The science department at my school recently made a bold and refreshing decision. Rather than approaching Years 7 to 9 as a prelude to the real work that begins in examination years, they reframed Key Stage 3 as an opportunity to create scientists. They asked themselves what it would look like if students arrived in Year 12 already able to hypothesise, identify variables, construct methodologies and critique experimental design with confidence. They saw that true scientific literacy does not emerge from cramming factual content, nor from carving the curriculum into the traditional silos of biology, chemistry and physics. Instead, specialism comes from the systematic development of core disciplinary skills. Their curriculum is now a long arc designed to cultivate curious, rigorous thinkers who can work with evidence, reason with complexity and design investigations that reach beyond the immediate task.
This shift reflects a broader and more profound understanding of what curriculum is for. A curriculum that fosters deep learning is not about coverage. It is about transformation. It is about giving students the conceptual tools and disciplinary habits that allow them to think like historians, scientists, artists or geographers long before they reach the threshold of post-16 study. When a curriculum truly brings challenge to life, it empowers young people to inhabit the practices, language and ways of knowing that shape a field.
Powerful Knowledge and Why It Matters
Powerful knowledge is an entitlement for all students. It is knowledge that is specialised, carefully conceptualised and rooted in academic disciplines. It provides learners with frameworks that take them beyond personal experience, and, crucially, equips them with the intellectual tools to navigate complexity, question assumptions and understand the world more deeply. As Michael Young reminds us, schools are the only institutions that can, in principle, give every child access to this type of transformative knowledge.
Powerful knowledge involves several layers. First, students need foundational disciplinary concepts. In science, this might involve understanding hypothesis formation, isolating variables or interpreting data. Watching a bottle of soda erupt when mints are added is entertaining, but without the conceptual architecture behind the phenomenon, it is not scientific understanding. Daniel Willingham is clear that the ability to think critically depends on content knowledge. Students cannot reason effectively about topics they do not understand. They need a store of domain-specific knowledge that allows them to recognise what type of thinking a problem requires and which strategies to employ.
The next layer of powerful knowledge is the reliable map of how the world works. This involves content that may be cognitively distant from students’ lived experience but is essential for developing intellectual reach. Young notes that we respect students’ experience, but cannot allow curriculum to be limited by it. Quantum theory is one such example. It sits beyond what is perceptually recognisable, but it offers explanations and predictions that are central to the discipline. Curriculum must therefore take learners from the everyday to the abstract, from the familiar to the conceptual, through carefully planned instructional bridges.
Finally, powerful knowledge includes the capacity to acquire and evaluate knowledge independently. Students are not expected to make academic discoveries, but they must learn how to conduct inquiries, judge the trustworthiness of sources and make sense of information. Alaric Maude describes this as the ability to gain some power over one’s own knowledge. It is a kind of intellectual independence that frees students from relying solely on dominant narratives or single sources of authority.
This combination of disciplinary foundation, conceptual reach and the ability to manipulate and extend knowledge forms the bedrock of a curriculum that has depth and mastery at its core.
The Role of Technical Language
Language is central to disciplinary thinking. Technical vocabulary is not decorative or optional. It is the architecture that allows students to articulate ideas with precision and connect concepts with clarity. When students learn the specific terminology of a discipline, they begin to speak as insiders. Research shows that subject-specific language skills are core prerequisites for mathematical understanding, and the same is true across subjects. Technical language allows students to categorise, interpret and critique with accuracy.
Effective vocabulary instruction requires more than memorisation. The Education Endowment Foundation highlights the need for bespoke definitions that act as bridges between everyday meaning and disciplinary meaning, purposeful variation to situate terms in multiple contexts, immediate interaction with word meanings and deep processing. Techniques such as elaboration, where students expand a definition by adding examples, questions or analogies, build fluency and mastery. This explicit teaching of specialised vocabulary helps students engage with material at a high level, enabling them to shift from surface understanding to disciplinary insight.
