Curriculum making: bringing an ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum to life

The Curriculum and Assessment Review published in late 2025 (DfE) sets out a bold and ambitious role for the English curriculum. As the report asserts:

“The refreshed curriculum must provide the knowledge and skills that will empower young people to thrive as citizens, in work and throughout life, in the light of the challenges and opportunities facing them today.” (p.47)

Realising this ambition in practice requires teachers to focus on what they are teaching, with an understanding of how our subject knowledge and skills can be empowering for young people. This means we need to think about knowledge less as a means to get through an exam, and more as a way to enable students to be productive, creative citizens of the modern world.

A curriculum is much more than a set of learning objectives or facts on a page. ‘Curriculum making’ describes the deliberate process that a teacher goes through to bring a curriculum to life. There are three main considerations, modelled by the overlapping circles in Figure 1: the subject, the student and the choices teachers make. 

 
Figure 1: Curriculum making – from Bustin (2024), p.73, based on Lambert and Morgan (2010)

The first consideration is the subject discipline itself. This includes the knowledge, skills and values that make up each school subject. The sort of knowledge that is inherent in this type of curriculum thinking is not an inert list of facts but is ‘powerful’ knowledge, a term from the work of Michael Young (e.g. 2008). This type of knowledge has derived from the disciplined thinking that comes from engagement with a school subject; it is the ‘best’ scholarly thought that has been developed within that particular discipline but is never a given as it can be replaced by better knowledge as more research is done. 

Powerful knowledge can include substantive knowledge – the claims of truth made by a subject; and procedural knowledge – knowing how to think with and through the subject, which often leads to distinctive subject-specific skills. Access to this sort of ambitious knowledge should be seen as a minimum curricular entitlement for all young people. Indeed, the Curriculum and Assessment Review contends that: 

“a curriculum centred on ‘powerful knowledge’ provides a shared frame of reference for children and young people from different backgrounds, enabling them to engage more effectively with issues affecting them and the world around them.” (p.45)

My own research with over 200 teachers across three schools, published in What are we Teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum (Bustin, 2024) identifies how powerful knowledge might be expressed in different subjects across the curriculum.

A second consideration of curriculum making is the lived experiences of the young people themselves. Teachers understand their pupils, their motivations and their prior knowledge, which can be drawn upon to develop engaging lessons. Students’ own life experiences can also be a meaningful starting point for engagement.

The third consideration of curriculum making is teacher choices. Subject-specialist teachers are best placed to decide on the most appropriate pedagogy. This could include introducing more active learning activities, direct instruction, deliberate practice or factual recall. What is clear is that a lesson cannot be an ‘off the shelf’ presentation sent out to all teachers to deliver uncritically. Instead, it should involve a careful selection of content, framed for that particular class at that particular time. A lesson first thing on a Monday morning might look different to the same lesson taught on Friday afternoon.

It is the centre point of the diagram above where the possibilities of curriculum making can be realised. Teachers make choices about what to teach, and how to teach it, and it is through engagement with the powerful knowledge of subjects that students can develop capabilities to see the world in new ways: to spot fake news, to understand nuance in complex debates, to think critically and become autonomous, free-thinking individuals. Subject-specialist teachers, given the autonomy to design their own lessons and decide on their own pedagogy, are key to realising this vision.

References:
Bustin, R. (2024). What are we Teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum. Carmarthen: Crown House.
Department for Education (2025). Curriculum and Assessment review. Available: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report. Accessed December 2025.
Lambert, D. and Morgan, J. (2010). Teaching Geography 11-18: a conceptual approach. Maidenhead: Open University.
Young, M. (2008). Bringing knowledge back in: from social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. Abingdon: Routledge.

About the author

Dr Richard Bustin is Director of Pedagogy, Innovation and Staff Development and Head of Geography at Lancing College, UK. He is the author of What are we teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum – available now from Crown House.

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