Making Space for Deeper Learning

 

At the end of the last academic year, I wrote about the work of untangling the threads.

I reflected on several years of sustained work to create greater clarity and coherence across curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, and collaboration. 

When I first stepped into my role in 2022, many of those elements felt like threads within a tangled ball. They were all connected, but it was not immediately clear which thread to pull first, or whether pulling too hard in one direction might tighten the knot elsewhere.

I decided to begin with the written curriculum. Not because documentation itself was the goal, but because shared clarity about what students should understand, know, and be able to do provides the foundation for everything else. It allows teachers to make more purposeful decisions about learning design, assessment, feedback, access and challenge. It creates a common language for collaboration and helps connect what is intended, what is taught, what is assessed, and what students ultimately experience.

From this foundation, over time, those threads have begun to loosen.

As we begin a new academic year, my fifth in role, the next question is not simply how we continue to untangle them. It is what we do with the clarity we have created.

The next stage of the work is about making space.

From clarity to choice

Clarity allows us to see the curriculum more fully. It helps us identify the most important conceptual understandings, knowledge, and skills within a subject. It also makes repetition, fragmentation, and overload more visible. Once the curriculum is mapped and shared, we can begin to see where too much has accumulated, where learning is being rushed and where breadth may be limiting depth.

This is where curriculum leadership requires more than organisation. It requires choice. 

Over the past four years, one principle has repeatedly shaped thinking:

Do less, better.

This does not mean reducing expectations, avoiding complexity or offering students an impoverished or diminished curriculum. It certainly does not mean making learning easier. It means being more disciplined about what deserves students’ time, teachers’ attention, and the limited cognitive space available within any learning experience.

Our taught curriculum had become increasingly crowded. Content had accumulated over time. Units included more concepts, topics, assessments, and activities than the available time could meaningfully support. New priorities had been added, often for good reasons, but older expectations had rarely been removed. Teachers were working extraordinarily hard. Students were completing a great deal. Yet completing more did not necessarily mean understanding more.

If we want learning to be deep rather than simply broad, we have to be willing to make choices about what we retain, what we redesign and what we remove.

The limitations of coverage

Curriculum planning often begins with the question:

What do we need to cover?

It is an understandable question. Schools have external frameworks, subject requirements, and agreed learning outcomes. Teachers are responsible for ensuring that students encounter important knowledge and disciplinary practices. However, coverage can become a misleading measure of curriculum success.

A teacher may have taught the planned 'content'. A student may have completed the activities. A team may have reached the end of the unit on schedule. None of these things necessarily tells us whether students have developed a secure, connected, and transferable understanding.

Students can encounter a large amount of content without being able to explain its significance, connect it to previous learning, or apply it in unfamiliar situations. They may remember information long enough to complete an assessment but struggle to use it beyond the context in which it was taught. A taught curriculum can therefore be extensive without being intellectually rich.

Deep learning takes time. Students need opportunities to revisit significant ideas, explore them through different contexts, make connections, encounter misconceptions, receive feedback, and revise their thinking.

They also need opportunities to use what they have learned when the task, context, or question is no longer familiar.

When a curriculum is overloaded, these opportunities are often the first things to disappear. Teachers feel pressure to move forward. Reflection becomes brief. Feedback is given, but students have little time to own it or act on it. Transfer becomes something we hope will happen rather than something we deliberately design. We retain the content but lose the conditions through which students make meaning from it.

What do we want students to become more capable of?

Perhaps the more important curriculum question is not only what students need to encounter, but:

What do we want students to become more capable of doing?

Do we want them to become more capable of explaining their reasoning?

Of asking purposeful questions?

Of recognising patterns and making connections?

Of evaluating the quality of evidence?

Of selecting and adapting strategies?

Of responding to feedback without waiting for a teacher to direct every next step?

Of applying their understanding in a context they have not seen before?

These capabilities develop through repeated, carefully sequenced opportunities. They cannot be secured through a single lesson or assessed once at the end of a unit.

Students become more capable of evaluating evidence because they see the process modelled, examine different examples, practise making judgements, receive feedback, and apply increasingly sophisticated criteria over time. 

They become more capable of transfer because they first build secure understanding and then use that understanding in situations where the surface features have changed.

They become more independent not because support is suddenly removed, but because learning has been designed so that responsibility can gradually shift from teacher to student.

This development cannot be rushed.

When every lesson introduces something new, and every unit competes to include more, students may complete a great deal without becoming significantly more capable.

