Despite the divisions within Northern Ireland's education system along religious and academic lines, it has managed to maintain relative stability, or at least a functional inertia, over the past four decades. The full potential, however, of this system and in particular, the Northern Ireland Curriculum (NIC), has yet to be realised. This paper…

Nearly forty years ago, Stenhouse argued that the function of the curriculum was to stimulate teachers' everyday reflection about and learning from practice. This suggestion, alongside his support for teachers as researchers, aligns with the Welsh Government's commitment to build an evidence-informed profession as part of ongoing major education…

Although teacher agency is increasingly recognised by educationists in the Global South, it is not always well understood or accommodated in policy, as experienced with Universal Primary Education (UPE) reforms in Uganda. This empirical study analyses its role on the UPE reforms, the factors that shape it and its implications for curriculum…

This paper provides a detailed account of the Queensland education system's engagement with reforming curriculum, pedagogies and assessment. In so doing, it responds to the University College London's Institute of Education report on "high-performing" jurisdictions, of which Queensland, Australia, was identified as one. In this report,…

The curriculum is the totality of experiences which are planned for young learners through their education, wherever they are being educated. It determines the ethos of the school as a learning community, curriculum subjects and areas, interdisciplinary learning, and opportunities to attain personal and learning goals. An effective curriculum,…

Recently, curriculum developments in Australia have seen the incorporation of functionalist "general capabilities" as essential markers of schooling, meaning that any pedagogical expression of classroom-based practice, including subsequent instruction, should entail the identification and development of operational general capabilities.…

The study aims to gain a better understanding of the national large-scale curriculum process in terms of the used implementation strategies, the function of the reform, and the curriculum coherence perceived by the stakeholders accountable in constructing the national core curriculum in Finland. A large body of school reform literature has shown…

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…

The poor success rate of policy for curriculum change has been widely noted in the educational change literature. Part of the problem lies in the complexity of schools, as policy-makers have proven unable to micro-manage the multifarious range of factors that impact upon the implementation of policy. This article draws upon empirical data from a…

This article reports findings from a small-scale project investigating the introduction of the Curriculum 2000 reforms at post-16 in four state comprehensive schools in England. These reforms aimed to broaden the curriculum at post-16, to provide parity of esteem for academic and vocational qualifications, to promote participation and lifelong…