This year I have unexpectedly become an English teacher.

After more than twenty years of teaching history, this has come as something of a shock. I have spent much of my career teaching pupils how to construct arguments, analyse evidence and develop sustained written responses. Suddenly I found myself teaching many apparently similar skills in English lessons — creative writing, poetry and textual analysis — but often using entirely different language.

For years I had privately wondered why English and history teachers seemed to use different terminology for what, from the outside, looked remarkably similar. Why PEEL in one classroom and PEZA in another? Why “evidence” here but “quotation” there? Why “argument” in one subject and “interpretation” in another?

Having now taught both, I have come to realise that the differences are not superficial. The disciplines are not simply teaching the same thing with different labels attached. Historians and literary critics may both analyse texts, but they do so differently and for different purposes. In history, I find myself constantly pushing pupils back towards provenance, context and reliability. In English, I am often asking them to remain within the text itself a little longer, noticing language choices and patterns that a historian might skim straight past.

Vertical Teachers, Horizontal Pupils

But this experience has also left me thinking about something else: how pupils actually experience school.

Adults experience school vertically. Pupils experience it horizontally.

An English teacher may teach five English lessons in a day. A historian may spend an entire afternoon thinking historically. Teachers experience school through the lens of a discipline.

Pupils do not.

A pupil may move from English to Maths to Science to French before lunch, encountering not simply different content, but different forms of reasoning, different expectations and different conceptions of what constitutes a strong answer. In a single morning, a pupil might be asked to interpret a poem, calculate an algebraic proof, hypothesise the outcome of a chemical reaction and memorise French vocabulary. Even words such as “analysis”, “evidence” and “argument” may subtly shift in meaning between classrooms.

In my current role as Assistant Head Academic, I spend a great deal of time visiting lessons across the school. This is one of the great privileges of the role. Over the course of a single morning I may see pupils analysing poetry in English, constructing proofs in Maths, evaluating sources in History and forming hypotheses in Science. The richness of the intellectual experience offered to pupils in good schools is genuinely remarkable.

Yet these observations have also made me increasingly conscious of the sheer number of cognitive transitions pupils undertake each day. Every forty minutes — or eighty in a double lesson — pupils are often required to switch not merely topics, but modes of thinking. They move constantly between disciplines with different assumptions, different methods and different intellectual habits. Adults rarely experience school in this way. Pupils do, every single day.

The Wisdom of EYFS

Interestingly, schools already seem to recognise many of these issues with younger children. In EYFS classrooms, the school day is often designed with much greater attention to rhythm, flow, cognitive readiness and sustained periods of activity. Children are not typically moved abruptly between sharply separated disciplines every forty minutes. The experience often feels more integrated and developmentally coherent.

As pupils move further up the school, however, subjects gradually harden into distinct silos, specialist teaching increases and timetables become more fragmented. There are, of course, good reasons for this. Specialist teaching brings enormous intellectual benefits. Yet it is perhaps worth asking whether schools always think carefully enough about how pupils experience this transition from integrated to increasingly compartmentalised models of learning.

Intellectual Architecture

This matters because pupils are not simply accumulating isolated parcels of subject knowledge as they move through the school. Over time they are developing habits of reasoning, conceptions of evidence and broader assumptions about what knowledge itself is and how it works. Yet pupils are often expected to navigate the distinctions between disciplines implicitly. Schools rarely make the intellectual architecture visible to the children experiencing it.

Perhaps schools need to become more deliberate in helping pupils understand both the connections and distinctions between subjects. Not to flatten disciplinary thinking, but to help pupils navigate the intellectual transitions they experience every day.

The Timetabling Compromise

The more I think about this, the more sympathy I have for those responsible for constructing school timetables. I share an office with the member of our Senior Leadership Team responsible for this task, and overhear the daily negotiations: limited specialist rooms, staffing constraints, shared-site complications, fixed lunch sittings, music lessons, games fixtures and countless other immovable pieces. Timetabling is one of the great acts of educational compromise.

Perhaps that is precisely why it is worth occasionally stepping back to consider what school actually feels like from the pupil’s perspective. Not because perfect coherence is achievable, but because the cumulative intellectual experience pupils have each day may matter more than we sometimes realise.

