On the face of it, “curriculum” is a straightforward concept: it is a document outlining the content that all pupils should cover in school.

But, according to Mary Myatt, it isn’t quite that simple. She is a former teacher, local authority adviser and inspector, who now specialises in curriculum work. She says that a curriculum is more than just a list - but it is also something that schools often overcomplicate.

Here, she speaks to Tes about what makes a strong curriculum, and what curriculum leads in both primary and secondary schools can do to maximise their offering.

The secrets of a strong curriculum

Tes: How do you define ‘curriculum’?

Mary Myatt: What’s taught in schools is based on the national curriculum, published in 2014. But that really is just a list of the content that needs to be taught, and we need to be thinking of the curriculum as a richer, wider, bigger piece of work than that.

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Curriculum is everything that a child experiences when they’re in school, both implicit and explicit. So, on one level, it is straightforward - but actually bringing it to life is another matter.

Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at the UCL Institute of Education, has said that the difference between a collection of topics to be studied and a well-designed curriculum is the same as between a pile of bricks and a house. That’s a really useful metaphor for thinking about this.

What are some of the things that schools commonly get wrong when it comes to curriculum work?

I think the way the curriculum gets enacted in some schools can be overcomplicated, with all sorts of fancy agendas for external audiences, particularly Ofsted. In the rush to get all the ducks in a row for external eyes, schools can attempt to cover everything, rather than focusing on the key concepts. 

Excessive curriculum-related paperwork for accountability purposes is also an issue. Quite a lot of time is wasted on that. 

Are those issues driven by misconceptions about the curriculum, do you think?

One of the things that has certainly been an issue is the focus on skills: the idea that children develop their skills as though those skills float free.

In the past, it was thought that it didn’t much matter what children were being taught as long as they developed skills. But we now know that skill development is, by and large, domain-specific development. Just because I can explain and analyse something really well in geography, it doesn’t mean I can do the same in history, if I don’t know any history. 

The worry is that there has been backwash from that focus on skills into curriculum thinking and planning. For instance, you have children in Year 7 being given AQA GCSE language paper two-type questions in the mistaken belief that will lead to better results five years later, because the children are practising inference and comprehension skills. But that misses the point that, actually, inference and comprehension skills come from engagement with rich, deep material.

Are there any other misconceptions driving problems with curriculum planning?

One misconception has been around the entitlement at key stage 3, where you’ve got longer being taken for exam courses.

You can understand why that’s happened: exam specifications are more demanding and there’s more content, so you can see the rationale for saying, “We need more time.” 

However, KS3 is the intellectual powerhouse of the secondary school, and students are entitled to a broad and diverse curriculum until the end of it. 

If you get KS3 right, all the groundwork has been done, so it’s like a launchpad to KS4 - but, more importantly, those students who are not taking a qualification at the end of Year 9 will have a deep residue of important and interesting learning to draw on. 

How much do we know about the types of curriculum models that work best?

I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule for that; I think it’s more about principles. As we are planning and implementing units of work, we need to ask ourselves, “Is this helping my pupils to know more, remember more and do more?” If it’s not, we can cheerfully chop it. 

Having said that, there are some useful headlines from research. For example, there is a lot of evidence that we know more and remember more if we understand the big ideas or concepts underpinning what we’re learning. 

In history, for example, a big idea might be democracy. When children are learning about Ancient Greece, democracy ought to be a big idea that’s being taught there. Later on, if they’re learning about Magna Carta, democracy will again underpin that. 

So, curriculum models that are carefully sequenced towards big ideas appear to be beneficial.

How much does the subject that you teach affect what your curriculum model looks like? And to what extent are cross-curricular approaches useful?

Each discipline has its own rules and ways of working. When that’s understood, you can start doing cross-curricular stuff where appropriate, as long as it’s amplifying what you’re teaching. 

But you can only do that when you’ve got to a certain level. For example, children might have learned about synagogues before, and made a model one. But if you ask them what they can tell you about a synagogue, they tell you it is made of cardboard.

That type of activity doesn’t do justice either to religious education or design and technology, then. You can see the flimsiness of it. That’s not because people set out for it to be flimsy, but there hasn’t been sufficient rigour in terms of thinking, “Is this amplifying the main topic we’re teaching?”

It’s the same when cross-curricular thematic work doesn’t have a proper rationale behind it. 

[Curriculum expert] Christine Counsell makes this point. Take, for example, the theme of colour, she says. That’s great for a subject like art, but by the time you get to history, you’re learning about the black death. 

You can still do that unit, but we have to move away from the idea of shoehorning everything in. If it’s important for children to be taught about the black death, we just teach that separately. 

What curriculum concerns do primary school leaders face that are unique to their phase? 

It seems to me that most secondary schools have a lot in common in the way they’re structured and the way they’re run, in terms of curriculum. But with primary schools, you’ve got a range from really tiny village schools with mixed-age classes up to schools with six-form entry and 900 pupils.

Yet a lot of the discourse around curriculum planning, on social media and elsewhere, is framed in secondary terms. You get people saying, “Go off and work in your departments or faculties”, which doesn’t apply if you’re in a primary with mixed-year groups.

But there’s some really good emerging practice of primaries collaborating, either in a formal trust or informally with other schools. I’m also pleased to see greater development happening between primary and secondary colleagues. When that works well, you find that secondary colleagues learn a lot from primary as well; it’s not a one-way street. 

We need to do far more work on that. Joining the dots between the phases needs to become absolutely embedded in the system, rather than it just being luck if it happens or not. 

For someone who is stepping up to lead on the curriculum for the first time, where should they begin?

I think the purpose statements in the national curriculum documents are the starting point. They are right at the beginning, and are very important because they set up the rationale for your subject.

From here, you can develop a good statement of intent. That doesn’t need to be written up anywhere, but if you haven’t got a rationale for why you are teaching your subject, it’s going to be a lot harder.

The next thing I would say is to join the subject association, which should be paid for by the school, and find local networks to engage with. Who are the people in other schools running departments or coordinating subjects?

The final place I’d go would be social media, because the quality of some of the subject chats is just great. Social media gets a bad rap, for a good reason, but actually if you curate your feed properly, it can be like a mini university. 

Are there any key takeaways that could help even experienced subject leads?

There are a couple of things that I would mention. One is work around transition and thinking about how we can strengthen the links between Years 6 and 7.

For instance, the Reach Academy thinks about its curriculum in terms of “cradle to career”. From the very youngest years, it considers what children need if they’re going to take this subject at A level and go on to university. It is not presupposing that every child is going to, but it is considering those deep, rich building blocks that are going to be useful. 

Thinking in those terms seems to be very productive. 

And the final thing to say is that this work does not happen by magic. You’ve got to be really intentional about how it’s done. But you’ve also got to pace yourself; curriculum work is not going to be done quickly. 

Sitting alongside that is the fact that leaders need to be brutal about chopping things that don’t add value. There’s an awful lot of dodgy data being collected, ridiculous marking policies and overblown paperwork still out there. And that’s just got to stop.

Mary Myatt’s new book, written with John Tomsett, Primary Huh: Curriculum conversations with subject leaders in primary schools, is out in April. 

She is one of the speakers at the 2022 World Education Summit. Tes is the official media partner for the event. For more information or to book tickets, visit worldedsummit.com.