Creative, vibrant and transformative opportunity
The 2024 review of curriculum and assessment provides an opportunity to open up schools and encourage the development of teaching that is creative, dynamic and transformative. This brief discussion justifies and provides a succinct summary of Future 3 (F3) as the means to break from the usual but suffocating pendulum swings in curriculum policy, between Futures 1 and 2.
First proposed in 2010[1], the ‘three futures’ model (explored in depth later) was developed to show the different epistemological foundations of three possible future curriculum scenarios. The F3 option was offered as an alternative to F1 (‘traditional’) and F2 (‘progressive’) scenarios. It was neither F1 nor F2 but somehow drew from both, embracing the principle of powerful disciplinary knowledge.
The notion of ‘powerful knowledge’ has, however, proved easy to appropriate and reduce into something altogether simpler and in fact retrograde. Thus, the knowledge-led reforms of the Gove years have in practice too frequently led to regressive F1 scenarios – with scripted lessons and teaching to the test among the other paraphernalia associated with ‘raising standards’.
With a new Labour Secretary of State, it is now time to articulate F3 as a functional possibility[2], for it has become increasingly clear that F3 scenarios are both desirable and possible to achieve, but only really through the proficient and sensitive curriculum making activities of teachers[3], a point Young and Lambert noted but arguably failed to develop fully at that time.[4]
Asking fundamental questions
Just how educationally ambitious does the curriculum and assessment review wish to be? The epochal challenges of our times, such as the rise of post-truth politics, conspiracy theories and the yet-to-be-understood educational implications of artificial intelligence (not to mention gross educational inequalities and injustices) demand an educational response. which in my view should take on the aspiration of F3 curriculum-making.