Young, Michael. "Knowledge, Curriculum and the Future School.

" Knowledge and the Future

School: Curriculum and Social Justice. By Michael Young, David Lambert, Carolyn Roberts and
Martin Roberts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 9–40. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 14
Feb. 2019. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472593405.ch-001>.

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Copyright © Michael Young, David Lambert, Carolyn Roberts and Martin Roberts 2014. All rights
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the publishers.
 1
Knowledge, curriculum
and the future school
Michael Young

This book focuses on the curriculum; however, as we hope is

already clear, it is not a curriculum handbook. It aims to offer a way
of thinking about the curriculum. In this chapter, we use the term
‘curriculum’ as a kind of short hand for defining the purpose of a
school (or, in relation to the National Curriculum, the aims of the
school system of a country), whether from the perspective of a head,
a subject leader, a teacher, a parent or pupil, or a minister. In focusing
on the curriculum and not on the more immediate questions of
inspections, staffing finance, league tables or pupil behaviour, we
do not dismiss such issues but emphasize ends rather than means.
In other words, we ask how such managerial issues might be
best understood from the point of view of a school’s curriculum
purposes. We try to ask questions that point to alternative solutions
and we hope that they offer you a more strategic basis for dealing
with the immediate problems with which you are faced.
We do not set out to be primarily critics of government policies
or to endorse them; the educational and national press is full enough
10 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

of both. In a sense we want to stand back a bit from the warring

factions that dominate today’s educational debates. The issues in
these debates are deeply felt on both sides; however they do not do
the profession, or the government much good, especially in the eyes
of parents. In contrast we go back to first principles and a view about
what we see as the main purpose of schools. Our experiences suggest
that these purposes, although rarely articulated, are more widely
shared by teachers and parents than is often assumed. The main
purpose of schools can, we argue, be summarized as follows:

It is to enable all students to acquire knowledge that takes them

beyond their experience. It is knowledge which many will not have
access to at home, among their friends, or in the communities in
which they live. As such, access to this knowledge is the ‘right’ of
all pupils as future citizens.

Such a definition needs more elaboration that relates to our view of

knowledge than there is space for here. The importance of subjects
is crucial and is discussed in some detail in Chapters 4 and 7.
Being clear about the purposes of schools will, we believe, help
heads and their staff to think beyond the immediate issues that the
new policies and even the perennial problems present them with.
Schools, especially secondary schools with their range of subject
specialists, have more autonomy than often they are themselves
aware of. The professional experience of teachers tells them what
it is that schools can do and what they cannot. Political pressures
from governments of all political parties often expect schools to
solve problems that have their origins elsewhere and which schools
alone can never solve – especially through the curriculum. Typical
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 11

examples are teenage pregnancy, obesity, youth unemployment or

an assumed lack of civic responsibility among teenage boys and
girls. Developing specific curriculum responses to such problems
is, we are sure, a mistake. This is not to play down their importance,
but to suggest that they are more likely to be solved from a clear
understanding of their causes, rather than by assuming that they
are problems that can be dealt with ‘educationally’. For example;
youth unemployment is largely caused by a lack of demand for youth
labour; more employment-related curricula will not change such a
lack of demand. This is not, of course to say that the kind of approach
to the curriculum that we advocate will not, by strengthening the
intellectual resources of young people by the time they leave school,
play a role in enhancing their employment prospects and better
prepare them for the responsibilities they will face as adults.
The more heads and teachers are clear about the main purpose of
schools, the less vulnerable they will feel when faced with attempts to
use the curriculum as a solution to problems that schools will never
themselves be able to solve.

The question of knowledge

Our view of the primary purpose of schools takes us directly to the

question of knowledge – as the entitlement of all pupils – and to the
question, ‘OK, but what knowledge?’ That is why Carolyn Roberts
(Chapter 6) and David Lambert (Chapter 7) refer to the idea of the
‘knowledge-led school’. It is also why any strategy for promoting
social justice and greater educational equality has to begin with the
question of ‘knowledge’.
12 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

Paradoxically, knowledge is an uncomfortable word for many

in education today. It is sometimes seen as the special concern of
philosophers and best avoided by the rest of us, or it is associated with
a top-down Gradgrind version of teaching that becomes little more
than the mechanical ‘transmission of facts’ from teacher to pupils.
For some teachers, knowledge has elitist and exclusive connotations;
it is negatively associated with elite fee-paying schools and is assumed
to involve imposing something on many pupils against their will
and without any respect for the knowledge and experience that they
bring to school. The Brazilian Adult Educator Paulo Freire expressed
this view most evocatively as a ‘banking model’ of education, or as
he put it ‘depositing’ knowledge in the ‘empty heads’ of learners.
Although Freire was writing about the education of poor adults in
rural communities in Chile and not about schools, his ‘banking’
model captured the imagination of many idealistic teachers from the
1970s, especially those working with inadequate resources in schools
located in disadvantaged communities. It seemed to describe what
they found themselves doing and not what they had hoped to do in
deciding to become teachers. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the title of
his justly famous book, not only sold more than a million copies
but also inspired many, in schools as well as in adult education. It
offered the hope, however lacking in detail, that somehow a different
kind of education was possible that involved a genuine dialogue with
pupils and would really serve their interests, however disadvantaged
their circumstances. I was a young lecturer when Freire’s book was
first published in the 1970s, and it certainly inspired me and many
involved in teacher education at the time. We wanted our student
teachers to be able to do something different immediately and
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 13

