Here’s a question that every person working in education will have an answer to: what makes a good curriculum? You wouldn’t get the same answer from everyone you asked but people would definitely have an opinion.

There will be those who agree with Amanda Spielman, chief inspector for schools, that a curriculum needs to be “broad and balanced”. Others might argue that a curriculum should be “knowledge-rich”, or cite the 2010 Cambridge Primary Review, which recommended that the primary curriculum reflect schools’ contexts and communities. There would be plenty of other views, too.

At first, all these opinions would appear disparate but, actually, they would all have one thing in common: they would be based on an experience of education before Covid-19 threw everything that we thought we knew up in the air. In the past year, our understanding of what we should be teaching, when and how has had to become more fluid. Schemes have been rewritten, units of work have been pushed forwards or backwards, and countless lessons have been adapted so that they could take place online. In short, the curriculum has worked in a different way from how we might have imagined.

Will this begin to unify what the profession sees as a “good” curriculum or scatter those opinions even further adrift from one another? My hope is that it will mean we will all return to the core research around curriculum design and put it into practice in a way that helps us to better meet the needs of all children within our post-Covid schools.

The starting point for this should be considering our current curriculum approaches. The curriculum is the vital structure that supports everything we do as teachers and school leaders. Despite this, curriculum design is no longer a part of initial teacher training courses (and has not been for some decades), nor is it generally a topic of professional development in schools. As a result, rather than taking a principled approach to curriculum, in many schools the national curriculum has simply become a syllabus; a list of topics to be covered.

This is a problem. As Kelly (2004) points out, a curriculum that is equated to a syllabus is a limiting conceptualisation. If what we are hoping to implement is an “educational” curriculum, there must be principles underlying what is taught.

So, if we want to get away from the definition of a curriculum as simply a taught syllabus, what are our options?

Well, we could accept the definition illustrated by Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), which moves us beyond the notion of “curriculum as content” to include curriculum as a “lived experience”.

CfE sets out not only the subject knowledge, skills and capacities that students should acquire but also communicates an awareness and consideration of the social, cultural and affective dimensions of learning.

However, this suggests - as does the national curriculum in England - that a curriculum is essentially a “given” entity. Both are based on the premise that teaching and learning must be framed within a designated set of affordances and constraints, and that this will lead to pupils achieving the desired educational outcomes.

The pandemic, though, has shown us that this approach leaves us with a curriculum that is not easy for us to adapt to changing contexts.

What’s the alternative? I’d like to argue that we should consider the viewpoint of British educationalist Laurence Stenhouse who, in 1975, suggested that “a new curriculum expresses ideas in terms of practice, and disciplines practice by ideas”.

In Stenhouse’s view, rather than seeing the curriculum as a framework of content, we can understand it as an ongoing process, one that involves discussion, reflective thinking and continual revision. If we take this approach, then our curriculum will always be tentative and open to change.

I appreciate this may seem a little loose and uncertain in a school context that requires certainty and specificity. So, if we take this as our guiding principle, how do we convert that into something that can be understood and lived by those in a school?

At the University of Cambridge Primary School (UCPS), we had a unique opportunity - as a new free school - to test out the process of trying to build a curriculum from scratch. We are the first and only primary university training school in the UK. What this means is that we work alongside the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education to use research-informed teaching practices and contribute to the growing body of research behind primary education.

We were given a completely blank canvas upon which to develop our curriculum. I believe that the lessons we learned from this experience could be useful for those who are reviewing their curriculum post-Covid. Here are the critical steps we took.

Stage 1: laying the foundations

Before the school opened, we spent many hours discussing what the aims, values and ambitions of the school should be. As the Cambridge Primary Review points out: “The first step in shaping a school’s curriculum is to determine the educational purposes for which it stands and the aims that it will pursue.”

There were two main influences that provided us with our foundations, here. The first was the Cambridge Primary Review. This review, directed by Professor Robin Alexander, was carried out between 2006 and 2010, and was the most comprehensive review of primary education undertaken since the Plowden report was published in 1967.

The review gathered submissions from a multitude of sources representing all those involved in, or concerned with, primary education, about the “purposes this phase of education should serve” and the “values which it should espouse”.

It found that, although effective learning in maths and English was, unsurprisingly, a recurring theme of the submissions, many also made reference to the need for primary education to address the needs of the “whole child”. Attributes such as joy, curiosity, interpersonal skills and enthusiasm were perceived as desirable foundations for the future.

The second influence was the extensive body of research that exists around pupil voice (Rudduck and Flutter, 2004). This has demonstrated the importance of making space for children to hear their own voices as they make sense of the world, and empowering them to make and express reasoned decisions.

Based on these influences, we decided to place a desire to nurture and develop compassionate citizens, who will make a positive contribution to their local and global worlds, at the very core of the UCPS curriculum. In addition to this, we set out to develop children’s abilities to express themselves, and to discuss and challenge diverse positions respectfully.

Stage 2: getting the culture right

Once we had determined what the overarching aims of our curriculum would be, we turned our attention to creating what we call the “enabling space” that would allow those aims to be “lived out”. This involved considering the arrangement of our physical school environment and what you might call the “invisible norms” of school (values, relationships, shared expectations), as well as our contexts for learning.

We have worked to develop spaces that are collaborative, foster agency and communality, and engender trust. For instance, our school was built around a large corridor, which we call “the learning street”. This is an extended shared space running between the classrooms, where large- and small-scale activities can take place. The space is designed so that children have opportunities to make autonomous choices about their learning and can engage in playful enquiry - conditions that appear to promote high levels of self-regulated learning (Meyer and Turner, 2002) - while applying the knowledge, skills and vocabulary that they have developed in the classroom.