Pupils do not experience schools departmentally. They experience the curriculum horizontally, day by day, transition by transition. If we want them to build genuinely coherent intellectual habits, perhaps it is time we spent a little more time looking across the timetable, rather than simply down it.

It was not until my PGCE year that I properly understood how essays actually worked.

That sounds absurd given that, by that point, I had already succeeded through school and university history, writing countless essays along the way. Yet much of what made an essay successful had remained strangely tacit throughout my own education. I had absorbed enough of the patterns to do well academically, but nobody had ever explicitly taught me what an essay actually was, how an argument developed across paragraphs, or why certain structures and formulations made writing more convincing than others.

During my PGCE, I found myself teaching Year 7 pupils who struggled with basic literacy. My research project focused on teaching literacy through history, and for the first time I had to think carefully about how analytical writing actually develops. I could no longer rely on instinct or imitation. If pupils were going to improve, I had to make the invisible visible.

The more I reflected on this, the more uncomfortable I became with how often schools assume intellectual development rather than deliberately constructing it.

We often speak as though essay writing simply emerges over time through repeated exposure. Pupils read enough essays, write enough paragraphs, receive enough feedback, and gradually improve. Yet much of what underpins strong analytical writing depends upon carefully layered knowledge, vocabulary, habits and conceptual understanding developed over many years.

Recently, while attending a curriculum conference, I was struck by a question raised during a keynote on Richard Anderson’s schema theory: is new learning genuinely building on prior learning, and what does this unlock later?

I have found myself returning repeatedly to that final question because it seems to me that it cuts to the heart of what curriculum coherence actually means.

Making the Invisible Visible

Schools often talk about coherence in organisational terms. Do topics flow logically between year groups? Are schemes of work sequenced correctly? Is there progression?

These things matter. But I increasingly wonder whether genuine curriculum coherence is something deeper than this. It may instead involve thinking far more deliberately about the cumulative development of pupils’ intellectual lives over time: the gradual building of vocabulary, conceptual understanding, disciplinary habits and increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking, speaking and writing.

Essay writing provides a useful lens through which to think about this because it exposes the difference between assuming development and deliberately constructing it.

In many schools, pupils are told to “develop their argument” or “analyse in more depth” long before they have been explicitly taught what an argument actually is. Feedback such as “this needs a stronger argument” can become slightly surreal if pupils have never been shown clearly what makes an argument convincing in the first place.

So much essay knowledge lives as tacit professional knowledge in teachers’ heads. Experienced teachers recognise weak analysis immediately, but may never have broken down precisely why it is weak in ways pupils can meaningfully act upon. We know when an essay “works”, but often struggle to articulate the underlying grammar of argument explicitly.

As a result, academically fluent pupils frequently learn to infer hidden expectations, while others are left trying to decode rules that have never been properly explained.

Building the Grammar of Argument

At primary level, this work begins much earlier than schools sometimes acknowledge, and much of what happens in Year 3 has already been shaped, or misshapen, by what came before.

In Reception and Key Stage 1, coherence may have less to do with formal writing and more to do with noticing, naming and elaborating. Questions such as “What do you see?” and, even more importantly, “What makes you say that?” begin training children to justify claims rather than merely state them. Encouraging pupils to elaborate orally — “I think this because…” and “also…” — lays important foundations for later analytical writing.

By Key Stage 2, pupils can begin to understand that a paragraph is not simply a collection of sentences but a unit of argument. They can begin thinking not merely about what they are writing, but what each paragraph is trying to do.

Connectives such as “however”, “in contrast” or “this suggests” are often treated simply as sophisticated vocabulary choices, when in reality they signal logical relationships between ideas. They help pupils understand that writing is structured thought.

Pupils can also begin to encounter ideas such as counterargument. They can learn that an argument is not simply “what I am talking about” but “the thing I am asking you to believe that you did not before.”

These are not merely examination techniques. They are intellectual habits.

This development should continue through Key Stage 3 and beyond. By Year 9, pupils may begin subordinating structure to argument rather than treating essays as formulae to complete mechanically. They may begin handling genuine complexity without immediately collapsing it into simplistic certainty. Ideally, essays gradually become less about “what does the teacher want?” and more about “what do I actually think, and can I defend it?”

That kind of intellectual confidence cannot simply be forced into existence through generic “critical thinking” activities. It depends upon years of carefully accumulated knowledge and disciplinary understanding.

