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As upcoming and , schools are being invited to reconsider how their curriculum visions relate to profound and unprecedented societal change. Historically, curricular change has struggled to keep pace or translate visionary goals into practice. Educational discourse has tended to centre on effectiveness, yet effectiveness only becomes meaningful when grounded in clear aims and is inseparable from pedagogy and culture. As Alexander (2010, p. 496) noted in the Cambridge Primary Review, ‘Policy needs to ask not just what works but what it is we are trying to do, why, and in whose interest.’

The evolving landscape of human experience calls for an education that empowers children to flourish. Rich substantive and disciplinary forms of knowledge, embedded within a coherent school ethos and reflected in practice, provide powerful and generative ways of understanding the world (Young & Lambert, 2014). They gain distinct potency when brought into closer dialogue with children’s lives. Curriculum, as the enacted and experienced expression of educational purpose, holds the potential to play a transformative role in nurturing the practical wisdom through which young people learn to live well.

Misguided fixes

Over recent decades, well-intentioned reforms have sought to innovate the ways that curriculum is implemented, yet many have proved misguided in practice, leaving a gap between intended and realised outcomes:

• Pedagogical misfires. Minimal-guidance approaches, while valuing learner autonomy, often neglected established findings on working memory, sequencing and the role of teacher guidance (Surma et al., 2025). Conversely, ‘lethal mutations’ of cognitive science reduced knowledge to decontextualised facts, stripped of connection to their disciplinary foundations (Counsell, 2023).
• Mirages of promise. Cross-curricular models frequently diluted disciplinary rigour, replacing depth with superficial thematic links. Enrichment ‘add-ons’ such as sustainability weeks failed to embed learning within progression, while generic skills frameworks separated goals like creativity and critical thinking from the disciplinary foundations that give them meaning (Youn & Lambert, 2014).
• Fragmented journeys. , constraining progression. In many contexts, the arts, humanities, languages, PE and personal development have been squeezed for time and scope, limiting opportunities for sustained engagement (Alexander, 2010).

Misaligned priorities

Together, these missteps point to a deeper disconnect between curriculum purpose and practice. Addressing this requires both internal coherence – the alignment of content, sequencing and assessment – and purpose coherence, where aims connect directly to the curriculum’s scope and its enactment in practice.

Research highlights how key realities of young people’s lives often remain peripheral to their curricular experiences. Consider climate education: only , with key terms like ‘net zero’ being widely misunderstood. In digital life, , including unwanted contact. Such examples reveal a persistent misalignment between students’ lives and what is prioritised among competing demands.

Five threads for realignment

The following five domains – broadly in line with England’s findings – represent not new subjects but cross-cutting priorities that require coherent sequencing, progression and disciplinary anchoring.

• Health and wellbeing. How are physical literacy, self-care, nutrition, relationships and healthy living systematically built into the curriculum?
• Digital. Beyond technical skills, how are safety, discernment and constructive dialogic participation cultivated so that students can engage thoughtfully and responsibly in digital life and with emerging technologies?
• Sustainability. How are ecosystems, human–environment interactions and responsibilities for environmental change explored across subjects like geography, science, DT and citizenship, and within school practices?
• Economy. How are understandings of economic systems developed and connected to wider societal awareness – including trade, resources, inequality and personal financial understanding?
• Ethics. How is ethical and intercultural awareness fostered so that students can engage with diverse perspectives, reason effectively and make value-informed judgments amid complexity and uncertainty.

When coherence of learning in these areas is taken seriously, possibilities of new arise (see also Wegerif, 2025) – ones where nuance can emerge between voices, and where children have the opportunity to situate school learning within their lives.

Reimagining coherence

‘Addressing realignment does not mean falling into tired binaries of diluted rigour or prescribed ideology.’

Addressing realignment does not mean falling into tired binaries of diluted rigour or prescribed ideology. Disciplines remain essential orientations for understanding the world, but they must be embedded within wider approaches that cultivate practical wisdom. Rather than token gestures such as one-off e-safety lessons, true coherence will emerge through cycles of return, where understandings are revisited and reconnected, conceptually and relationally, into successively deeper forms of knowledge and action.

This is particularly evident in domains marginalised by narrow conceptions of rigour. Health and wellbeing, digital, sustainability, economy, and ethics each profoundly shape the quality of young people’s lives. Attending to these require curricula to move beyond coverage towards structures that bring knowledge, values and lived experience into purposeful encounter. In so doing, it opens opportunities for ‘response-ability’: to meet the world as subjects, engaging with its present while imagining what it might yet become (Biesta, 2021).

References

Alexander, R. (2010). Children, their world, their education: Final report of the Cambridge Primary Review. Routledge.

Biesta, G. (2021). World-centred education: A view for the present. Routledge.

Counsell, C. (2023). Laughing muppets, lost memories and lethal mutations: Rescuing assessment from ‘knowledge-rich gone wrong’. Teaching History, 193, 8–25.

Surma, T., Vanhees, C., Wils, M., Nijlunsing, J., Crato, N., Hattie, J., Muijs, D., Rata, E., William, D., & Kirschner, P. A. (2025). Developing curriculum for deep thinking: The knowledge revival. Springer.

Wegerif, R. (2025). Rethinking educational theory: Education as expanding dialogue. Edward Elgar.

Young, M., & Lambert, D. (2014). Knowledge and the future school: Curriculum and social justice. Bloomsbury.