thought Freire was telling us what it was. It was no fault of his that
his idea of ‘conscientization’ led to a one-sided emphasis on ‘practice’
and experience; the result, of course, was that the link between
knowledge and practice got lost. It is the idea that access to knowledge
beyond our experience is the only true source of freedom and as such
is the ‘entitlement of all’ that underlies this book. For some this idea
will be as difficult and even as alien as it was once for me. The title of
my first book was Knowledge and Control (1971) and it criticized the
curriculum in terms similar to how Freire’s ideas were interpreted.
It took me a long time to recognize that freedom from the existing
curriculum without access to knowledge leads nowhere.
The school, for all its tendencies to reproduce the inequalities of
an unequal society, is the only institution we have that can, at least in
principle, provide every student with access to knowledge. The only
alternative to schools for all is to accept that the majority will never
have the educational opportunities that the minority has always
treated as their right. We must respect and value the experience of
pupils, but we can never allow them to depend on their experience
alone. To do so would leave them (and us) in the position of our Stone
Age ancestors, or worse; we would be no different from animals, who
have only their experience.
For those readers who disagree with this argument about the
importance of knowledge, I can only ask you to trust us and read on
and make your own judgements when you come to the end.
We do not deny the persuasiveness of the ideas of those who see
knowledge as a form of domination, nor do we dismiss the integrity
of many of those adopting such ideas; they are an understandable
response to the disaffection of many pupils and the endless imposition
14 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

of new policies from governments of all parties. On the other hand,

we think that such a negative view of knowledge is deeply mistaken
and lies at the heart of the sense of disillusionment shared by many
who work in education today. Real educational change will always
be slow because the learning involved in acquiring real knowledge
takes time and can challenge the deepest identity of learners. Freeing
pupils from the limitations of their experience, which is what schools
at their best can do, is always potentially ‘alienating’;1 however
just to leave students with their experience as something almost
untouchable will only perpetuate current inequalities. You can be
absolutely certain that the rich and powerful will always make sure
that their children are not left with just their experience – you only
have to look at the curriculum of a typical Public School – it never
focuses on their pupils’ experience!
Knowledge is not only uncomfortable for many teachers, but it is
also a tricky word in the English language; it has so many meanings.
For example, we refer to our local ‘knowledge’ when we list the names
of the streets we live but we also refer to our ‘knowledge’ (or lack
of knowledge!) about quantum theory. In this book we start with
view that as educators, we must differentiate types of knowledge: in
particular between the knowledge that pupils bring to school and
the knowledge that the curriculum gives them access to. This view
does not involve any esoteric philosophical distinctions, nor will
it be wholly unfamiliar to readers of this book. Despite this it is
all too often dismissed by educationalists. It is a distinction that is
related to the experience familiar to many who, like I did, opted for

1
It separates a person from their prior and often deeply embedded sense of themselves.
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 15

teaching as a career with the expectation that they would be able to

inspire the next generation to be scientists, historians, geographers
or poets – in my case it was chemists! This is a view of knowledge as
worthwhile in itself because it is in some sense the truest knowledge
we have about the world and therefore must be transmitted to the
next generation.
The approach to knowledge we take in this book is different from
this view in two respects. First, those graduates who became (and
many who still do become) teachers, like I did, took the knowledge
they had acquired at university for granted, as largely given, and
relatively static. They had what in Chapter 2 we will refer to as
Future 1 view of knowledge. To put it another way, a Future 1 view
assumes that though the future will be different from the past, it
will always be an extension of the present. Secondly, whatever their
politics, few of those teachers envisaged how the knowledge they
wanted to ‘pass on’ could or even should be an entitlement ‘for all’;
they accepted that it was knowledge ‘for some’. In this they were
following a distinguished tradition of ‘liberal education’ associated
with such writers as Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman in the
nineteenth century and leading later in the twentieth century to I.
A. Richards, F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot among others.
So what is the idea of knowledge that we want to share with you in
this book, and why is acquiring it seen as so problematic and divisive
that teachers often avoid the question of knowledge altogether? The
most important starting point for us is to recognize that all knowledge
is inescapably a human product that is developed by people in every
period of history and in every society to make sense of the world
they experience. At the same time, knowledge is progressive; in very
16 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

different ways in different fields from the sciences to the humanities,

it changes and develops. Our knowledge is different from, and
in some senses and in some fields, better than the knowledge of
previous generations. Secondly, as a human product, knowledge
is, in principle, accessible to all human beings, even if we construct
ideas and concepts such as ‘measurable intelligence’ that makes this
seem all but impossible for the majority. Children have very different
experiences after they are born which shape their development, but
we have no reason or evidence that leads us to believe that, except for
a tiny minority with the most acute learning difficulties, they can be
differentiated at birth in their capacities to acquire the foundations
of knowledge. This differentiation of capacities begins in the early
years; but as we know from the research, much is a product of
differing circumstances. A third feature of our view of knowledge is
that in the past two centuries, the ways that new knowledge has been
discovered have become increasingly specialized. As a consequence,
not all can be research scientists or lawyers or novelists or engineers;
no one can know everything. Specialization is double-edged; it has
brought with it all the benefits associated with modern societies and
at the same time it has led to new divisions and new inequalities.
This is a tension that all modern societies have to acknowledge and
come to terms with. However, in a book primarily concerned with
the idea that everyone is entitled to a foundation of knowledge, we
have no space to consider the conditions for or consequences of
specialization in the later years of schooling. We recognize that, to
a different extent in different countries, many will not acquire the
foundations of knowledge by the same age; some will progress faster
while others will need extra support over a longer period if they are
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 17