Curriculum as Design, not Delivery
A curriculum that fosters mastery is carefully designed, not merely delivered. It does not rely on accumulated coverage, but on engineered coherence. It asks three fundamental questions:
- What are the enduring ideas and disciplinary practices students must master?
- How do we sequence knowledge so that each new concept rests meaningfully on the last?
- How do we create the cognitive conditions that allow challenge to flourish?
Design is therefore a question of deliberate architecture. Concepts are revisited in increasing depth. Skills grow in sophistication. Vocabulary becomes more specialised. Tasks evolve from structured to open, from guided to independent. Challenge is embedded, not bolted on.
A knowledge-rich curriculum is not about teaching more. It is about teaching purposefully. It provides the tools for understanding before expecting students to critique or create. It invites them into the discipline, then gradually hands over responsibility so they can generate, refine and interrogate knowledge themselves.
The Human Side of Curriculum Making
Curriculum is often discussed in theoretical terms, but behind the theory lies a deeply human endeavour. Teachers design curriculum not only to build knowledge, but to shape identity, empower thinking and open doors. I learned this most vividly in my first year as head of faculty at a start-up school.
The role felt enormous. I was responsible for creating a humanities new curriculum from Year 5 to Year 9. It was a blank slate. There was no inherited scheme of work, no folders of resources and no established culture to lean on. I remember sitting at my desk late into the evenings, surrounded by pages of ideas, trying to determine what truly mattered at this critical stage in students’ development. These were the years where learners began to form disciplinary habits that would stay with them for life. Years where curiosity widened, identity began to solidify and the cognitive foundations were being built. The responsibility felt weighty but exhilarating.
I was determined that our curriculum would do more than cover content. I wanted students to think historically, geographically and ethically. There was (perhaps controversially) activism at the core. I wanted them to grasp cause and consequence, to interpret sources, to ask better questions, to spot patterns across time and to articulate ideas with clarity and confidence. I wanted them to taste the world beyond the page. Much has been written about the idea of powerful knowledge, largely developed through the work of Michael Young. Young’s distinction between the knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge itself is vital. Knowledge of the powerful refers to content selected through the lens of dominant groups, historically white, Western, heteronormative and elite. A curriculum constructed solely around this legitimises certain world views and marginalises others. That year taught me that curriculum design is both intellectual craftsmanship and moral purpose. Every decision shapes a learner’s future trajectory.
The science department I work with now is doing exactly what I tried to do then. They are not preparing students for examinations. They are preparing them for a discipline. They are investing in the long arc of learning, not the short cycle of assessment. This is the heart of mastery.
Curriculum is an act of hope. It is a belief that what we teach, and how we teach it, can enlarge a young person’s world. It is a commitment to depth, to challenge and to the enduring power of knowledge to transform lives.
References
Education Endowment Foundation (2023) Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools. London, EEF.
Maude, A. (2015) What is Powerful Knowledge and Can it be Found in the Australian Curriculum? Geographical Education, 28, pp. 18–26.
Miller, E. and Krajcik, J. (2019) ‘Promoting Deep Learning’, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 56(3), pp. 310–325.
Reynolds, D. (2023) Vocabulary Instruction: Evidence and Practice. London, Education Endowment Foundation.
Smith, K. (2020) The Language of Disciplinary Thinking. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Ufer, S. and Bochnik, K. (2020) ‘The Role of Language in Developing Mathematical Competence’, Educational Studies in Mathematics, 103(2), pp. 147–165.
Vallance, J. (n.d.) Knowledge for the Long Arc: Proximal and Ultimate Purposes of Curriculum. Unpublished manuscript- curriculum handbook.
Willingham, D. (2007) Critical Thinking: Why It is So Difficult to Teach. American Educator, 31(2), pp. 8–19.
Young, M. (2014b) Knowledge and the Future School. London, Bloomsbury.Young, M. and Muller, J. (2014) Knowledge, Expertise and the Professions. London, Routledge.