Adults experience school vertically. Pupils experience it horizontally.

Why the intellectual transitions pupils make every day may matter more than we realise.

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.