I’m taking a break from my series of posts about specific topics because I was lucky enough to attend a workshop lead by Christine Counsell on Shaping the Primary Curriculum recently. It caused me to think more generally about the process of curriculum design, so I’ve written this two part blog to capture my thoughts on that. I have more ideas for topic-specific posts which I’ll return to writing soon.
When primary schools are mapping out their curriculum for history or geography, the process tends to work something like this: the National Curriculum bullet points are divided up, and each one is allocated to a year group and a term. So for example in KS2 history, teachers would allocate a term for changes from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, then another for the Roman Empire, and so on throughout the bullet points. In KS1 geography, there would be a block for identifying continents and oceans, another for the four countries and capital cities of the UK, another for a small area of a contrasting non-European country, and so on. Sound familiar? This is the way it has worked in every school I’ve worked in. But is it the best way of developing a challenging and coherent curriculum?
When the National Curriculum is cut up and shared out between year groups, one of the dangers is that some of the details specified in the programmes of study are lost. This is particularly relevant to the history curriculum, where each bullet point has non-statutory examples. It’s easy to fall into the trap of selecting one of the examples for each bullet point and thinking that we have everything covered. This is understandable considering the time pressures teachers are under, but it can lead to a lack of challenge in the curriculum.
If you teach children about the lives of Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong in KS1, have they compared aspects of life in different periods? Possibly. But I think it’s likely that when ‘Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong’ is allocated to Year 2 Autumn 1, the fact that their lives should be used to compare aspects of life in different periods may be lost, so although children may have learnt a lot about their achievements, they have missed the opportunity to identify similarities and differences which is key to their progression in history.
In KS2, if you teach a topic on Iron Age hill forts, have your children learnt about changes from the Stone Age to the Iron Age? If you teach a topic on the Roman invasion and resistance by Boudica, have your children learnt about the impact of the Roman Empire on Britain? If you teach a topic on the Ancient Egyptians, have your children also learnt about when and where the first ancient civilisations appeared around the world?
It’s worth checking that what is being taught in each of your topics achieves the purpose set out in the National Curriculum for that area of study. Are they aware of these details, or are they just teaching some facts about Christopher Columbus or Ancient Egypt? Where topics involve comparison or an overview of different civilisations or changes over time, is this being planned for and implemented?
Another potential problem, which is more relevant to the geography curriculum, is that every objective is taught through one 2 – 3 week block, or one lesson a week over a six week term, when that may not be the most effective way to ensure that children achieve some of those objectives. For example, if KS1 children learn about the continents and oceans of the world over one term, possibly learning some facts about each continent one at a time, but then move onto a different topic without revisiting this, how likely are they to be able to name the seven continents and five oceans, and locate them on a world map, by the end of the key stage? Will they continue to be able to do this in KS2? Is mentioning the names of the continents in later topics enough to make sure they can? Or would spending one lesson introducing the location of continents and oceans on maps and globes, followed by regularly spending ten minutes on whole class retrieval activities throughout the key stage and into Year 3, be a better way of ensuring that this knowledge is properly embedded? I explain which objectives I think would be better disaggregated like this in my KS1 and KS2 geography curriculum planning blogs.
One of the main reasons for the issues described above, is that in the rush to allocate topics, we skip over key parts of the National Curriculum documents and jump straight to the bullet points. Preceding these are the purpose of study and aims of the subject as a whole, and a summary of what the subject looks like at each key stage. These give us the big picture of what children must achieve by the end of the key stage, which all the objectives specified in the bullet points feed into. It’s vital that all teachers are aware of these, as they should be guiding the decisions they make about all the planning they do for that subject. If a school’s overview of history and geography looks something like this*:
| Term 1 | Term 2 | Term 3 | Term 4 | Term 5 | Term 6 | |
| Year 1 | Our local area | Toys | Weather | The first aeroplane flight | Maps and compass directions | Local history |
| Year 2 | The Great Fire of London | India | Florence Nightingale | The United Kingdom | Christopher Columbus | Continents and oceans |
| Year 3 | Our local area | Stone Age to Iron Age | The United Kingdom | Local history | Italy | The Romans |
| Year 4 | Rivers & the water cycle | The Anglo Saxons | Climate zones & biomes | The Vikings | The United Kingdom | Ancient Egypt |
| Year 5 | Types of settlement & land use | Ancient Greece | The United Kingdom | Local history | Mayans | The Amazon |
| Year 6 | Mountains, volcanoes & earthquakes | Crime & punishment | Natural resources | Energy | World War II |
Is it clear enough to the teachers how the individual topics they are allocated contribute to children achieving the aims described in these summaries? Or does this leave the quality of planning and level of coherence between the topics too much to chance? However well planned and delivered the units are, if each teacher simply plans six lessons on each topic heading for their year group from a grid like this, will children have achieved those aims? Even if we plan in links between topics, and revisiting of prior knowledge, I wonder if it is possible to achieve them by focusing on each unit for one fixed period of time. Or is planning in this way creating a barrier to curriculum coherence?
In Part 2 I’ll explain my thoughts on alternative ways to approach the process.
*This is an example created by me without reference to any specific schools. Any similarity to an existing overview is coincidental, and this isn’t intended to be a criticism of overviews that look like this, just some suggestions about how to supplement them in order to ensure the most thorough curriculum for the children.
MrsSTeaches on Curriculum 