What is a curriculum?
History, selection, and the hidden choices that shape what schools teach.
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.