ARTICLE: Deciding what is (and isn’t) the most important knowledge – climate education and the curriculum making process. (1/5)
On November 5th, the Department for Education published ‘Building a world-class curriculum for all’ the final report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review. This article is the first in a series of five reflecting on the report and how climate change and sustainability will be woven into the education of students in England over the next few years. Through the lens of the curriculum making process, these articles highlight key areas for climate change and sustainability education campaigners to focus on over the next 18-24 months.
Introduction to this series
This is the very first paragraph of ‘Building a world-class curriculum for all’:
The importance of our national curriculum cannot be overstated. It is an entitlement to the most important knowledge that we expect children and young people to learn, both for their benefit and for the benefit of the nation. (p. 5) - Professor Becky Francis, chair of the Curriculum and Assessment Review
There is a lot to unpack in this short paragraph alone – entitlement; the (relative) importance of the national curriculum; how it benefits (or otherwise impacts) young people; how it benefits (or otherwise impacts) the nation – but, in this series of articles I will focus on the national curriculum as ‘an entitlement to the most important knowledge that we expect children and young people to learn’.
I will pay specific attention what is (and isn’t) judged to be ‘most important’ and by who.
Article 1 (below) sets the scene.
Article 2 looks at how climate change and sustainability was addressed by the Curriculum and Assessment Review.
Article 3 explores how climate change and sustainability will be written into the national curriculum.
Article 4 examines curriculum making at the meso level, with a focus on Oak National Academy.
Article 5 looks at how equipped schools and teachers are as climate and sustainability curriculum makers.
Article 1: What is (and isn't) the most important knowledge?
Early on in Government, Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson MP, announced that under her leadership, every state funded school (including, therefore, all academy schools) will have to teach the national curriculum. At a pen stroke, this increased the importance of the national curriculum.
On the one hand, this decision ensures that all state educated children and young people will benefit from a broad and balanced national curriculum. Viewed through the lens of equity and inclusion, this appears to be a positive thing. It is a guard against school leaders who decide – sometimes unilaterally – that it is better to offer their learners a very narrow curriculum than a curriculum that exposes learners to many different subjects, disciplines, pedagogies, and ways of knowing.
On the other hand, however, what this decision means is that all young people will have imposed on them the ‘knowledge’ that the DfE deems to be the ‘most important’. In other words, they will HAVE to learn the things that are listed under each national curriculum subject that they are made to, or opt into, study - whether or not this does indeed benefit them and the nation.
This begs a key question, I found myself asking it over and over again as I made my way through the 197-page CAR report: Who decides what is (and isn’t) ‘most important’?
I’m going to explore this question through this series of five articles. I’ll be doing this through the lens of the curriculum making process and from the standpoint of a climate change and sustainability education campaigner.
So, who decides?
The answer is not straightforward, and the word ‘democratically’ might not come up in the answer as often as we might like it to. But it is important to examine this question regularly, and now is a vital moment to do this.
In this article and the ones that follow, I will reflect on the curriculum making process we’ve witnessed to date, and the curriculum making that lays ahead. I will reflect on what has been achieved over the last 18 months and what needs to be achieved over the next 18-24 months.
The articles, so far as possible, will be practical. I will highlight potential points of intervention and influence, and make suggestions on what we might do, as a movement, at those points. This is a conversation starter, my aim is to sketch a pathway that can be annotated and refined to create a coherent campaign roadmap.
To wrap up this first article, let’s return to the question – who decides what is ‘most important’?
In simple terms, here’s what I think has happened and will happen over the coming months and years at the four most relevant ‘sites of curriculum making’ (see the footnote below for a brief explanation of what I’m referring to when I talk about ‘upper macro’, ‘lower macro’, ‘meso’, ‘micro’, and ‘nano’ sites of curriculum making activity - I will be using these terms throughout this series of articles):
Through processes such as the CAR, the Government decide what is (and isn’t) most important for young people to learn. They communicate this in broad brush terms citing something like ‘the climate crisis’ as a topic that needs to be covered by the national curriculum.
Next, the DfE commission subject experts to write or rewrite the national curriculum, those experts are thus tasked with the responsibility of deciding which aspects of a topic, like ‘the climate crisis’, are of most importance. They insert these in the national curriculum with some specificity, but without definitive detail.
Once the national curriculum has been published and reaches the hands of the education profession, it is interpreted by exam boards, publishers, specialist NGOs, teacher training institutions, and a variety resource providers, all of whom examine the statements in the national curriculum and make decisions on the precise elements of the aspects of a topic (like ‘the climate crisis’) are most important. These decisions inform the resource sheets, textbooks, lesson plans, slide-decks, animations, etc, (and assessment tasks) that young people encounter.
Finally, at school and in the classroom, subject leads and teachers interpret the national curriculum itself and the manifold teaching and learning resources made available (or marketed) to them and adapt them to suit their own unique skills as educators and the needs of their learners. All the while they are making judgement calls on what is most important for them to cover to prepare their learners for the next stage of their education, for the exams and assessments that lay ahead of them, and for that little thing call life.
Over the next four articles, I will look at each of these steps in a bit more depth to identify both how decisions on what is ‘most important’ have so far been made (step 1 - article 2) and how they will continue to be made (steps 2, 3, and 4). In doing this I hope to reveal where our campaigning efforts – as a movement for climate change and sustainability education – need to focus next.
Read on…
Article 2 looks at how climate change and sustainability was addressed by the Curriculum and Assessment Review.
Article 3 explores how climate change and sustainability will be written into the national curriculum.
Article 4 examines curriculum making at the meso level, with a focus on Oak National Academy.
Article 5 looks at how equipped schools and teachers are as climate and sustainability curriculum makers.
Footnote - Sites of curriculum making activity
The four steps listed above are loosely based on the work of Preistley et. al. (2021) who gave names to the different ‘sites’ of curriculum making activity. These sites can often be identified when we analyse questions like who decides what the ‘most important knowledge’ is. Preistley et. al., are cited by Lizzie Rushton and Nicola Walshe in their 2025 [open access] paper on “Curriculum making and climate change and sustainability education: a case study of school teachers’ practices from England, UK” - worth reading in full.
I will use Preistley’s terminology in the articles that follow, to introduce you to them I’ll quote Rushton and Walshe at length here:
Priestley et al. (2021) have outlined a heuristic of sites of activity of curriculum making which enables us to identify different sites (in this framework, five sites) and activities. The nano site focuses on curriculum making in the classroom and other learning contexts undertaken by teachers and students. The micro site is concerned with school-level curriculum making including lesson planning, schemes of work and programme design undertaken by teacher, middle and senior leaders in school. The meso site encompasses activities including the production of guidance, support and leadership of curriculum making and the creation of resources and is frequently undertaken by national governments and curriculum agencies, publishers of textbooks and other resources and subject-focused bodies and organisations. At the macro site of activity, national governments and curriculum agencies develop and implement curriculum policy frameworks (e.g. The National Curriculum) and bring about legislation to establish infrastructure and curriculum focused agencies.
In articles 2 and 3 I will split the macro site into ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ segments to differentiate between processes such as the Curriculum and Assessment Review and the process of re-drafting the national curriculum. They are both in the macro site of curriculum making activity, but represent different stages of the process.
There is a further site, the ‘supra’, where bodies such as the UNESCO and OECD and play their part, but activity there is beyond the scope of these articles (I’ll no doubt blog on ‘PISA 2029 Climate Literacy’ at some point soon!)