership of learning,” he says.

Barton argues that, since Callaghan’s famous “secret garden” speech in 1976, his profession has been “teaching someone else’s curriculum”. The former secondary head believes that if schools are to now be judged on their curriculum, they also need to be empowered to make their own decisions.

John Roberts is a reporter for Tes. He tweets @JohnGRoberts

Will inspections favour a knowledge-rich curriculum?

The big question facing Ofsted as it prepares to assess the curriculum is: how will it decide what a “good” school curriculum looks like?

The work the inspectorate has done so far on the issue has raised concerns that it favours a particular approach - the knowledge-rich curriculum.

Its research has involved visits to 23 “good” and “outstanding” schools that are particularly invested in curriculum design.

But most of these schools were described by the inspectorate as having either a knowledge-focused or knowledge-engaged approach. A smaller group were said to have skills-focused curricula.

The sample was also unrepresentative of schools nationally. Free schools made up 30 per cent of the study - compared with less than 2 per cent of all state-funded schools.

And seven of the 12 primary schools visited (58 per cent) were academies - compared with 27 per cent of schools nationally.

There was also a geographic imbalance: London and the East of England were over-represented and the North West was significantly under-represented.

And the inspectorate did not include any schools for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), or pupil-referral units, as part of the research.

Four of the 23 schools (nearly a sixth) came from just two academy chains - New Vision Trust and Inspiration Trust.

But Ofsted has insisted that it never intended its sample to be representative and has rejected claims of a bias towards a knowledge-rich approach.

The inspectorate says it sampled knowledge- and skills-focused schools, and found strengths in both approaches.

But critics say the question of whether this sample was representative does matter. The conclusions Ofsted draws from its research are important because they could underpin the way that all schools are inspected in the future.

Chris Jones, the inspectorate’s deputy director for research and evaluation, has said that this research was carried out to establish what indicators are “most useful for assessing curriculum intent, implementation and impact” during inspections.

It is in this context that there are concerns about whether Ofsted will favour one form of curriculum over another.

What is Ofsted planning?

Amanda Spielman is putting curriculum at the heart of the future of school inspection.

The chief inspector (pictured, inset) is drawing up plans for a new framework, which is expected to put much greater emphasis on a school’s approach to how and what it teaches, and less weight on the results it achieves.

She says that “without a curriculum, a building full of teachers, leaders and pupils is not a school”.

For years, exam results have been the bottom line for schools, both in terms of government floor targets and because of the big part they play in the “overall effectiveness” grade from Ofsted.

Now the watchdog wants to change the focus, with Spielman noting: “Exams should exist in the service of the curriculum, rather than the other way around.”

In Ofsted’s curriculum research, 11 of the 14 primary schools it visited carried out some form of preparation for key stage 2 Sats, which meant curtailing or postponing the teaching of other foundation subjects.

And almost half the secondaries the inspectorate visited had reduced KS3 to two years in order to extend GCSE courses.

Spielman acknowledges that Ofsted has played a part in this trend by placing “too much weight on test and exam results”. So her plan is that, from next September, schools will no longer be subject to a specific pupil outcomes judgement.

This will instead be combined with the current teaching, learning and assessment judgement to create a new “quality of education” judgement, in an attempt to place greater emphasis on the “substance” of what happens in schools.

“Ofsted will challenge those schools where too much time is spent on preparation for tests at the expense of teaching, where pupil’s choices are narrowed, or where children are pushed into less rigorous qualifications purely to boost league table positions,” Spielman says.