History contributes differently here from English. Source analysis, causation, contextualisation and competing interpretations all shape historical writing in distinctive ways. Geography, science, theology and philosophy each contribute their own disciplinary habits and forms of argument. Yet schools rarely map these intellectual moves explicitly across subjects. Very few schools could clearly articulate which disciplines are responsible for developing which aspects of reasoning, argument or analysis over time.

The Problem of Successful Schools

Part of the difficulty, I think, is that schools can appear highly successful while remaining less coherent than they imagine.

Strong teaching and highly able pupils can compensate remarkably effectively for curricular incoherence. If lessons are engaging, results are strong and pupils appear happy, schools may feel little pressure to step back and ask more fundamental questions about what is actually being built cumulatively over time.

This may be particularly true in independent schools, where curricular freedom can become both a strength and a vulnerability. Freed from some of the constraints of public examination specifications, schools possess genuine opportunities to think carefully about long-term intellectual formation. Yet freedom does not automatically produce coherence.

Sometimes curricula become shaped less by deliberate design than by inherited habits, legacy scholarship papers, departmental traditions or the accumulated preferences of individual teachers. Long-serving Heads of Department can become deeply associated with particular topics, approaches and resources built up over many years. This is not necessarily a criticism. Strong teachers often produce rich, engaging and intellectually vibrant curricula precisely because they care deeply about their subject and know their material exceptionally well.

Yet strong teaching and strong curricular thinking are not always the same thing.

A curriculum shaped primarily by passionate individuals may still contain gaps, repetitions or weak progression that remain largely invisible because pupils are succeeding anyway.

Increasingly, I wonder whether schools sometimes mistake successful outcomes for evidence of genuine curricular coherence.

What Does This Unlock Later?

I increasingly suspect that curriculum coherence is not mainly about curriculum maps, sequencing documents or organisational neatness. It is about whether schools think carefully enough about what pupils are gradually being inducted into over time.

What assumptions are being made explicit? Which intellectual habits are being deliberately cultivated? What knowledge is genuinely building on prior knowledge rather than merely sitting alongside it?

Most importantly: what is today’s learning designed to unlock later?

Too often, I think, schools assume that intellectual development will simply happen on its own.

As a history teacher, I start every academic year with a simple question: What is history? Unsurprisingly, the most common answer is: “the past.”

This always opens up an interesting discussion, because the past is everything: every person, every moment, every event. And yet what we study in history lessons is only a tiny fraction of it. So we refine the definition, and eventually settle on something along the lines that history is a selection from the past, a set of events, people and developments that have been consciously chosen for study.

Once you arrive at that point, the real questions begin.

Who chose?

Why these events and not others?

What makes something “important” enough to be included?

And what has been left out—not because it didn’t happen, but because it wasn’t selected?

Before long, pupils begin to see that history is not just a body of knowledge. It is also a debate, about significance, interpretation and perspective. The subject itself is shaped by argument: historians disagree about what matters, why it matters, and how it should be understood.

This way of thinking about subjects, as structured forms of knowledge with their own internal logic, has been shaped by scholars such as Christine Counsell, whose work has had a profound influence on how history is taught in schools.

It strikes me now that this is also a useful way to begin thinking about a much broader question: what is a curriculum?

Ask ten educationalists what a curriculum is and you will get ten different answers.

Some describe the curriculum as a plan—a structured sequence of learning that schools intend pupils to follow, an idea most clearly associated with Ralph Tyler and his emphasis on planned and directed learning. Others place the emphasis on knowledge—a coherent, cumulative body of content that pupils should acquire over time, a position strongly articulated by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and, in a different way, Michael Young with his notion of “powerful knowledge.” Others still take a broader view, seeing curriculum as the totality of a pupil’s experience in school—everything they encounter, both planned and unplanned—a perspective rooted in the work of John Dewey.

Each of these definitions captures something important. But each, on its own, feels incomplete.

My experience in the history classroom suggests a simpler starting point.

A curriculum is a selection.

And like all selections, it raises questions of judgement, value and purpose.

The moment we accept that a curriculum is a selection, we are forced to confront its limits—and its consequences.

There is always more that could be included than time allows. No curriculum can be comprehensive. It must, by necessity, be partial.

This makes curriculum design an act not of accumulation, but of choice.

We decide what to include and what to leave out; what to return to, and what to mention only in passing; what is foundational, and what is peripheral.

