According to education theorist ED Hirsch, there are some questions that all of us should know the answer to. For example: what is Valhalla? What’s linear momentum? Who said, “There’s special providence in the fall of the sparrow,” and what did they mean by it?

You might be struggling to come up with the answers to these questions yourself, never mind expecting your students to be able to. But they are among 5,000 facts included in Hirsch’s 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which sets out the case for a knowledge-rich curriculum. 

“Facts are what you need to read properly, and to learn more, and to communicate,” the professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia has said.  

And so, the knowledge-rich argument goes, we need to make sure school curricula ensure that pupils from all social backgrounds have access to this knowledge - not just those coming from middle-class families, where it’s more of a given. 

Hirsch’s influence on teachers and leaders at several academy trusts and on government ministers in recent years has - like it or not - helped to create a knowledge-rich curriculum movement that has already had a major impact on classroom practice in schools across England. That knowledge organiser? Very knowledge-rich curriculum. The new GCSE specifications? They’ve got knowledge-rich written all over them. 

Even if you don’t know the term, it’s still influencing a lot of what teachers in England do and it is central to the Ofsted inspection framework.  

But as the government in England looks to re-enforce the dominance of knowledge-rich curricula as part of its levelling up and post-pandemic agenda, it’s important to ask some questions. What do we really know about knowledge and its role in education? Is England leading the way in its adoption of knowledge as central to education with others looking to follow, or is it being looked at as a curiosity by the rest of the world? And, most crucially, how far does the idea of a “knowledge-rich” curriculum stand up to scrutiny?   

In terms of what a knowledge-rich curriculum means in the classroom, that’s pretty simple, according to Katharine Birbalsingh, co-founder and headteacher of the Michaela Community School, which is often held up by ministers as a poster school for the knowledge-rich approach.  

“If this was the 1950s, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she says. “Everybody would know you just teach the kids things they need to know.” 

That, she claims, has since been distorted.  

“Over decades, things have changed so it became more this idea of transferable skills, instead of knowledge, as being central to the focus of your classroom,” she argues.  

Birbalsingh, appointed by the government as chair of the Social Mobility Commission in October 2021, claims that critics of the knowledge-rich approach have set up a “straw man” argument around it: “People think you’re just memorising a whole bunch of facts when you say knowledge is central.”  

But, she explains, what happens in classes at Michaela is that students learn how to form an opinion in a class on Macbeth, for example, starting with knowledge about Macbeth, “and then you talk about the ideas and then you analyse the ideas,” she says. 

Knowledge-rich, then, is just good teaching.  

On the other side of the debate, however, Guy Claxton, emeritus professor of the learning sciences at the University of Winchester, believes that the knowledge-rich curriculum is “born out of a misunderstanding and an aversion to the whole idea of skills”.  

Traditionalists, he argues, believe that the teaching of skills involves discussing them explicitly. Therefore, they believe “there is some necessary zero-sum game going on between the teaching of skills and the teaching of ‘knowledge’,” in which giving more attention to the former means giving less to the latter.

A knowledge-rich curriculum as described here, then, is an ideological vehicle. 

The knowledge revolution

Regardless of the opposition, the concept has momentum (all kinds of it, not just linear). Proponents have explained that knowledge can be broken down into different categories - for example, procedural or conceptual - and the work of educationalists such as Michael Young has inspired multiple approaches to making a knowledge-rich curriculum a reality in schools.  

“I’m so enthused about the revolution that is going on,” says Birbalsingh, who sees it as a movement being led on the ground by individual schools and teachers, and organisations such as ResearchED. 

It is also being led by ministers, of course, their support catalysed by a 2015 UK lecture by Hirsch. This was hosted by the think tank Policy Exchange, which also published an accompanying collection of essays on Knowledge and the Curriculum featuring key figures such as former schools minister Nick Gibb and Birbalsingh. 