to progress. Countries vary significantly in whether their priority

is ensuring that as large a proportion of each cohort as possible
progresses together, and those which accept the inevitability of
differentiation and hence, inequalities from an early age.
Finally, an important aspect of our view of knowledge that is
crucial in any discussion of the curriculum is that it is distinguished
from opinions or common sense. Unlike common sense it is never
something ‘given’ and never tied to specific contexts. It is always
fallible and open to question, in principle, by anyone, although
the more specialized the knowledge, the harder it will be for
non-specialists to question. It is its fallibility that tells us that
however true something is it is only the truth as far as we know.
For example, for 2,000 years, mathematicians thought that Euclid’s
axiom that ‘parallel lines never meet’ was true. Since Lobachevsky
and others, in the nineteenth century, we now know that Euclid’s
axiom is only true in certain circumstances. It is this openness that
distinguishes knowledge in the sense used in this book from our
everyday experience and lies at the root of its links with freedom;
it always opens up new possibilities. The extent to which these new
possibilities are open to those who have not followed a specialist
route of study varies widely across different fields. The fallibility of
knowledge also distinguishes it from the knowledge associated with
dogma or ideology which always rely on some overt or covert force
to resist any challenge. It is the fallibility of knowledge, its openness
to question and the alternatives that it points to that provide the
most powerful argument against the ‘fear of knowledge’ often
found among teachers. Knowledge, from the perspective we are
presenting, is always about possibilities – it is the antithesis of fear.
18 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

A last point: we need knowledge to live in a complex world but we

cannot live by knowledge – we live by beliefs in what we value which
may or may not be the beliefs of a religion. What is important is not,
as Richard Dawkins and others claim, that religion is a delusion.
Although religious ideas are not knowledge in the sense we use the
word in this book, they are one of the sets of values which people
live by; as educators we must respect such beliefs and values even
when we do not share them.

Pedagogy and the acquisition of knowledge

There is another neglected or, more appropriately, misunderstood

feature of knowledge that is important for our argument in
this book. Unlike gaining a new experience, acquiring what
in Chapter 3 we will refer to as ‘powerful knowledge’, always
requires much dedicated effort and hard work. Experience is just
experience – what we are. Knowledge, like anything worthwhile,
is not only shared but has to be struggled for – wrought from the
world by work no less dedicated than the work it took to create it.
Students are not always convinced of this argument and they find
support in much advertising and mass media which presents a
world in which everything is made simple and accessible to anyone
(provided you have the money!). The argument of this book and,
less explicitly, all public demands for higher educational standards,
is that schools and teachers have to help students go beyond and
sometimes resist the cultural forces that they experience everyday.
It is not surprising that some students, when they find something
difficult to understand, assume it is not worth struggling with. All
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 19

too easily, they become satisfied with ‘passing’ or accept the label
that they are ‘non-academic’ or ‘slow learners’. The concept of a
‘slow learner’ is always preferable; whereas slow learners can always
learn more, the label ‘non-academic’ creates an identity which may
be hard to change.
It is the sense of the struggle involved in acquiring knowledge
that may be at the root of the prevailing ‘fear of knowledge’ found
among teachers. The idea of ‘encouraging students to learn’ seems
much gentler and more democratic. On the other hand, it can easily
lead a teacher to forget to ask the more difficult questions such
as ‘what are they learning?’ and ‘is it valuable?’ This is a genuine
problem facing teachers and we will return to it later in the book.
It is why the term pedagogy, which describes the professional
practice of teachers, is so important but so often undervalued. For
us pedagogy refers to the theory and practice involved in taking
students beyond their experience and helping them to acquire new
knowledge.
We should not be surprised that making new knowledge one’s
own is difficult and some students will always resist it or try to
avoid the difficulty by ‘memorizing’ and regurgitating it. Not only is
knowledge the product of many people’s hard and dedicated work in
the past, but real knowledge challenges not only what we know but
sometimes our sense of who we are. It was not just that Pope Urban
disagreed with Galileo about the sun going round the earth; he felt as
if his whole being as head of the Church was under threat. Breaking
with our sense of who we are is never easy – another reason for a far
greater acknowledgement of the enormous responsibility we place
on teachers.
20 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

