Three Year Key Stage 3 Curriculum

All the Future Curriculum options consists of detailed content guidelines for Years 7, 8 and 9 in the following subjects: English, History, Geography, Drama, Art and Music.

Other curricula sometimes specify similar-sounding concepts to ours. Where our curriculum differs from these is that The Future Curriculum shows you how to achieve the conceptual aims, by detailing specific content which will deliver understanding.  In English, to extend the example, the National Curriculum sets out that pupils should ‘use grammar accurately in a variety of sentence types’. The Pimlico curriculum specifies the main sentence types that should be taught in each year (in Year 7, simple, compound and complex), the prior grammatical knowledge necessary before they can be understood (the parts of speech, subject-verb agreement and the independent and dependent clause) and common sentence mistakes that pupils will need to correct (fragments, run-on sentences and comma splices).  Other curricula offer the destination, but they give you a globe to try and get there with, when an A-to-Z and a car is what you really need. With other curricula, of course, some gifted teachers and talented pupils will achieve. With The Future Curriculum, all teachers become capable of getting the best possible outcomes for all of their pupils.

The alternative to specifying content in detail, as we have done, is to specify just the outcomes you want pupils to achieve. Many other curricula take this approach, and the problem with it is that teachers and schools take the outcome listed in the curriculum – it might be, ‘thinking scientifically’ in the science curriculum, or ‘evaluating evidence’ in the history curriculum – and try to teach this outcome in the abstract. This is an ineffective approach, because these skills cannot be taught without some content to give them meaning and application. At its worst, this approach simply misses out fundamental content. For example, in History, leading with outcomes means that pupils are often asked to compare the changing attitudes to a particular era before they have a solid understanding of that era.

This great advantage of The Future Curriculum: it listens to what modern scientific research has to tell us about how the brain learns. The scientific consensus is that intelligence is far more knowledge-bound than we ever thought. Although educationalists like to talk of transferable skills such as problem-solving and creative thinking, in actual fact there is very little evidence that it is possible to teach such skills in the abstract. It is possible to be a good problem-solver in the domain of mathematics and a very poor one in the domain of literary analysis. Skills are domain-specific: that is, the content of the problem you are solving will have a big impact on your ability to solve it.