Building a World-Class Curriculum: Key Insights for Educators

The independent Curriculum and Assessment Review has provided an ambitious roadmap for enhancing the educational experience for all children and young people. The final report, "Building a world-class curriculum for all," focuses on evolution, not revolution, aiming to strengthen the core of the English education system while tackling long-standing challenges in curriculum design, assessment, and equity. At Developing Experts, we were excited to explore this review’s findings and consider both what we have already achieved and how we can continue to improve and adapt our content to ensure it reflects the recommendations the DfE have accepted.

Foundational Principles for a Refreshed Curriculum

The review sets out key curriculum principles to guide the revision of all Programmes of Study:

• Aspirational and knowledge-rich: The curriculum must remain an aspirational, engaging, and demanding offer that reflects high expectations, retaining a knowledge-rich approach. Skills development should occur in conjunction with knowledge and be appropriate for each subject discipline.
• Depth and mastery: Content should be structured to support students in mastering core concepts, ensuring they have sufficient space to build knowledge and deepen their understanding.
• Coherence and specificity: Curriculum coherence should be an organising principle, with clearly presented vertical core concepts (sequencing within subjects) and ensuring horizontal coherence (links across subjects). For Foundation subjects, each subject should specify the essential substantive knowledge and skills required to aid clarity and continuity.
• A curriculum for all: The curriculum must reflect our diverse society and the contributions of people from all backgrounds, ensuring all children and young people feel represented. This should be supported by reviewing and updating all Programmes of Study and GCSE subject content.
• Teacher empowerment: The process must ensure the professional autonomy of teachers is maintained and that the curriculum is ambitious but teachable within a typical school timetable. The Review also recommends developing the national curriculum as a digital product for easier navigation across key stages and disciplines.

At Developing Experts, our work is guided by the belief that the curriculum must be ambitious and aspirational for all pupils. Every lesson by Developing Experts inspires pupils to become analytical, inquisitive and diverse thinkers. Building curiosity and long-term knowledge retention is at the heart of our curriculum approach. All of the material supplied by Developing Experts is aligned with the National Curriculum and focuses on developing both substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Using our resources, pupils move beyond the National Curriculum, growing and adapting with each new lesson. We ground abstract concepts in real-life scenarios, and our expert and career films from our sponsors ensure pupils see the enormous opportunities that the diverse careers in STEAM offer.

Key Subjects: Science, Geography, and History

The Review identified significant opportunities for improvement within core subjects.

Science

The Review emphasises that Science education must be based on the fundamental concepts of each individual discipline and calls for more cohesion and consistency across the primary curriculum. A key recommendation is that the curriculum must explicitly develop students' understanding of climate change and sustainability and the global efforts to tackle them. Crucially, the Review states that the curriculum must more clearly articulate the purpose and expectations of high-quality practical work.

Our Alignment:

• Practical investigation is central to how Developing Experts approaches our curriculum design. By ensuring students develop disciplinary skills and scientific knowledge concurrently with core content, they not only solidify their learning but also gain an appreciation for the excitement and creativity inherent in scientific discovery.
• We are proactively addressing the need for relevant content: our science curriculum already embraces the importance of teaching pupils about climate change and sustainability, and we look forward to developing this further.
• We prioritise illustrating the pathway to employment: our expert and career films make abstract scientific concepts tangible by connecting them to real-life scenarios, effectively showcasing the enormous opportunities pupils have in their career choices.

Geography

The Review recommends making minor refinements to the Programmes of Study to streamline content and explicitly calls for embedding climate change and sustainability more explicitly across different key stages and sections. Furthermore, geographical education should focus on effectively developing disciplinary knowledge at Key Stage 3, such as geographical enquiry, spatial reasoning, and the use of digital tools.

Our Alignment:

• We are already meeting the call for more focused climate education: our geography curriculum currently embraces the importance of teaching pupils about climate change and sustainability, and our sponsors reflect this.
• We support embedding disciplinary and applied knowledge: our platform utilises expert and career films to ground abstract geographical concepts in real-life scenarios, highlighting the use of data and critical thinking needed for diverse careers.

History

The Review seeks to adjust the History Programmes of Study to explicitly improve the understanding and application of disciplinary knowledge and skills. Crucially, it recommends supporting the wider teaching of History’s inherent diversity and inclusion. Teachers need clarity to reflect the complexities and diversities of our national history.

Our Alignment:

• Our new history curriculum is being developed with a focus on critical thinking, making sure pupils consider where our knowledge of the past comes from, and how reliable historical sources are from an early age.
• We are committed to the principle that the curriculum must reflect our diverse society: our history curriculum will also reflect the "innate diversity of British history".

The Critical Role of Oracy

The Review explicitly recommends introducing an oracy framework to support practice and complement existing literacy frameworks. This is driven by evidence showing that skills related to speaking, listening, and communication are vital for learning, critical thinking, enhanced engagement, and success in future study and the workplace. A lack of clarity has led to inconsistent implementation of spoken language requirements across the current curriculum.

Our Alignment:

• Developing oracy has been at the forefront of our work throughout our science review and while writing our new geography and history curricula.
• We are keenly aware of the importance of communication and collaboration skills in succeeding in the future job market.
• We have tailored our lesson plans and mission assignments to provide many opportunities to develop oracy and look forward to the framework to help structure our future work on it.

Ultimately, the success of these proposals hinges not on ambition alone, but on a pragmatic approach to implementation. We hope the DfE will engage closely with teachers and schools to develop guidance and funding that acknowledges the real-world pressures of curriculum breadth, timetabling, and recruitment, ensuring that any changes genuinely enhance—rather than hinder—the excellent education our pupils deserve.