Jonathan Simons, former head of education at Policy Exchange and current partner and head of education practice at political consultants Public First, says the knowledge-rich curriculum has become “so important because it speaks to people across the political divide”.  

“Obviously, from the right’s perspective, it speaks to the importance of rigour, and of teachers being in charge, and of a coherent narrative of facts,” he says. Meanwhile, some on the left favour its support for giving “disadvantaged kids” the knowledge that will allow them “to break through barriers that hold them back”. 

So while there are detractors of the knowledge-rich approach in schools, the ideological appeal to many is clear. And the government in England is keen to not only cement a knowledge-rich approach into place in schools but to expand it as part of the push from ministers to level up the country and recover from the pandemic. If anyone thought knowledge-rich would fade slowly away, they were very wrong.

‘A knowledge-rich curriculum is so important because it speaks to people across the political divide’

But what research evidence is there that adopting a knowledge-rich curriculum is an effective way to improve outcomes? 

Hirsch’s ideas have been applied in the US by the Core Knowledge Foundation that he founded. Its curriculum is billed as being used in over 800 schools in the US and around the world. 

The biggest study to look at this approach, published in 2000, compared four US schools implementing a Core Knowledge method against a control group of four schools that did not, tracking them over three years. 

The study, led by Amanda Datnow, now professor in the department of education studies at the University of California, San Diego, found that, on basic skills tests, the Core Knowledge pupils’ results “did not reveal substantially better outcomes than those for students from comparison schools, except for the 3rd- through 5th-grade cohort” in schools that implemented the approach to a high degree.  

But they also reported that “implementing Core Knowledge rather consistently contributed to making instruction more interesting and content-rich for students and provided coherence to the curriculum”, and “redefined teaching in a positive way”. (Though surprisingly, they found that Core Knowledge teaching was “associated with more hands-on, activity-based instruction”, which sounds quite un-Hirsch.) 

However, the authors of the report conclude that even these outcomes might not be the result of the Core Knowledge approach “per se”, but might instead be attributed to the use of a well-planned “articulated curricular sequence” in the schools within the 3rd-5th grade cohort. The same results, they theorise, might be seen with a different type of curriculum, as long as “the content covered is broad, sequential and well-grounded in theory and research”.  
  
In the UK, meanwhile, the Educational Endowment Foundation funded a one-year pilot study of the Word and World Reading Programme, developed by Daisy Christodoulou, a former head of assessment at the Ark multi-academy trust and another leading advocate of the knowledge-rich curriculum. 

The programme aimed to develop the reading comprehension and literacy skills of children aged 7­ -9 from low-income families at 17 English primary schools, by improving their vocabulary and background knowledge “through the use of specially designed knowledge-rich reading material, vocabulary word lists…and resources such as atlases and globes”. 

The final 2015 evaluation report by academics from Durham University, which looked at results for 1,340 pupils, finds “the intervention has had no discernible impact” on Progress Test in English scores. Compared with a control group of pupils not given the intervention, the knowledge-rich group was actually “slightly ahead at the start and slightly behind at the end”. 

From these examples, the case for the knowledge-rich curriculum looks less than compelling. However, you could argue that such a large-scale and carefully considered implementation of the knowledge-rich approach as is currently happening in English schools has never before been tried, so the proof may yet emerge. Long-term data on knowledge-rich approaches are also scant, and separating curricula from other elements is tricky.  

For example, a knowledge-rich approach is implicit in many pedagogical approaches - and other interventions - that have been studied and sometimes found to be very effective, such as Siegfried Engelmann’s Direct Instruction approach. What role a knowledge-rich focus plays, though, we don’t know.  

But Birbalsingh offers a different view about how we should judge things: “I know everyone talks about research, but I’m always saying, ‘Look at the kids in front of you.’” 

At Michaela, she says, visitors “can’t believe how both knowledgeable and skilled our children are…their confidence, how articulate they are, how ambitious they are, and determined. All those characteristics come, in part, because they feel they really understand the world.” 

