A coherent curriculum: A consideration of the IBDP as a model for curriculum design

Writing in the Autumn 2018 edition of Impact, Tim Oates effectively asserts that the ‘oppositional discourse’ maintained through a debate between knowledge and skills within a curriculum fails to ‘reflect the most effective pedagogy from around the world’ (Oates, 2018, p. 16). With an emerging focus on building powerful knowledge (Young, 2013), there is a danger that the national mood will, rather predictably, swing reactively in the reverse direction to previous educational discourse. What is meant by this is that unless we, as Young himself points out, seek to find another way (Young, 2018), we eschew development of some elements of education over others. In practical terms, the emphasis on standardised assessment has the greatest impact on curriculum emphasis. What is meant by this is that, in the reality of a school, curriculum decisions will be motivated by those priorities delineated through terminal assessment. Anecdotally, the reformed GCSEs are more difficult than t