Along with creating this “enabling space”, we developed three “golden threads” that we felt would bind the curriculum together. These are “habits of mind” (self-regulation), “oracy and dialogue” and “playful enquiry”.

Stage 3: logistics

At this point, we had a good idea of what we wanted to teach and why, and had the environment that would enable us to do so. But taking a curriculum plan from paper to practice can be challenging. You can have the best aims in the world but if you can’t get the logistics right, then your curriculum will fail.

At UCPS, we initially experimented with an immersive curriculum (where one subject is taught for one or two weeks at a time) and a model of traditional weekly slots for different subjects. We found both to be problematic.

Dividing the curriculum evenly into weekly lessons across all subjects was extremely difficult to timetable without inadvertently creating what we thought of as fragmented learning experiences. Equally, immersion subject learning left too long a gap between other subjects and so lacked coherence.

We therefore moved to using a flexible framework of selecting major and minor “spotlight” subject areas to focus on each week, as well as identifying which curriculum areas required daily scheduling, such as physical exercise, singing and mindfulness.

We used national curriculum outcomes as starting points to map progression in subjects vertically across the school, setting out a coherent journey for children as they progressed through the years.

The resulting curriculum overview document provides teachers with suggested ideas but also gives them the autonomy to use their own professional judgement to decide how to design the learning sequence in more detail. Teachers work within their planning teams to create week-by-week journey maps, using the document as a starting point.

This has had positive implications for teacher workload. By removing top-level planning, they don’t have to spend their time mapping coverage and are instead free to focus on the detail of sequencing the learning journey.

Stage 4: review

An essential cog in all curriculum design is to review what you have done and make iterative changes based on those reviews. We can always be better. All of the above is to be viewed through the context of our own decisions, but the steps and the process for transforming research into practice are applicable to every school.

The learning points that we took from our review process are also universal. They look like this:

Better support

We need a much more coherent set of curriculum support materials across our education system. There is little sense in teachers creating similar resources across the country or haphazardly searching a variety of untested resources on the internet. There is an opportunity here to look to systems in countries like Japan, where teachers, subject specialists and researchers are given opportunities to collaborate through lesson study to develop high-quality instructional materials that are accessible to all.

Don’t ignore pedagogy

When curriculum aims are considered meaningfully, curriculum and pedagogy cannot be thought about in isolation. The notion of pedagogical repertoires is important for understanding how different teaching approaches develop different aspects of learning. Rather than falsely setting instructional modes against each other, they are more helpfully conceptualised for teachers in terms of their potential strengths and limitations, pitfalls and conditions for success.

Embed values

Values can be developed alongside and through the development of knowledge, concepts and skills. For example, by building a topic about sustainable fashion into your geography and English curriculum provision, you can help children to develop empathy for those affected by a highly polluting global industry within the context of subject learning.

Promote autonomy

The most effective way to develop children’s autonomy and self-regulation is likely to be through a focus on nurturing these skills within the curriculum rather than thinking of these as separate aims. Practically speaking, it is unlikely that schools have time to schedule “learning how to learn” lessons, nor might these be effective if they are separated from the curriculum material that children need to reflect on.

Link curriculum design and CPD

It is a missed opportunity to separate curriculum and professional development. Teachers’ understanding of curriculum materials and progression - and the best ways to put this understanding into practice - can be developed through their involvement in curriculum development, where collaborative practitioner research can facilitate planning, observing and reflecting on the efficacy of instruction.

Consider your enabling space

The physical and symbolic space of the classroom must be considered in curriculum planning. Invisible classroom norms are a powerful prism through which the curriculum is experienced. If a curriculum aims to teach the heart as well as the mind, the importance of human interactions should not be underestimated. Children learn what to expect when they enter a school and a classroom, and this likely impacts on social and motivational aspects of learning alongside the quality of the pupil-to-pupil dialogue that takes place.

Physical and emotional health

It is easy for children’s physical and emotional health to become marginalised when our curriculum focus is purely academic. In countries such as China, physical exercise is strongly valued and culturally embedded. But habits are arguably much more variable in the West, as are norms around eating and nutrition. Our school has worked to give attention to these through daily class exercise, mindfulness and family-style dining routines. It is widely documented that physical and emotional health are key components of life satisfaction in adults. It would follow, then, that a curriculum should pay due attention and time to developing these in daily schooling.

Take a future view

Beyond the basics of core knowledge, what we choose to include in our curriculum should acknowledge the issues that will be important to children in later life. When we strive to provide a “knowledge-rich” curriculum, there is commonly an emphasis on powerful knowledge of the past, but we also need to connect learning to pressing global issues of the present and future.

Ultimately, our own enquiry into curriculum design has made it clear that there is a real need for more professional development in this area. As we attempt to recover from the effects of the pandemic, we need to be guided by more than just a syllabus. Designing a curriculum has to start with an interrogation of our purposes.

Yes, we need to consider what we want children to learn and how they might learn it, but we also need to consider what space they will do it in, what will characterise their relationships and what qualities and “ways of being” we want to encourage.

As we push forwards with our Covid recovery efforts, we need to be taking a long, hard look at our existing curricula and asking ourselves whether we need to do better.

James Biddulph is executive headteacher of the University of Cambridge Primary School

This article originally appeared in the 9 April 2021 issue under the headline “How to build a post-Covid curriculum”