Others, such as John Yandell, associate professor at UCL Institute of Education (IOE) and subject leader for the English and English with drama PGCE, who has published research on pedagogy and knowledge in English, argue that we need to further interrogate the idea of “knowledge”, however.

“It’s not possible to have a curriculum that doesn’t engage with knowledge,” he says. “But there are questions about what knowledge is, how it comes into being, and whose knowledge it is.” 

And “to separate off the question of knowledge from the question of learning and from questions of pedagogy always seems to me to be problematic,” Yandell argues, when “in practice, those are so intimately intertwined in everyday reality in classrooms”. 

‘Boring, unengaging and relentless’

Then there are concerns about the volume of knowledge children are expected to take on. 

Alistair McConville, deputy head of the independent King Alfred School in London and co-founder of Rethinking Assessment, says that moves to make GCSEs and A levels more knowledge-rich - spearheaded by Michael Gove -  have had “a huge impact on the approach teachers have had to take to their classroom practice, because they have simply got more material to plough through”, leaving them with less time to facilitate in-depth discussion or experimentation.  

McConville fears this could have knock-on effects for children’s mental health, as education may become “boring and unengaging and relentless”, with teachers setting “masses of homework” to get through everything they need to cover. 

Supporters of the knowledge-rich approach would likely argue that if this is happening, then the fault lies with the teacher’s choices about planning and delivery, rather than the focus on knowledge itself.  

But there are other questions being levelled at knowledge-rich approaches, a key one being: what do we really mean by “knowledge”?  

On the pro-knowledge-rich curriculum side, knowledge has been broken down into different components, as mentioned earlier. Claxton agrees that the concept is not straightforward. In his book, The Future of Teaching and the Myths That Hold It Back, he sets out his own interpretation: six different kinds of knowledge, with categories such as “expertise” and “emotions and intuitions”. Then, there is understanding.  

“Understanding is what happens when you think about knowledge, when you grasp it, when you become able to paraphrase it, to use it in different contexts, to critique, to do all kinds of different things with it,” says Claxton. “Just stuffing people full of knowledge is not going to get people to that place.” 

Knowledge-rich advocates often seem to have in mind “a Hirschian notion of information: ED Hirsch’s long list of what everyone needs to know,” says Yandell. Absent from this, he argues, are Young’s ideas around the “centrality of concept”, of higher-level thinking beyond factual information.

Plus, Yandell continues, there’s the fact that “different disciplines have different conceptions of what knowledge is, how it comes into being and how it is used”. That means in art, music, drama or literature, for example, that “effect, emotions, [and] aesthetic” are all part of knowledge. 

When knowledge-rich advocates fail to grasp how knowledge looks different across different subjects, it has negative consequences in classrooms, says Yandell, citing a school he visited that was expecting English knowledge to be assessed “by asking [pupils] to organise a series of poets in order of their death dates”. That is “knowledge reduced to utterly trite gobbets of information”, he says.

Ofsted has recently been making moves to focus more on subject-specific curriculum teaching - performing “deep dives” into individual subjects during inspections and conducting subject-specific research reviews. Nevertheless, for Claxton, the driving force behind all of this is still politics. “I think the knowledge-rich curriculum is a political construct, not an educational construct,” he says. 

But if we were to abandon the current knowledge-rich focus, based on the concerns outlined by people such as Yandell, McConville and Claxton, what would the alternative be?

An international perspective

Looking to other nations, there are plenty of examples of how England could take a more skills-oriented approach. Australia’s curriculum, for example, encompasses seven “general capabilities’’: literacy; numeracy; information and communication technology capability; critical and creative thinking; personal and social capability; ethical understanding; and intercultural understanding. 

The New Zealand curriculum is based around five “key competencies”: thinking; relating to others; using language, symbols and texts; managing self; and participating and contributing. 