Learning at school – from experience

to knowledge

We have schools, colleges and universities which provide students

with opportunities to break with their past experience and begin
to trust the possibilities that knowledge and a knowledge-based
curriculum can offer them. With its combination of reliability and
fallibility, what we refer to as ‘powerful’ knowledge has little to do
with the piling up and regurgitating of facts that an emphasis on
knowledge is all too easily associated with. This does not mean
there is knowledge without facts, just that facts on their own are not
knowledge. Knowledge in the sense we are using the word in this
book allows those with access to it to question it and the authority
on which it is based and gain the sense of freedom and excitement
that it can offer.
There are some parallels as well as important differences between
acquiring knowledge and tough manual tasks like digging ditches
or cutting logs. Such ‘hard work’ was paid work until we developed
machines for digging and cutting much faster than men and women
ever could. We now have machines not only for doing hard manual
work like digging ditches, but computing machines for doing hard
mental work like solving complicated mathematical problems which
would take a person, however skilled, half a life time or more. When
we argue that the acquisition of knowledge is always ‘hard work’, we
mean something very different from the hard work either of digging
or of the repetitive routines of computers. It is the ‘hard work’ of
making a relationship with ideas that are new to the learner. The
school curriculum and the pedagogy of teachers can offer pupils ways
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 21

of relating to knowledge that is new to them and new in how this

knowledge relates to their experience. Whether pupils acquire this
new relationship between knowledge and their experience is largely
the responsibility of teachers and the confidence they have in their
subject and their pedagogy. Another way of grasping the meaning
of the term pedagogy refers to the relationship between teachers
and pupils that are involved in development of their knowledge. It
is why technology, however sophisticated it is and despite its many
remarkable capacities for making information accessible, will never
replace teachers or schools – acquiring knowledge involves a human
relationship with teachers who are specialists in pedagogy. This does
not deny that parents and peers may not at times take on the role of
teacher in the same sense that they may take on the role of healer.
The important difference is that teachers are involved in pedagogy as
specialists and schools are specialist institutions that bring teachers
and students together.

Curriculum and social justice

The subtitle of this book is Curriculum and Social Justice –

not words that are commonly found together in writing about
education.2 Why is this so when the links might at first glance
appear obvious? No one thinks of separating medical knowledge
(the basis, in a sense of the ‘hospital curriculum’) from health

2
The journal of Education Policy recently had a special issue on the theme ‘What would
a socially just education system look like?’ With one exception, a short comment by
the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell which we refer to later in this book, there is
virtually no reference to the curriculum or knowledge at all.
22 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

rights and justice. There are two possible reasons which take us
to the heart of our argument in this book. The first arises from
the reality that we have a system in which systematic educational
inequalities persist. If we take a broad definition of ‘entitlement
to foundation knowledge’ to be 5 good (C grade or better) GCSE’s
in the EBacc subjects, this currently includes significantly less
than half of secondary school pupils in English schools3 – a
clear expression of educational inequality. Furthermore in their
emphasis on ‘standards’ measured by performance in more
rigorous examinations, the present curriculum and examination
reforms seem likely to exaggerate this inequality. It is for this
reason that many working in education oppose the reforms, but
without proposing any alternative approach to tackling existing
inequalities. Those who criticize the government reforms appear to
accept, or at least prefer the situation that existed under the previous
government when the links between curriculum and standards
were, at least partially obscured. First, pass rates rose every year
for over 30 years and this made a debate about whether standards
were rising or not seem irrelevant. Secondly, and less explicitly,
the idea of ‘universal’ standards for all was dropped in 2007 when
different ways of measuring achievement for different subjects and
forms of assessment were treated as ‘equal’. The assumption was
that giving priority to a list of more difficult ‘academic’ subjects
put children of wealthier parents at an advantage, either because
they could pay for private schooling or additional tutoring or
because they provided other out of school cultural advantages.

3
The figure rises to over 50 per cent if a foreign language is excluded.
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 23

This argument takes us right back to the case we want to make

for the curriculum as an ‘entitlement to knowledge’. Of course the
children of richer parents have enormous advantages in our society
and it is undeniable that schools able to charge £30,000 or more a
year in fees are selective in the pupils they take. However, this is an
issue about distribution of wealth and the social selection that this
makes possible; it is about elitist schools, not necessarily an elitist
curriculum. The knowledge on which maths or history as GCSE
subjects is based is not a ‘cultural arbitrary’ as the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu once claimed. It has a form of universality derived
from two sources: (a) how mathematics has been developed by
specialists in the universities, and (b) how school maths teachers
select and sequence mathematics content in ways that their theory
and experience tells them is appropriate for the majority of pupils
at different ages. We would not be doing a service to those students
who struggle with maths, history or any other subject by reducing
the more difficult content of some subjects or by treating physics
as equivalent to leisure and tourism.
Our argument in this book is that teachers who want to improve
the achievement of their pupils have two strategies in relation to
reducing inequalities. One is internal and pedagogic and the other is
external and political. For a school their internal pedagogic strategy
will have two aspects – at a school level the head will endeavour to
improve the qualifications of her or his subject departments when
recruiting new staff and by supporting existing staff to undertake
further studies as the basis for improving the curriculum. At the
departmental level, the focus will be pedagogic; teachers will be
encouraged to attend courses to upgrade their specialist pedagogic
24 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

knowledge. The role of subjects and the subject departments in a

school’s curriculum is an issue we return to in Chapters 4 and 7.
The unequal distribution of educational resources raises political
questions relevant to teachers as members of political parties but not
in their role as members of staff of individual schools. As citizens in
a democracy, teachers may choose to get involved politically at the
local or national level to try and influence government educational
policy. That is distinct though not unrelated to their role in the
school as members of the teaching profession.
We cannot exclude the possibility that a school adopting a
stronger knowledge-led curriculum could find this led to a drop
in examination results although not necessarily a fall in standards.
This is where the curriculum leadership role of the head becomes
crucial. She or he would have to convince the governors, first, that
there were other measures of standards than examination grades
and, secondly, that in the longer term, a stronger emphasis on the
‘entitlement to knowledge’ will lead to higher standards and more
examination successes.
One response to the standards issue is to take a historical
perspective. There is space here for only a very brief sketch but it
is important because it reminds us of the incremental nature of
educational change. Despite the many difficulties that schools
face today in reducing inequalities, when we look back to the 1944
Education Act and to the nearly 70 years of ‘secondary education for
all’ that have followed, we see a ‘success story’, rather than a story
of failure. The most dramatic evidence of success is the proportion
of young people who now go to university; it has increased at least
ten times in those 70 years; that cannot be anything but evidence of
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 25

