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How to design a curriculum
Be clear on how to design an effective curriculum with this guidance on 3 core principles to bear in mind, plus resources and examples to help you improve your curriculum design.
Contents
What is curriculum design?
Curriculum design is, broadly speaking, how you interpret a designated curriculum in the context of your pupils.
This means taking the schemes of work and end-of-year expectations and delivering them while taking into account:
- Your local environment
- The expertise of staff
- The traditions of your school
It’s likely that for you, the “designated curriculum” will be the National Curriculum. However, the above principles also apply to academies and international schools that may use a different curriculum as a framework.
3 core principles of curriculum design
1. The curriculum should be developmental
This means it should:
For example, a child may learn about light and dark in Key Stage 1, but as they move through school they would learn about areas such as how light is created, electricity,
- Anti-racism: how to review and re-frame your curriculum
- Bloom's Taxonomy: summaries
- Classroom displays: effective practice
- Covering LGBT content in your curriculum
- Curriculum accessibility for pupils with SEND: checklist
- Curriculum audit: gender and LGBTQ+ inclusivity
- Curriculum maps: templates and examples
- Curriculum provision in PRUs and APs
- English genres in the National Curriculum
- How to promote British values across your school
- How to review your curriculum
- Implementing a knowledge-rich curriculum
- PE teaching hours: guidance and examples
- Quality first teaching: guidance
- Relationships and sex education (RSE): curriculum audit
- Requests to withdraw a pupil from RE
- School reopening and getting learning back on track: where to start
- Whole-school curriculum audit
- Withdrawing pupils from subjects
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