ARTICLE: Decisions on ‘most important knowledge’ at the LOWER MACRO site of curriculum making. (3/5)
This is the third in a series of articles in response to the recently published final report of the DfE Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR). Article 1 provides context, including a key explainer of ‘the sites of curriculum making activity’. Article 2 looked at what happened at the upper macro site. This article looks at the lower macro site of curriculum making and how climate change and sustainability will be written into the national curriculum by DfE commissioned writers.
Article 3: Decisions on ‘most important knowledge’ at the lower macro site of curriculum making
Let’s take geography as an example to analyse what happens at the lower macro site of curriculum making activity.
The recommendation from p. 84 of the report that I cited towards the end of article 2, will be handed over to whichever body is awarded the contract, by the DfE, to write the geography section of the national curriculum. For ease, here is that recommendation again. The report recommends that Government:
Embeds climate change and sustainability more explicitly across different key stages, including across the physical geography, geographical applications and human geography sections of the curriculum, ensuring early, coherent, and more detailed engagement with climate education. This should be done without risking curriculum overload. (p. 84)
The DfE commissioned national curriculum writing body for geography, let’s call them ‘Geography Inc.,’ will interpret this recommendation, consult with civil servants, climate scientists, climate change and sustainability educators, teachers, parents, children, and Ministers, and then come up with a list of the ‘most important’ aspects about this ‘most important’ of topics. The challenge then, for Geography Inc., will be to embed these aspects into the national curriculum in a vertically and horizontally coherent way. Not easy, but possible.
The principle of specificity
One of the principles for the national curriculum that the CAR review sets out is ‘specificity’, so what gets written in the national curriculum will be less ‘high-level’ than the recommendation cited above. It will not, however, be heavily detailed. It will name a number of concepts, ideas, phenomena, processes and so on, that learners should know by the end of each key stage (vertical coherence) and in relation to what they are learning in other subject classes (horizontal coherence).
Climate change and sustainability is a huge topic, deciding which aspects of it to include in the national curriculum is therefore not an easy task. Again though, it is possible. Here’s an example of how it might happen.
Armed with the CAR review’s recommendations, Geography Inc. will cast around for ideas on what to include, i.e. what the most important aspects are. This search will likely lead them to many sources, but a relevant recent one is Royal Meteorological Society’s (RMetS) ‘Curriculum for Climate Literacy’. In that document Geography Inc. will find a long list of recommendations on which aspects of climate change and sustainability to include in the national curriculum, and details of where and when to include them.
RMetS recommend, for example, that learners should, amongst several other things, gain knowledge – via the key stage 4 geography curriculum – of the:
Social, cultural, religious, economic and political determinants of climate action in the local, national and global community.
Geography Inc. will read this statement and ask themselves whether knowledge of the ‘political determinants of climate action’ meets the criteria of ‘most important knowledge’; and whether it is possible to include this (not insignificant aspect of climate change) in the geography curriculum ‘without risking curriculum overload’ (p. 84).
If they do decide it should make the cut and be formally written into the national curriculum, they will copy and paste it into their draft 1 document and send it to DfE for review. It may get sent to other trusted stakeholders too*. The suggestion will be bounced back and forth a little until a final form of words is agreed. The DfE might, for example, agree to its inclusion if Geography Inc. accept a slight tweak, e.g.:
Social, cultural, religious, and economic and political determinants of climate action in the local, national and global community.
At the time of writing (November 2025), the lower macro site of curriculum making is beginning to open up. As campaigners for CCSE, the work right now is to build relationships with all the people and organisations who might win the curriculum writing contracts for the subjects of interest to us: geography, science, D&T, citizenship, but also other subjects, e.g. media studies, economics, art, English, history, where the different forms of climate change and sustainability education might emerge.
Once the contracts have been awarded – early 2026 – the task is to engage with ‘Geography Inc.’ and its equivalents across the different subjects. Seek meetings, arrange workshops, send proposals (e.g. the recent curriculum policy proposal by Global Action Plan, UCL CCCSE, NAEE UK and the Council for Subject Associations), charm your way into the relevant stakeholder groups to be part of the formal conversation. Critically, keep engagement levels high throughout the process, and be especially vigilant as the end game approaches.
All the while, it will be important too to pay attention to the next site, the meso site of curriculum making activity. The meso is critical, it is where the finalised national curriculum is transformed from subject-by-subject and key stage-by-key stage statements into the resources – lesson plans, slide-decks, fact sheets – that teachers download, adapt and then use in the classroom.
Read on…
Article 4 examines curriculum making at the meso level, with a focus on Oak National Academy.