‘success’. It is a major achievement of generations of teachers which

has not always received the recognition it deserves and is a good
starting point for thinking about the goals of the school curriculum
for what we refer to in the title of this book as future schools. If we
extrapolate from 1944, our starting point for thinking about future
schools might be that by 2084, 80 per cent of each cohort would go
to university or have the qualifications for entry that they might
use later in their lives. This is not so unrealistic when we remember
that the proportion of current cohorts entering higher education in
Finland is already over 60 per cent. Any just curriculum for a future
school must surely envisage making such a future possible.

The curriculum and ‘future schools’

A focus on education as the entitlement to knowledge allows us

to identify some of the conditions that are most likely to ensure
the continued expansion and better distribution of educational
opportunities. It also enables us to identify how well-intentioned
recent policies have led us astray. A key example of such a policy
is the assumption of the previous government that widening
participation and more students obtaining more certificates that were
treated as equivalent to GCSEs necessarily meant that educational
opportunities were being extended.
Entitlement should result in access; however, the idea of ‘access’
becomes empty of meaning unless we ask the question ‘access
to what’. Our understanding of the purpose of schools suggests
that while widening access is an important starting principle, it is
inadequate on its own without a curriculum criterion. A curriculum
26 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

must provide access to ‘knowledge’ – not to ‘facts’, and not to

‘learning’ unless what is to be learned is specified. We have found
it useful to use the narrower term ‘epistemic access’ when referring
to the curriculum. The question that the idea of ‘epistemic access’
poses for all schools and all subject teachers is ‘does your curriculum
help all students to shape and guide their learning in the search for
truth’ whatever course they are on and whatever the subject they are
studying, vocational or academic. Like knowledge, truth is another
difficult and misunderstood word and certainly we do not mean
truth in an absolute sense. We mean the best truth a student can
grasp depending on their age and development. Furthermore, truth
is like knowledge; it is differentiated and may be scientific, aesthetic,
moral or practical. Somehow, as teachers, in whatever we ask our
students to do – there should be some idea in our mind that it has a
‘truthful’ outcome or challenge to existing ideas – it might be about
a poem, a historical source or the property of a chemical element.
That challenge to a student’s existing ideas is what ‘epistemic access’
refers to.

Subjects and the curriculum

The current government’s curriculum and examination reforms

place far more emphasis on school subjects as the basis of the
curriculum than the policies of its predecessors. The arguments
for and against a subject-based curriculum are hotly debated and
we will return to them in some detail in Chapters 4 and 7. However
there are issues involved in establishing a National Curriculum that
are important, whether or not the current reforms are supported.
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 27

The first is the assumption that a National Curriculum makes that

there is ‘universal’ or ‘better’ knowledge (although in subjects such as
history and literature this ‘universality’ will be expressed differently
in different countries). The second is that a National Curriculum
expresses the entitlement to that knowledge for all children in a
country, regardless of their different social and cultural experiences
outside school. The present Secretary of State for England expresses
this entitlement in terms of having high expectations for all children.
This is an important principle; however it is difficult to take seriously
when at the same time, the new National Curriculum does not apply
to academies (the majority of secondary schools) and government
funded ‘free’ schools. Is there an assumption on the part of
government that making a school an academy (and independent of a
local authority) in some way guarantees the entitlement that is only
guaranteed by the National Curriculum for other schools?
As educational specialists, our role with all those working in the
schools is to specify the conditions for realizing high expectations
for as large a proportion of each cohort as possible. It is this role
that makes us ‘knowledge specialists’, or in more familiar terms,
curriculum specialists. This does not make us specialists in all the
different subjects that make up a school curriculum. However, the
idea of entitlement or ‘high expectations for all children’ assumes
that these expectations are the same for all children regardless of
their social, ethnic background or gender. Why is this important
and why does it present such a challenge both to teachers and to
government?
This question can be answered in several ways. Teachers have
to face the reality that despite starting with ‘high expectations
28 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

for all pupils’, not all pupils fulfil these expectations – some get
poor grades and some fail. Individual teachers, schools and the
government inevitably look for explanations. Some blame each other
or the pupils and their families and researchers devote much time
to trying to work out which factor appears to be more important.
We do not deny any of the obvious factors: inadequate distribution
of resources, poor pedagogy and underqualified teachers, difficult
family circumstances and individual pupil learning difficulties or
lack of motivation. Research has swung unhelpfully between the
poles of ‘schools do matter’ and ‘the causes of differences are largely
external to the schools’. In this book we take a different – and we hope
more constructive, although not easier – approach that starts from
the knowledge that all pupils are entitled to. It can be summarized
briefly as follows:

●● There is agreed ‘powerful knowledge’.

