What Does This Unlock Later?
On curriculum coherence and intellectual development
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.