Exploring Learning

In my last post, I wrote about making space for deeper learning. I reflected on a principle that has increasingly shaped my thinking about curriculum design: do less, better. Not less ambition or lower expectations, but greater intentionality about what deserves students' time, teachers' attention and the limited cognitive space available for learning. This week, my reading has pushed that thinking one step further. If we are going to remove things from learning, we need to be very clear about what we are removing, because there is an important difference between removing a barrier and removing the thinking. Cognitive load has been something of a red thread woven through my work with teachers and learners since I first stepped into my current role. It has shaped conversations about curriculum breadth, lesson design, assessment, instruction, scaffolding, collaboration and the increasing number of systems students are expected to navigate. Much of our curriculum work over the pas...

  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 stud...

Conversations about technology in schools often begin from a place of legitimate concern. Families and educators are right to ask questions about distraction, wellbeing, social media, sleep, attention, and the amount of time young people spend in front of screens. These concerns should not be dismissed. They matter because children’s digital lives are complex, and schools have a responsibility to think carefully about how technology shapes learning, relationships, identity, and wellbeing.  However, one distinction is often blurred: Unmanaged recreational screen use is not the same as intentionally designed digital learning. Passive scrolling is not the same as collaborative inquiry. Social media consumption is not the same as learners using digital tools to research, create, communicate, receive feedback, organise ideas, or participate in meaningful communities. When all screen-based experiences are treated as the same, schools risk making decisions based on anxiety rather than on ...

Belonging is not granted after learners prove they can access the curriculum. Belonging is created through the way curriculum, instruction, assessment, relationships, and evidence-informed responses are designed. That idea has been sitting with me deeply. In schools, we often talk about belonging as something relational, cultural, or pastoral. Whilst it is, of course, all of those things, I also think belonging is a curriculum and learning design issue. Learners experience belonging, or exclusion, through the tasks they are given, the examples they see, the feedback they receive, the ways they are invited to participate, and the assumptions adults make about what they can do. Inclusion, then, cannot sit only in intervention structures or individual support plans. These matter, of course; some learners need targeted and specialist support, and schools need strong systems to provide it. But if inclusion begins only after a learner struggles, we have already accepted a design problem as a...