The following is an update that details the development of the Cabot Learning Federation’s Key Stage 3 Curriculum 3.0; it is the third iteration of the curriculum that has been in place for the last two years. It is the result of the work and insight of curriculum curators from across the Trust who have been charged with the deep responsibility of curating the curriculum for our children. A curriculum that allow children to dance across disciplines…

Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines… modern life requires range, making connections across far-flung domains and ideas. ( Range, David Epstein, 2019)

We choose to curate our own CLF curriculum across the Trust not because it is easy, but because it is hard… and because it is a challenge that we are willing accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win (for our children).

We take on this challenge fully aware of the weighty ethical responsibility that it brings; knowing that what we choose to teach confers or denies power… there is nothing more important than what we choose to pass on to the next generation.

We choose to empower experts across the Trust to own and curate our Curriculum. A shared curriculum that builds a platform on which experts can perform (teach and inspire). The shared curriculum frees professionals to follow the learning to meet the needs of all children. On the platform of the curriculum we believe colleagues should be empowered to “red dance“… to realise the promise of the curriculum and its loftier goals

We choose to empower curators in an ever-onward curation to provide the best possible curriculum for our children.

The curators are charged to fulfill the ambition of the Curriculum.To deliver the promise of the curriculum and its loftier goals.

The ultimate aim  of the Curriculum is to ensure all children have self-agency so that become active participants in their own lives, because each child has a strong sense of self and an understanding of their place in the world. This is the result of children seeking meaning and making connections as they build understanding from a foundation of knowledge and skills (expertise). Where knowledge and skills are the foundation and servant of the loftier goals of the curriculum.

The aims can be represented in a hierarchy that move from knowing some stuff, to disciplinary thinking to being able to transfer and connect to wider subjects areas and ideas, interdisciplinary knowledge…

or linked to cognitive science…

And that the nature of cognitive challenge varies. From low cognitive challenge for new knowledge and skills to high cognitive challenge for the loftier ambition of the curriculum that requires a level of assimilation into present schema. To build our sense of self and place we need to alter what we already believe to be true. Whilst it is far harder to secure these curricular goals they are necessarily built on a strong foundation of understanding made possible by a deep foundation of knowledge and skills.

The loftier goals of the CLF Curriculum are to support our young people to develop a sense of self; so that teaching and the wider curriculum support the positive development of behaviours, perceptions, dispositions and character traits that create a sense of self.

Understanding who we are can only be in relation to the world in which we live. Closely allied to the supporting children to have a sense of self is to secure a sense of place in the world. Not that this is directly taught, of course, because as with a sense of self every child is unique and at the centre of many networks of social relations, and nobody else occupies that particular position…

These loftier goals of the curriculum have the ultimate aim of giving all children self-agency both now and into adulthood. Self-agency: the ability to take decisions that give us control over our lives… so that we know what to do when we do not know what to do.

It is the loftier goals of the curriculum that live on into adulthood, far more than the specific knowledge or skills that we acquire in the detail of the curriculum that fall away. Perhaps in the same way that far after the knowledge of the rose garden have gone, the underlying meaning and pattern of that learning that changed our view of self and place remains deeply in the soil, waiting for a time to be useful (or appear in a dry spell)…

The CLF KS3 Curriculum is part of the CLF 3-19 curriculum…

Against aims of the curriculum and within the above spiral there are a set of guiding principles for the CLF KS3 Curriculum:

The aim of the curriculum is to secure self-agency for all children now and into adulthood, through a developed sense of self and place that is built on seeking meaning based on understanding secured on a strong foundation of knowledge and skills (expertise). The curriculum is based on age related expectations that are progressive and built across the 3-19 curriculum. It focuses on securing the disciplinary knowledge required to support children to be mathematicians, authors, historians, artists… It is built by Curriculum Curators and the entitlement for all children is protected by Curriculum Guardians across the Trust.

It purposefully builds up from Primary to support breadth and depth of curriculum that seeks broader curricular than that stifled by drawing GCSE of flightpaths down from KS4.

In addition the following are key principles:

The curriculum is intended to be taught to depth, stretching, demanding and expecting opinions from children. Based on a shard curriculum teachers evaluate and reflect on the learnt curriculum to follow the learning and meet needs. There are vertical strands in the 3-19 curriculum of oracy, writing, reasoning and reading. Assessment is principally through DOYA, with knowledge acquisition assessed through MCQs.

Whilst the shared curriculum is important … what really matters is how it is enacted (taught) … and then what matters is what is learnt …. and then what is long-term learnt…

The curriculum is divided into four cycles of teaching, assessment and re-teaching … repeat:

Each subject in the KS3 Curriculum is defined by a set of Age Related Expectations; starting with KS2 prior learning, knowledge and skills, Understanding and Application and then Meaning … the loftier goals cannot be directly taught.

For each cycle there are medium term plans; sets direction without stifling teachers to follow the learning to meet needs; to red dance on the platform of the shared curriculum…

All of this demands a deep focus on pedagogy and the quality of teaching. The loftier goals of the curriculum in particular are likely to require something like this:

• Make explicit how the whole curriculum links and connects together; giving opportunity to explore direct and indirect connections between schema to piece together how they fit in the world.
• Bounce up through the future curriculum to spark awe and wonder and set-up future learning, a sense of progression and to see the bigger picture early.
• Build in space in the curriculum to support children to seek meaning and develop their sense of self and place in the world. 10% eureka time where the only output is speculation.
• Explore the sense of self agency: the notion that social, political and other change can be triggered by individuals and groups. Developing skills and competences that build self-agency and the ability to trigger and sustain change.

“Empowering students to create social change and solve problems that will improve living conditions and increase well-being.” (Nathan, 2017 in Fullan, 2019)

• Promote the he role of teacher: we learn by paying attention to others; it is staggering how much information is socially transmitted. What if it is significant others in our lives that actually make the difference; shaping who we are and who we become?
• Understand the key importance of disciplinary knowledge (how to think like a… (historian for example) for deepening understanding, exploring meaning and enabling children to understand how to think and to conceptualise the world.
• Contextualise learning in the present and future challenges that children face. We only attend to things that we belie/e or are made to believe are important; to these things that are directly relevant to us – make it important.

Dr Dan Nicholls | Cabot Learning Federation | July 2019