These decisions are not neutral. They reflect beliefs—about knowledge, about children, and about the purpose of education itself.

And yet, in many schools, these decisions are rarely made explicitly. Topics are inherited, schemes of work evolve incrementally, and the rationale behind what is taught gradually fades from view. The curriculum begins to feel less like a deliberate construction and more like something that simply exists.

One of the most important shifts in my own thinking has been recognising that this is not enough.

If a curriculum is a selection, then it must also be justified.

This raises a more fundamental question: what is the selection for?

There are, broadly speaking, two ways this question is often answered.

The first focuses on knowledge. On this view, the purpose of the curriculum is to induct pupils into a shared body of cultural and intellectual inheritance. Knowledge is seen as cumulative and structured, and the curriculum as the means by which pupils are brought into that structure over time.

The second focuses on experience. Here, the emphasis is on what pupils encounter, do and feel as they move through school. The curriculum is not just what is taught, but what is lived—the quality of discussion, the richness of activities, the opportunities for creativity and exploration.

Both perspectives capture something important. But in practice, the balance between them is not always evenly held.

The challenge, then, is not simply to “hold knowledge and experience together,” but to understand the relationship between them.

Knowledge shapes experience: what pupils are able to notice, think about and question depends on what they already know. At the same time, experience gives knowledge its meaning. Without opportunities to encounter, apply and think with what they have learned, knowledge risks remaining inert.

The work of curriculum design, therefore, lies in deliberately constructing that relationship over time, ensuring that what pupils learn and what they experience are not separate strands, but mutually reinforcing.

In the prep school context, this tension is particularly visible.

Prep schools are often exceptionally good at designing experiences. They offer a rich and varied programme—trips, projects, performances, enrichment—much of which is genuinely valuable.

But experience is also highly visible. It is what parents see, what schools can showcase, and what pupils remember most immediately. Knowledge, by contrast, is slower, less visible, and harder to demonstrate.

The risk, therefore, is not that experience is overvalued in itself, but that its visible nature allows it to interrupt the careful, deliberate sequencing of knowledge over time. We see this regularly: pupils often miss significant chunks of curriculum, either en masse or, even more disruptively, in small groups, for matches, events and competitions. These experiences are wonderful, but they physically pull children away from the classroom, fracturing the cumulative learning their teachers had painstakingly planned.

Alongside this sits a more fundamental issue: a lack of coherence.

At the upper end, schemes of work are often shaped by public examinations that pupils may no longer even sit. Elsewhere, they are the legacy of colleagues who have long since moved on, thoughtful and well-crafted in their time, but rooted in particular interests or specialisms rather than a shared, deliberate design.

It is relatively rare for schools to step back and review their academic provision at subject level. It is rarer still for them to look across the curriculum as a whole and ask more fundamental questions: how does it all fit together? What is the overall shape of what we are offering? And what kind of pupil are we hoping this curriculum will help form—what do we want our pupils to know, to understand, and to value?

If curriculum is more than a list of topics or a collection of experiences, then we need a definition that captures both intention and structure. I would suggest this:

A curriculum is a deliberately constructed, coherently sequenced selection of knowledge and experience, designed to shape what pupils come to know, understand and become.

Seen in this way, curriculum design becomes one of the most important forms of leadership in a school.

It is here that abstract values are translated into concrete decisions. It is here that questions about purpose become questions about practice.

These are not purely technical questions. They are philosophical ones, but they must be answered in practical terms, in timetables, schemes of work, lesson sequences and assessments.

Returning to the history classroom, I am struck by how much those early conversations anticipated this wider discussion.

When pupils begin to see history as a selection, they begin to understand that it could have been otherwise. That different choices might have led to a different story being told. That what is included—and what is omitted—shapes their understanding of the world.

The same is true of the curriculum as a whole.

What we choose to teach—and how we choose to teach it—matters. It shapes not only what pupils know, but how they think, what they value, and how they see themselves in relation to the world.

This is why the question “What is a curriculum?” is not a purely academic one.

It goes to the heart of what schools are for.

And like the study of history itself, it is not a question that admits of a single, settled answer. It is a question that must be returned to—argued over, refined and reconsidered—if the curriculum is to remain something we design, rather than something we simply inherit.

I suspect this is a question I’ll return to often.