●● A school has responsibility for ensuring that that all students
have access to the foundations of powerful knowledge4 and
that there are opportunities for those who have not achieved
to a level equivalent to the EBacc by the age of 16 to continue
their foundation studies as part of any post-16 programme
they take.
●● Each school and the country as a whole (and its government)
should constantly review the gap between the ‘entitlement to
knowledge’ and the reality of differential achievement. They
should collectively take responsibility for their role in realizing
the aims of ‘entitlement for all’.

The EBacc is an initial attempt to express what such foundations might involve.
4
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 29

●● No school should be held responsible for failures that are

beyond its control. For example, there will be factors in the
local community or region and related to the background
experiences of their pupils that schools have little control over.
Likewise the responsibilities and control of governments are
limited. They can influence the availability of teachers with
good specialist qualifications; however, the relative autonomy
of individual schools will be used in different ways.
●● The factors over which individual schools have increasing
control are a school’s curriculum and its teachers’ approach
to pedagogy. We will return to these issues later in this book.

The key distinguishing feature of a knowledge-led curriculum

based on an ‘entitlement to knowledge’ is that the issue of the
knowledge a school wants its pupils to have access to is its starting
point. As we argue in Chapter 2, a knowledge-led curriculum must
be defined by subjects and the proportion of the school week that
they are assigned. This stands in sharp contrast to the idea that the
school curriculum should start with the interests and experiences
of the children, their parents and the locality, or with broad ideas
such as well-being. Examples of this approach which for us are
well intentioned but seriously mistaken are the RSA’s popular
Opening Minds and local curriculum programmes. It is not that
such programmes do not recognize that knowledge is important,
or that interdisciplinary studies do not have a role to play. There
are at least two problems involved in placing an emphasis in the
curriculum on locality and pupil experiences. First, it weakens the
role of subjects as the basis for ensuring that students progress and
30 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

do not miss out on key concepts; and secondly, as a recent Bristol

study showed, schools in lower income areas are far more likely
to opt for programmes based on local experience than schools in
higher income areas.
We do not under-value pupil experience of the locality of
a school. As we argue in Chapters 5 and 7, for example, pupil
experiences of where they live are a crucial resource for teachers.
Nor does a knowledge-led curriculum imply that every child in a
school will acquire the same knowledge at the same pace. What a
knowledge-led curriculum does do, which sets it apart from the
RSA programmes, is to place the ‘entitlement to knowledge’ as the
starting point of the curriculum for all children.

The entitlement to knowledge

The idea that every pupil has an ‘entitlement to knowledge’, and

indeed that this is the only basis for continuing to expand educational
opportunities, rests on two assumptions. The first assumption,
touched on earlier in this chapter, is that, albeit in different ways in
different fields, there is better knowledge – the Russian psychologist
Lev Vygotsky called it higher order thinking. A similar view was
expressed by the English sociologist, Basil Bernstein. In critiquing
forms of compensatory education which excluded pupils from
discipline-based knowledge, he argued that academic disciplines
were the ‘public forms of understanding through which a society
has conversations about itself and its future’. We do not mean
better in the sense that it is knowledge beyond debate, nor that
better knowledge in any field is ‘fixed’ as in the nineteenth-century
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 31

‘liberal curriculum’ and its reliance on the Classics of Ancient

Greece and Rome. Better knowledge means the best knowledge
we have and the best means we have for creating new knowledge
for the kind of world we envisage for the next generation. In fields
such as the humanities and most of the social sciences it will mean
access to the different ways of thinking about social, historical or
geographical phenomena – Chapter 7 illustrates this in the case of
geography. Despite the lack of consensus among social scientists and
humanities teachers, some concept of a ‘canon’ for these subjects
seems an inescapable feature of any national curriculum. In contrast,
mathematics and the natural sciences, at school level, will be less
about debates and different interpretations and more about what
existing knowledge tells us about the natural and physical worlds. The
important point about a knowledge-led school curriculum is that it
relies on the ‘best’ ideas and enquiries of the specialist communities
which give priority to discovering, debating, testing and evaluating
new knowledge – whether scientific laws, novels or engineering
designs. Chapter 3 explains why we find it helpful to refer to this
‘best knowledge’ as powerful knowledge and what this means as a
principle for the curriculum. Chapter 4 develops this argument
about knowledge – why it points to a subject-based curriculum and
what its practical implications may be for headteachers and subject
specialists in schools. Given that our experience is largely about
secondary education, this book focuses on secondary rather than on
primary schools. However, our argument is that making knowledge
the starting point for the curriculum is no less relevant to those
working in primary schools. We do not make schooling compulsory
for all 5 year olds just to extend their experience – we want their
32 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

schooling to give them access to knowledge that takes them beyond

that experience in ways they and their parents can trust and value,
that they will find exciting and challenging and which prepares
them for the next stage of their education – secondary school. It
is, to put it mildly, ironic that the only schools in England that are
explicitly referred to as ‘preparatory’ are the private fee-charging
schools which ‘prepare’ students for private, fee-paying secondary
schools which even more ironically, we call ‘Public’. For us it makes
sense that all schools are ‘preparatory’ – in other words in focusing
on the ‘development’ of children they have a view of a child’s possible
future in mind in ways that reflect the age of their pupils. This in no
way denies a place for play in schools for younger pupils and for its
expression as sport and other ‘extra curricular’ activities when they
get older.
This chapter began by asserting that this is not a ‘how to’ book,
nor is it a book of educational theory and full of references to journal
articles that few have time to read.5 Starting from the assumption that
the purpose of schools is to support the ‘entitlement to knowledge’,
it presents ways of thinking about the question ‘what do we teach?’
at every level from national curriculum policy to school leadership
teams to classroom practice.

