Deepening the Curriculum

June 18, 2025

At the Havering Festival of Education where I was drawing on the headlines of the research to help learners know more, remember more and be able to do more, we talked about the importance of concepts.

I believe that identifying the concepts in the content we teach has several benefits.

The first is that it makes planning the curriculum more coherent. There are big ideas that run across each domain that provide the unifying story threads which help our pupils make sense of the content. Without them, we are likely to end up in cul de sacs with nothing to stitch the content together.

As Steven Pinker argues:

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

When we are able to make the connections, it becomes easier for us to talk to our pupils about how to make sense of new material. This doesn’t need to be heavy duty and it doesn’t need to be done in one go.

It also helps when asked the question ‘Why are you teaching this? Why now?’ While this might be a question often asked on inspection, that’s not the main reason for asking it. The main reason is to help our pupils to make connections between what they are learning now with what has gone before.

The concepts, as ‘holding baskets’ provide the gateways into the subjects and for this reason it’s important to pay attention to them.

There are two main places we can go to, in order to identify the big ideas:

The first is the national curriculum importance statements and the second is the high-quality texts we use to teach the subject.

I explore this in the Huh Curriculum Leaders course, now on Myatt & Co, access with a group or annual subscription.