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…

Interpreting and enacting curriculum in any school is a complex undertaking, even more so in special school contexts where teachers must develop and enact appropriate curriculum modifications and accommodations for small groups of students and individual students. In special education contexts, educational modifications are changes teachers make…

Internationally, there is a clear turn towards inquiry as a core approach to learning secondary school geography. This research critically compares how inquiry learning is expressed and justified in six jurisdictions (Australia, China, England, Hong Kong, Singapore, USA). Through content analysis of national curriculum documents, we found that…

Recent 'decolonising the curriculum' movements have called for Higher Education to rethink how it engages with diversity and colonialism in its lectures and syllabi. But what can these ideas mean for science subjects in secondary schools? Grounded on a decolonial perspective around the Science and Technology Studies (STS) field, this paper…

It has been suggested that curriculum coherence is crucial in successful educational reform. However, empirical research on the topic is still scarce. This study explores how the stakeholders involved in curriculum development at the district level perceived curriculum coherence. Survey data (n = 550) were analysed using structural equation…

This article discusses the challenges faced teaching the promotion of 'British values', especially for trainee teachers. The advancement of these 'British values' as set out by the Department for Education is confusing, contradictory, and appear to exclude a sizeable minority of pupils of minority backgrounds from the current historical narrative…

This article offers a contribution to the current debate about knowledge and the curriculum, especially initiated by social realist writers. The enacted Swedish subject-based curriculum for compulsory schooling is examined and is also used as a significant case with the aim of discussing practical implications of social realist claims regarding…

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about…

In this paper, I offer a critical reflection on the thesis of the general educational value of foreign languages developed by Russian linguist Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba. I do so against the background of current debates on the positioning of foreign languages in the school curriculum in the United Kingdom (UK). I argue that Shcherba's thesis,…

This paper critically examines the framing of historical knowledge in the primary and "broad general education" phases (ages 4-14) of Scotland's "Curriculum for Excellence". The paper focuses on curriculum documentation, particularly the curriculum's aims and "Experiences and Outcomes" and evaluates these in light of…

In the past 20 years, creativity has increasingly been recognised as an important aspect of young people's education around the world. The global interest in creativity is fuelled by various economic and social considerations. One concern of the approach to creativity in education is the curriculum. The research reported in this paper aimed at…

Recent public discussions of curriculum and pedagogy that have accompanied the English National Curriculum review have been structured around clichéd dichotomies that generate more heat than light and that, as Robin Alexander has argued, reduce complex educational debates to oppositional and incompatible slogans. This paper begins by exploring the…

The New Zealand education system is recognised internationally for its overall high quality. At the same time, there is a persistent gap in achievement between students in low socio-economic status (SES) schools in which there is an over-representation of Maori and Pasifika students, and students in more affluent communities. In this paper, we…

In the current government's "Great Books" approach to the National Curriculum for English lies an apparent desire for all school students to benefit from access to a shared "cultural heritage", where compulsory knowledge of Shakespeare and other canonical writers is in itself assumed to be a transformative and democratising…

This article focuses on the learning affordances of different language and communication curricula in the world. For reasons of space, only two national education systems (Finland and Singapore) and their language and communication curricula are referred to. The accounts of national education systems consist of the identification of mechanisms…