Meanwhile, the Singapore Ministry of Education sets key stage outcomes according to its “Desired Outcomes of Education”, under which children should be “confident persons who have a zest for life”, “self-directed learners”, “active contributors who are able to work effectively in teams [and] exercise initiative”, and “concerned citizens”. 

These are just a handful of the countries that are doing things differently; there are many more.

According to Claxton, the English attitude to the curriculum is “really antediluvian”, and he is not the only one who thinks so.

Sir Chris Husbands, former director of the IOE, now vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, was one of the authors of the 2015 Policy Exchange collection of essays, mentioned earlier. He points out that England is now “a long way out of kilter with international practice”, but that this is “obscured in England because of the - unusual by international standards - highly subject-based assessment regime at the end of schooling.”  

In other words, the Gove model of assessment makes the Hirsch model of curriculum a good fit. 

But for Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), that fit isn’t a good enough reason to not include a focus on skills. 

“The modern world no longer rewards you just for what you know - Google knows everything - but for what you can do with what you know; that’s the skills aspect,” he says. “The problem is that too many education systems, and I include England here, focus on teaching students to just reproduce what they know, rather than to extrapolate from what they know and to apply their knowledge creatively in novel situations.”

‘The modern world no longer rewards you just for what you know, but for what you can do with what you know’

This has led to there being “too much focus on surface content and too little on deep conceptual understanding”, Schleicher argues - for example, in science, focusing on scientific facts and figures rather than teaching students to think like a scientist. 

There is an argument that at the school level, oppositional views are largely absent and that the majority of teachers just get on with a hybrid approach.  

XP School, a free school in Doncaster, offers one possible model for this. Inspired by Expeditionary Learning Schools in the US, as well as High Tech High in San Diego, the school’s curriculum centres on cross-subject “learning expeditions” while also being standards-based - an approach that encompasses knowledge and skills, says Andy Sprakes, XP’s executive principal.  

For example, a recent Year 8 learning expedition on migration involved studying Of Mice and Men, the “human and environmental drivers for migration”, media coverage of migration, and hearing from a group of migrants in Doncaster who came into the school. The pupils made an “absolutely stunning” film about the lives of migrants, which was shown at a theatre in the town, says Sprakes. Other learning expeditions have led to pupils producing books on the legacies of mining and the railways in Doncaster. 

Much of what the school does is underpinned by the concept of “powerful knowledge”, as articulated by Michael Young. 

Powerful knowledge can be explained in two ways, says Mark Enser, head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College. “Firstly, by the manner of its creation, in academic institutions, different from everyday knowledge and open to being contested and changed,” he explains. “And secondly, by the capabilities that it gives the people who have it. Powerful knowledge lets you see the world through that discipline and join in discussions and debates over it.” 

While this sounds like an approach that all schools might aim for, in Enser’s view it is rarely that explicit. “I don’t think we have ever had a national conversation about the purpose of schooling, and of our subjects - as a result, most curricula pull in various directions and try to achieve too many poorly defined goals,” he says. 

At XP, however, the focus on powerful knowledge is both explicit and essential to outcomes, suggests Sprakes.

“We do teach knowledge - but that is powerful knowledge, because the kids acquire it to do something with it that changes the world for the better,” he says. “We’ve found that through doing that, the students acquire these high-quality skills they need to function in the world when they leave school. They can grapple with difficult concepts, they can relate to other human beings.” 

If this description of students who are well-equipped to make sense of the wider world sounds familiar, that’s probably because it bears resemblance to the way in which Birbalsingh depicts her students, too. 

This similarity raises another important question: to what extent is the discussion around knowledge not really about knowledge at all, but rather about teaching methods - the “trad” versus “prog” debate once more rearing its head? 

Yandell argues that the idea of the knowledge-rich curriculum brings a danger of neglecting pedagogy: “If it’s just a matter of transmission, why would you bother about how you do it?” 