Responding to the current reforms

We nail our colours firmly to the ‘mast’ that all pupils are entitled to
what we refer to as ‘powerful knowledge’, as an educational goal and

5
We have added some suggestions for additional reading for those who want to take these
ideas further.
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 33

as a principle of educational justice. This is easy to say or write but far

from easy to accomplish. The strong emphasis on knowledge that is
expressed in the government’s current reforms is often seen as being
more likely to lead to pupil disaffection and failure than to enhancing
their achievements or commitment to learning. This is a challenge
that schools have to face directly and there are no easy solutions. It
is not surprising that one response to the government’s reforms is
that they must be resisted in any way possible. The reforms are seen
as elitist, backward looking, neglect all the ‘progress’ that teachers
have made in the past decades and pay scant regard to any research.
Some critics go so far as claiming that in their total disregard for the
experience and views of most of the specialist educational community,
the reforms rely on little more than the personal prejudices of the
Secretary of State. This book sympathizes with these reactions to the
top-down way in which the present government’s reforms have been
introduced; it is almost as if they were presented as Michael Gove’s
personal preferences. However, we see no good educational purpose
in focusing on the personal political style of the Secretary of State.
We see the type of critical response to his reforms and the degree
of support such criticisms have gained as a symptom of how far the
broader educational culture has turned against knowledge. It is as if
being ‘for knowledge’ is the same as being ‘for Michael Gove’ and vice
versa. There is a real danger in being trapped in this ‘for’ or ‘against’
debate about the government’s reforms when far more important and
fundamental issues of educational justice are at stake. Social class
differences in achievement, in access to top universities and in entry
into the professions have increased not decreased in the past decade.
This is confirmed time and again by the data on social mobility. This
34 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

may not be the direct result of past curriculum reforms; however, it is

inconceivable that such trends to greater inequality will be reversed
if a knowledge-led curriculum is not extended to the majority.
How is it that anti-knowledge views of the curriculum and
schooling have become dominant in university educational faculties
even more than in schools and that the idea of a knowledge-led
curriculum is seen as an elitist and exclusive and not as a right of
all pupils? It is an attitude that would be unthinkable in France,
Germany or in most if not all other European countries. This
introductory chapter concludes with a very brief history of why in
this country there are such negative responses within the education
community to the idea of ‘a common entitlement to knowledge for
all’ and how we might have reached such an impasse.

For and against knowledge-led schools:

A brief history

The expansion of our public education system in England has

been torn between two well-intentioned but ultimately divisive
approaches to the curriculum. One has been based on a concept of
excellence associated with the idea of liberal education which was
gradually extended from the ‘Public’ schools to the grammar schools
and with the reorganization of secondary education from 1965, was
incorporated into the upper streams of comprehensive schools. This
is often symbolized by Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase ‘The best
which has been thought and said.’ Although Arnold was deeply
committed to education for all, and spent his whole life inspecting
schools for the children of the poorest sections of society, his emphasis
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 35

on ‘the best’ is often taken as a sign of his elitism. Commenting on

the charge that Arnold was an elitist is beyond the scope of this book.
What is undoubtedly true is that for all his concern to improve the
education of the poor, his concept of ‘culture for all’ was rooted in
the classics and gave scant reference to the way the society of his time
was being transformed by innovations in science and technology.
His conservative and backward-looking view of the curriculum was
a benign and ‘in spirit’ at least, egalitarian example of what, in the
next chapter we shall call Future 1.
Since 1944, when secondary education for all became enshrined
in statute, and in particular since 1988 when the first National
Curriculum was established, England has made successive but only
partially successful attempts to update Matthew Arnold’s ideas as
a principle for ‘education for all’. The expansion of access to higher
education can be seen as an indication of the relative success of these
attempts. What has hardly been addressed is whether the public/
grammar ‘liberal education’ school curriculum is in some way
intrinsically elitist or whether it might be the basis of a curriculum
entitlement for all. The Coalition government’s reforms since 2010
propose a return to a version of an Arnoldian Future 1 view of
culture and a ‘curriculum for all’. At the same time they show far
less concern than Arnold did with the consequences for the less than
half of each cohort who are in no way prepared for their future in an
increasingly complex, global knowledge-led economy and a world
which faces severe ecological and environmental challenges. Insofar
as the government addresses this question, success or failure appears
to be seen almost entirely in individual terms – those who are
motivated will succeed and the rest either do not deserve to succeed
36 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

or lack the ability. Of course, individual motivation is important;

