Centralised Curricula in History – A Panacea?
With the development of multi-academy trusts of varying sizes and geographic reaches, along with the focus on curriculum triggered by the changes to the OFSTED framework ushered in by Amanda Spielman, there has been a big move towards the development of what I am going to refer to as ‘centralised curricula’ across trusts.
It’s probably helpful to clarify first exactly what I mean by that, with specific reference to my own subject of History, as I think this is a term interpreted in different ways by different people and indeed there are varying degrees of centralisation at play.
In its most extreme form, a centralised History curriculum (or indeed in any subject) is one where, across a group of schools, the exact same knowledge is being taught, in the same sequence, implemented via an aligned pedagogical approach which includes the use of common resources and teaching techniques, across all year groups, leading almost certainly to some form of common summative assessment at various points across that journey. There may be some marginal wiggle room for adaptation (for example if you are teaching a very low prior attaining class) but broadly speaking everyone is teaching the same thing in the same sequence. That is the model to which I have essentially been working in for the last three years.
In some organisations, there may be elements of decentralisation within the above. It may be that the knowledge to be taught is prescribed, but that developing the resources (by that I mean the Powerpoint slide decks, or perhaps the texts to be used) or (particularly in Key Stage 4, the sequencing) is up to the individual schools (a bit like GCSE or A-level History where we have a list of specified content to teach working towards common assessments, but how one school might organise that is different to another one). It may be that in some trusts there are certain ‘core’ topics that must be taught, with scope for optionality alongside that, perhaps reflecting the geographic or ethnic context of the individual school.
Centralised curricula have been ‘sold’ to teachers on one key premise. They are a massive workload reducer. No longer do teachers have to stay up into the middle of the night fiddling around with Powerpoints or trying to find some sources to use for a particular lesson or scripting an explanation because things are done for you by the team of people (or it may be a single person) responsible for developing the curriculum across your organisation. Now you can focus on making sure the intended curriculum lands with your students and you can tweak and adjust as needed for their needs.
Centralised curricula are also ‘sold’ to senior leaders as being a good thing on the basis that they will help raise the floor of the teaching in a department. This is particularly attractive if you work in a context where recruiting teachers is extremely difficult and you are reliant on temporary or non-subject specialist staff. The centralised curriculum ensures at least a baseline of quality input going towards the students, and if the teacher takes some time before the lesson to check the resources and do a bit of intellectual preparation, then they should be good to go to at least teach competently.
Of course, it is obvious enough to see some of the ways in which these selling points can lead to drawbacks. If you say that centralised curricula are beneficial because they lead to reduced workload, it is sending a message that that work of preparing the lesson is done and all the teacher needs to do is plug and play. These can lead to some pretty shoddy teaching where if you are watching and know what to look for, it can be quite apparent that the teacher hasn’t even looked at all the slides in advance of the lesson beginning (a problem no doubt familiar to PSHE leaders who have been running highly centralised curricula for a lot longer than many academic subject teams have). Teachers can be visibly surprised by what comes next on the slideshow sometimes.
There are workarounds, such as preparing short explainer videos or podcasts, or producing extensive curriculum documentation, or regular Teams meetings, to help provide teachers with greater insight into the curriculum intent. But then the challenge becomes making sure teachers engage with that material and then act on it. How do we, as leaders, help to make that happen without building in patronising and punitive ‘checking’ regimes? Clearly having high professional expectations is important, but we’ve also just said a minute ago that this curriculum was meant to reduce workload, and now you want me to adapt these materials and listen to some podcasts and so on and so forth well, that’s all extra time that I could be spending with my own kids or my partner!
Similarly, you can have all the supporting materials in the world, but if the teacher (perhaps because they are a non-specialist or highly inexperienced) lacks understanding of how best to make use of those resources, or just the simple professional desire to get better, then we are also going to have a problem. What happens when a student asks a left-field question, or when it’s apparent that the materials provided are too easy or too hard? Does the teacher have the knowledge and skill to be responsive on the fly?
It’s very as leaders, and I have been guilty of this, of saying that teachers ‘need to adapt the curriculum for their students’. But that is easier said than done. Let’s say your curriculum has a heavy focus on reading high quality material as part of the pedagogy. A worthy thing to do in a History lesson, for sure. But if the material for my Year 7 class is maybe pitched at a 12–13 year old level (ie just above a standard Year 7 age to put them out of their comfort zone) and your students have an average reading age of an 8 year old, then adapting that lesson is going to take quite some time, and so your argument that this curriculum is going to reduce my workload doesn’t hold as much water.
It can also be demotivating and deskilling for some teachers to work under a highly centralised curricular system. You may be raising the floor but potentially lowering the ceiling. Particularly in History (perhaps also English), where ‘what’ knowledge we should be teaching is highly contested and varied between different schools and trusts, this can become a problem. This problem accrues where the trust becomes larger and more geographically widespread. Clearly, as History teachers there are things we have to teach that we don’t particularly enjoy teaching. We can’t get 100% of what we want. But when it feels as though the choices are imposed on us, that, ceteris paribus, might make the autonomous single academy school up the road look a little more enticing if a vacancy came up.
There’s also a question about you build in responsiveness to local need and context. If you teach in a school, like I do, with a large number of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage children, you might think it appropriate to focus a Year 9 twentieth century unit on the Partition of India in the 1940s. You might, from another perspective, think students need greater emphasis on global history than the British ‘island story’ (or, indeed, vice-versa!) However if your curriculum planner, based in another part of the country wants to focus on something else with that time, and the trust-wide assessment will assess that as well, you are a bit stuck and not able to be responsive. When you become distant from where the decisions are being made about the thing that occupies a lot of your time, that as an educated professional History teacher can be a bit frustrating.
Unsurprisingly, to answer my initial question, I don’t think centralised curricula are a panacea (in History) but they are no doubt for many of us here to stay and indeed do offer opportunities and benefits as well as drawbacks. In many cases they have significantly helped to raise standards in schools and provide students with a better offer than they would otherwise have. My own contention would be that centralised curricula can be a very good thing, but are not a silver bullet for helping teacher workload or improving the quality of education or some other specific benefit. In particular, doing it well, at a large scale, in a subject like History, is extremely tricky and beset with traps. Effective implementation of such is a years-long task. So my next post is going to look at how we might solve some of these problems within schools both as teachers and as leaders supporting teachers for the benefit of our students. At my current rate of blogging that’ll probably be in May 2026 though!
