A school curriculum is intended to provide children and young people with the knowledge and skills required to lead successful lives. Today, there is growing concern that the taught curriculum needs to be reconsidered and redesigned. The use of the word ‘innovation’ in discussions about the school curriculum and classroom teaching practice has become wide spread. It is the keyword in much policymaking across all public services.
What is a curriculum for at this time? It comprises a challenging selection of subjects that help children and young people understand the world. It highlights skills necessary for learning throughout life, as well as for work, and for one’s personal development and well-being. But a curriculum is also political. Decisions about ‘what’s in’ and ‘what’s out ’ change from time to time depending on political needs and aspirations. A curriculum fundamentally establishes a vision of the kind of society we want in the future, and the kind of people we want in it: it decides what the ‘good life’ is for individuals and for society as a whole. As such, it’s not always possible for everyone to agree on what a curriculum should be. It could be said that the most significant curriculum innovation in recent English history was the establishment of the National Curriculum in1988, a political decision that still sustains understandable debate and argument today
Everyone involved in education recognizes that it is critical to design and deliver a curriculum that inspires and challenges all learners and prepares them well for life in the 21st century.
The questions that helped shape the project were:
1. What are we trying to achieve through the curriculum?
2. How do we organize learning in order to achieve it?
3. How will we know that we have achieved our aim(s)?
4. How can this drive for curriculum change best be led for success?
Activity related to the project has demonstrated how the power to innovate engages leaders involved in curriculum development in revisiting their thinking about education and school purpose.
It has also required that they reframe their practice as leaders of learning. It has stimulated the creativity of school leaders, staff and pupils and promoted key, systemic shifts towards a curriculum that is more flexible, responsive and relevant to the needs and lives of learners.
Among the project’s key findings was a clear recognition that there is no one model for success, because context matters. Each participating school adopted an approach to leading curriculum innovation that was right for its particular situation.
Moreover, rather than tackling this task in isolation, participating schools were able to benefit from the thinking and practice of their network colleagues and so were able to articulate and shape their ideas in a way that, as one project participant put it, “enabled us to bring back practical solutions to our school in even better shape than when we took them out”
-by Olivia
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