Designing great curricula is complex. It requires a great deal of expertise and time - and time is a scarce commodity in schools.

To guide the work we do at Oak National Academy, we’ve crafted guiding curriculum principles that summarise the important features of great curricula. These form two layers.

Firstly, a set of overarching principles that describe features important to curriculum in all subjects.

Secondly, each and every subject is different, so subject-specific guiding principles reflect the unique nature of different subjects.

Here, I want to detail the former and explain why we believe these elements should underpin a school curriculum.

1. Knowledge and vocabulary rich

A laser focus on knowledge and vocabulary are powerful levers to help pupils achieve success. Knowledge plays a hugely important role in learning - we build upon and link new knowledge to prior knowledge.

This focus on knowledge also reflects the foundational role it plays in developing skills. For example, if we want pupils to think critically and creatively, they need something to think about.

Vocabulary is a form of knowledge that carries great importance in learning. In 2021, the Education Endowment Foundation recommended extending pupils’ vocabulary by explicitly teaching new words, providing repeated exposure to new words and providing opportunities for pupils to use new words.

2. Sequenced and coherent

Careful, purposeful sequencing of curriculum content is vital to ensure pupils are building on and making links with existing knowledge. At its simplest, this means ensuring, for example, that pupils learn about the square and square root functions before meeting Pythagoras’ theorem, or that pupils explore rhythm patterns by clapping before being introduced to musical notation.

Curriculum sequencing ensures that, where necessary, new knowledge and skills are met in a logical or meaningful sequence. There is also powerful sequencing through coherent threads within subjects, such as gothic in English or monarchy in history. 

3. Flexible

Flexibility is particularly important in how we’re approaching our curricula at Oak. Schools should be able to use curricula in a way that fits their context and meets the varying needs of teachers and their pupils.

For example, a secondary school in Yorkshire may want to adapt a coastal unit to include Holderness as a local case study or a primary school in Brighton may want to add its own bespoke history unit on King George IV to reflect the local history of the area.

Indeed our research shows this is how most teachers use Oak now, either adapting our curricula or learning from it to make improvements to their own existing curricula.

Our curricula models are just that, models. It is up to schools to decide how to, and indeed whether they choose to, use them. They are optional and will always remain so. School leaders and teachers know their pupils best.

4. Diverse

In selecting what knowledge to teach, we provide access to society, represent what has influenced the world today, challenge common misconceptions, introduce diversity and help children find, and be proud of, who they are.

In ensuring breadth and diversity in content, language, texts and media in curriculum choices, we attend to the importance of giving pupils a broad and rich understanding of the world, of different perspectives and of thinking critically about sources of knowledge.

5. Accessible

It is important that curricula support all pupils to learn, especially those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The SEND Code of Practice highlights high-quality teaching as being the foundation of SEND provision.

Examples of the features of high-quality teaching include explicitly linking new content to previous content, chunking new content into appropriately sized blocks, giving concise verbal explanations with clear supporting visual models and illustrations, checking understanding regularly and responding accordingly, and providing scaffolded practice.

Teaching resources need to be designed with this in mind. We believe it is important, where possible, for all pupils to study the same content. Differentiated activities or resources, for example providing three worksheets with different levels of difficulty, have generally not been shown to have much impact on pupils’ attainment and can have the unintended outcome of pupils gaining different knowledge and worse, widening the disadvantage gap. That said, for some pupils, a more tailored and specialist approach to the curriculum is needed.  

There are many different approaches to designing a curriculum and teaching resources. Ultimately, it is the teacher, not the resource, that does the teaching. No slide deck nor sequence can replace the importance of a teacher’s relationship with a pupil, nor their craft in skilfully planning and delivering a lesson. But good curriculum choices can certainly play a big role in ensuring pupil outcomes are the best they can be. 

Emma McCrea is head of curriculum design at Oak National Academy. This is an abridged version of a blog on Oak’s website about their approach to curriculum