This paper makes a theoretical contribution to the discussion of powerful knowledge in education. The major claim is that curriculum integration can structure knowledge for a coherent curriculum and thus, support the idea of powerful knowledge. The mainstream understanding of curriculum integration promotes it as a pedagogical arrangement and…

In Europe, with the dissemination of curriculum autonomy policies, teachers tend to be more involved in curriculum reforms as curriculum designers. In Portugal, in 2016, the government unprecedently commissioned eighteen teachers' associations to define a curriculum benchmark -- 'Essential Learning'. Studies have shown the difficulties felt by…

There are increasingly frequent calls for school mathematics curricula to be informed by robust research evidence. One approach to achieving this is designing evidence-informed learning and teaching resources for the classroom. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of designing a free and fully resourced complete set of secondary…

The COVID-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear how far our school systems are from being crisis-ready. The lockdowns seen across many parts of the world left schools and teachers scrambling to provide parents with whatever teaching materials they could find to enable some semblance of distance learning to take place. Despite heroic efforts, the…

Curriculum reforms often fail because teachers are asked to implement approaches to teaching and learning that are contrary to their beliefs about students and how to teach them. Since curriculum reforms are attempts to resolve particular educational problems, failures in implementation produce parallel failures to resolve the problem for which…

This article considers the extent to which the English National Curriculum for science has influenced practice and learning outcomes, and briefly reviews the mechanisms through which this influence is exerted. It identifies and discusses three central issues for the review that is now in progress: the structure of the science curriculum; the…

This article gives details of the Portsmouth Learning Community Assessment for Learning (AfL) project from 2002 to 2007. A context of research is given and a reframing of formative assessment suggested. Qualitative, positive effects are indicated resulting from teachers' collaborative action research and learners' involvement in classroom…

One of the objectives of Curriculum 2000 is to increase the breadth of the curriculum followed by 16-19 year olds. In this paper A level and AS uptake for the years 2001 and 2002 are considered. There was considerable diversity in the uptake of A levels, with nearly 21,000 different combinations of A levels being present in 2002 A level results.…

Initial teacher education programmes, in order to comply with the requirements for teacher registration, are usually expected to introduce student teachers to the mandated curriculum. Often this is done uncritically, so students tend to accept rather than examine the underlying epistemological model which partitions knowledge into distinct…