however, such a focus on the individual student does not take us very
far from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’ –
hardly an adequate recipe for innovation and a growing economy,
let alone a more just society.
The second approach had its origins in a rejection both of the
narrowness of the elementary school tradition of ‘3 R’s’ (Reading,
(W)riting and (A)rithmetic) and of Arnold’s ‘best’ as being in effect
no more than best as seen ‘by the few and for the few’. It can be
can be traced back to the reforms of the 1920s and 1930s but took
its modern expression in the 1960s with the Newsom Report –
aptly titled Half Our Future. Newsom argued that we should not
start from a view of a common curriculum for all, but from the
pupils themselves, their interests and their likely future in other
words, their culture. This led to well-intentioned attempts to build
curricula around the diverse interests of those identified as ‘non-
academic children’ and the communities they came from; a kind of
‘localism’. The first examples were the programmes proposed by the
then Schools Council with titles such as Science for the Young School
Leaver, Geography for the Young School Leaver and Mathematics for
the Majority. These new curricula, followed by TVEI (the Technical
and Vocational Initiative) in the 1980s were taken up by teachers
in often highly innovative ways that were not always tied to the
Newsom Report’s divisive cultural assumptions – school-based
curricula and assessment were only some of the many innovations
that the Newsom Report and the schools council funding that
followed, led to. However the titles of these early programmes – for
the young school leaver – masked a reality that was systematically
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 37

avoided. They assumed that there were two kinds of geography and
two kinds of history, mathematics and science – each as valuable as
the other but for different groups in society; one kind for those who
were expected to stay on at school after the age of 16 and progress to
university and the other kind for ‘the rest’. This divided approach
to the curriculum has continued both in the differentiated forms
of assessment for GCSE, less overtly in the RSA’s Opening Minds
and Area-based Curriculum Projects mentioned earlier and in the
recent Demos Report, The Forgotten Half (2011) which echoes the
title of Newsom’s Report 50 years earlier. There is a danger that such
assumptions could be repeated in the Labour Party’s proposals for a
Tech Bac. All continue with the philosophy of giving priority to the
motivations of students and links with their somewhat hypothetical
future employment possibilities. By implication, at least, they assume
that access to ‘real knowledge’ is beyond them.
The Coalition government when elected in 2010 dismissed all
previous attempts to mask curricula differences by laying down
a curriculum based on subject knowledge that is designed to be a
benchmark for all students up to the age of 16; their proposals
impose strict criteria for treating subjects and forms of assessment as
equivalent. At the same time, they have given little attention to what
might be involved for the less motivated students, if a subject-based
curriculum, at least up to 16, was to include all of each cohort.
In the context of the challenges posed by such reforms, the ‘fear
of ’ or even ‘rejection of knowledge’ by teachers referred to earlier
is understandable. Nor is it surprising that these fears are given
some legitimacy by being associated with certain fashionable
trends in educational theory that call into question the very
38 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

idea that there can, objectively, be ‘better’ knowledge. At least

the more comfortable alternative of a learner and experience-
led curriculum that New Labour and the Qualifications and
Curriculum Development Authority (QCDA) offered following
the 2008 National Curriculum was less likely to be experienced
as an ‘imposition’ on pupils. The current battle between many
sections of the educational community and the government is not
a productive one – both lead in different ways to an educational
underclass with few resources but their wits and the possibility of
a few sporting or pop music successes.
The alternative approach to the curriculum suggested in
this book owes a debt to the Italian activist and political and
educational theorist, Antonio Gramsci, who died in one of
Mussolini’s prisons nearly 80 years ago. It is interesting that while
Gramsci’s political ideas have been long endorsed by the Left,
they have, with a few exceptions, largely neglected his educational
philosophy. On the other hand the importance of his educational
ideas is acknowledged by Michael Gove, the current Secretary of
State and his educational mentor, the American E. D. Hirsch, both
of whom managed to void their political implications. It maybe
that the potential contradiction in the title of Harold Entwistle’s
seminal intellectual biography – Antonio Gramsci: Conservative
Schooling for Radical Politics – was more prescient than even
Entwistle knew.
In emphasizing the concept of ‘entitlement to knowledge for all’,
this book offers an alternative way of thinking about the curriculum
rather than a way out of the dilemma facing schools and teachers
in a society that is characterized by inequalities. It suggests how
 KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL 39

present government reforms might be used for sound educational

ends rather than just rejected. It also addresses government but in
a different way. To them it says ‘if you are serious about building
a system based on high expectations for all, this requires a
redistribution of resources that as yet we see no sign of’. The gap
between universalizing the criteria for knowledge which is endorsed
by the government and the far from universal distribution of
opportunities for accessing such knowledge raises difficult political
questions in a time of public spending austerity. It raises equally
difficult pedagogic and curriculum issues for heads and classroom
teachers, educational researchers and teacher educators which
are no less avoidable. Under New Labour the QCDA introduced a
framework of levels which classified academic and non-academic
subjects as equivalent. Lower achieving students were advised to
take the non-academic courses; however, while in some cases this
led them to higher level courses and even to employment, most did
not. By and large teachers went along with this; the question we
raise is ‘was this social justice?’
In this book we argue that social and more explicitly curricula
justice is inescapably linked to the widest possible access to what we
refer to as ‘powerful knowledge’ and that schools and their curricula
are the main instrument through which this can be achieved. The
aim of the book is to make explicit what we mean by ‘powerful
knowledge’ and why it should be the basis for a universal entitlement
for all. As this introductory chapter has indicated, this issue has
been implicit though rarely explicitly debated in every reform of
the past century. Since the election of the present government,
this issue has surfaced more explicitly than ever before in sharp
40 KNOWLEDGE AND THE FUTURE SCHOOL

disagreements between the educational community and the current

Secretary of State. This book is an attempt to offer a way beyond
these disagreements for how headteachers and schools might think
about their curriculum and realize the old Enlightenment goal that
schooling should be an ‘entitlement to knowledge for all’.