Beginning with capability changes the planning conversation. It moves us from asking only what the teacher will deliver towards considering what students will develop, how that development will be made visible and what conditions it requires.

Subtraction as an act of design

The power of subtraction does not lie in removing content indiscriminately. It lies in identifying what matters most and ensuring that it has enough space to be understood.

This might mean reducing the number of units so that important ideas can be explored more fully. It might mean selecting fewer conceptual understandings and giving students repeated opportunities to examine, refine and transfer them. It might mean replacing several disconnected activities with a more coherent sequence that deliberately builds knowledge, skill, and independence. It might mean assessing less frequently but gathering more meaningful evidence of learning. It might mean removing duplication across units or subjects. It might mean simplifying instructions, platforms and routines so that students can direct their cognitive energy towards the learning rather than navigating unnecessary procedural complexity. It might also mean letting go of an activity, text, or assessment that is familiar and well-liked but no longer serves learning as effectively as it once did.

These decisions are difficult because schools develop layers over time. Most additions begin as reasonable responses to genuine needs. Very little enters a curriculum without a purpose.

The difficulty is that worthwhile elements can still compete with one another.

Subtraction therefore requires professional judgement. It asks us to distinguish between what is valuable and what is most valuable. It asks us to consider opportunity cost: what students are not able to do because their time and attention are already occupied.

Removing something can feel like diminishing the curriculum. In reality, purposeful subtraction can protect its integrity. It creates space for discussion, practice, feedback, revision, reflection, and transfer. It creates space for teachers to respond to evidence rather than continuing through a predetermined sequence regardless of what students understand.

Most importantly, it creates space for students to think.

Productive and unnecessary complexity

Making space does not mean removing intellectual complexity.

Students should encounter difficult ideas. They should grapple with ambiguity, consider competing perspectives and engage with questions that do not have immediate answers.

This is productive complexity. It is part of rigorous learning.

However, productive intellectual challenge is often surrounded by unnecessary complexity.

Students may be expected to manage multiple platforms, changing routines, competing deadlines, lengthy instructions, excessive task requirements or scaffolds that obscure the central thinking. Significant cognitive energy is consumed before they reach the learning itself.

Greater clarity does not reduce rigour.

Clear instructions, coherent sequencing, consistent routines and purposeful modelling make sophisticated thinking more accessible. They allow students to focus on the challenge that matters rather than on decoding the structure surrounding it.

Our instinct when students struggle is often to add something: another explanation, another resource, another scaffold, another step. Sometimes that is necessary. At other times, the more effective question is not, “What else do students need?” It is, “What might be getting in their way?”

Priorities require protection

Schools are often very good at identifying priorities. We are less consistent at deciding what will stop. Yet a priority is not genuinely a priority if it is simply added to everything that already exists.

If we say that deep learning matters, we have to protect the time it requires.

If feedback matters, students need time to interpret and use it.

If transfer matters, students need opportunities to apply understanding in unfamiliar contexts.

If student agency matters, there must be meaningful decisions for students to make.

If inclusion matters, learning must be designed with learner variability in mind from the outset, rather than relying solely on adjustments after barriers become apparent.

If collaboration matters, teachers need protected time to examine curriculum, discuss evidence and refine learning together.

Each commitment has implications. Each requires us to consider not only what we will introduce, but what we are prepared to reduce, redesign or remove.

That is the discipline of prioritisation.

Continuing to pull the right threads

Untangling the Threads was a reflection on sustained change and the coherence that had begun to emerge from several years of collective work.

Making Space for Deeper Learning is the next stage of that same journey.

Once the threads become clearer, we can see which are essential, which have become tangled through unnecessary complexity and which may no longer contribute sufficiently to the learning we are trying to create.

The work is not about making the curriculum smaller simply for the sake of simplicity. It is about creating a curriculum that is more intentional, more connected and more likely to result in learning that lasts.

As we begin this academic year, the question is not whether we can do more. Schools have always demonstrated a remarkable capacity to do more. The more important question is whether doing more will help students learn more deeply.

This year, I hope we continue to ask:

What do we want students to become more capable of?

What knowledge and understanding will make those capabilities possible?

What learning experiences will allow them to practise, connect, revise and transfer?

What conditions must we protect?

And what are we willing to remove so that the learning we value most has space to grow?

The threads are still unfolding. Our responsibility now is to ensure that we do not fill the space we have worked so carefully to create.