Curriculum design in discrete subjects: What are we missing?

CHARLIE CUTLER, HEAD OF PRIMARY CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT, UNITED LEARNING, UK TANYA HUGHES, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, UNITED LEARNING, UK The importance of designing and organising a curriculum around discrete subjects is well established. Among others, Christine Counsell has argued that each subject’s substantive and disciplinary knowledge needs to be placed at the heart of the curriculum (Counsell, 2018), and the research behind Ofsted’s Education Inspection Framework (2021a) echoes this message. Instead of planning arbitrary topics like ‘chocolate’ or ‘mysteries’, subject leads in primary schools now plan history, geography or music curricula discretely. But do we lose something with this siloed approach to curriculum design? This article examines how looking across subjects to make meaningful connections can help all students to know and remember more; it also sets out how schools can embed this in their curriculum design. While the examples used relate predominantly to pri