But “how people learn is not a straightforward process” and pedagogy really matters, he says. It damages children’s learning if “they are presented with something that is merely a transmission pedagogy, a didactic pedagogy, which leaves no space for them to make sense of what they are doing”, to participate and question, or to bring their own knowledge into a discussion, he adds. 

Claxton agrees that a focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum often goes hand in hand with “didactic” teaching methods, forcing teachers to adopt these approaches. 

Birbalsingh, however, says that England is “leading the Western world” in this area, pointing out that there are teachers in New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the US “wishing they had a similar movement, a similar counter-movement against the progressive zeitgeist”.

The future of knowledge

Where, then, does all this leave us? Should teachers in UK schools be railing against knowledge-rich approaches? Or embracing them? 

For Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, it is ultimately a question of balance. “Great teaching,” she says, is “the most important lever schools have to improve pupil attainment,” particularly for “the most disadvantaged among them”. 

“Teaching approaches that help pupils’ long-term retention of knowledge are crucial,” Francis continues. “Alongside this, great teaching should also make sure pupils have the skills to develop as learners. This means not just giving them the background knowledge to write an essay on Macbeth, for example, but the writing strategies to ensure pupils can plan and structure it successfully, too.”

Schleicher, likewise, says that “the main point is not to see this as an either/or, but to teach and learn knowledge and skills in conjunction”. 

To an extent, there’s some agreement with Birbalsingh here, who says that via the essay, discussion with partners and class discussion on Macbeth at Michaela, “you will, in the end, be developing skills through that knowledge”.  

She agrees that a knowledge-skills dichotomy is wrong “because it’s through knowledge that you become skilled; that’s how you get skilled”. 

Being able to amass a lot of knowledge about a subject is an important skill, crucial to a wide variety of jobs. But perhaps it is just that: a skill, and just one of a range of important ones that teachers need to balance within their pedagogy.

“It’s about opportunity costs,” says McConville. “Are you going to spend a huge amount of your education just practising this one skill [amassing knowledge]?” Fulfilling careers often also involve “creativity, teamwork and presentation”, he observes.

Perhaps the strengths of schools like Michaela, so admired by ministers, come from things other than the knowledge being imparted: such as a strong sense of culture and direction in the curriculum, and in the school more generally.

‘Approaches that help pupils’ long-term retention of knowledge are crucial, but we should also make sure pupils have the skills to develop as learners’

Could the real issue, then, be a tendency, at a policy level, to see “knowledge” as the pot of gold at the end of the educational rainbow, when, in fact, the picture is far more nuanced? 

According to Christian Bokhove, associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies, this is where the whole knowledge-rich concept falls flat. 

“My take on it is that if there even is a benefit, then it is mainly in the fact there is a coherent curriculum offer, with teachers working towards that offer, and not the, in my opinion, rather arbitrary ‘knowledge’ label per se,” he explains, echoing Datnow and her colleagues’ conclusions in their report on Core Knowledge.  

There is, of course, a common tendency in education policy to think of education as a bigger force in the materiality of our lives than wider economic factors. Private school pupils might often have access to a knowledge-rich curriculum, but they also have access to a lot of other economic and social advantages. And, within the context of a push to “level up” the country, it is easy to see why ministers might look for a golden key that appears to unlock all doors and offer the hope of social mobility for all. 

But while knowledge might be the key at hand, it might not be the right fit for every lock. 

“In my experience, education does tend to replicate society,” says Husbands. “I do think that knowing things matters. When I was a proper teacher, I wrote things on blackboards and whiteboards and I expected students to write them down and learn them. But the notion that the curriculum will address inequality is for the birds.” 

Ultimately, the debate over the knowledge-rich curriculum raises big questions: about what knowledge is, how much of it we need, the purpose of education and its social role. And, unlike what we know or don’t know about the afterlife of Norse gods, the products of mass and velocity, or a Hamlet quote on fate - the answers are not straightforward facts that we can memorise.

John Morgan is a freelance journalist