Culture as a catalyst for curricular development

Lekha Sharma, Avanti Schools Trust, UK Curriculum leaders are school administrators who are both instructional leaders and change agents. This model encompasses multiple responsibilities, including enhancing knowledge, subject knowledge expertise and classroom practices to positively impact on curriculum (Glatthorn et al., 2011). Curriculum leadership is complex for many reasons. One of these reasons is that any curricular development work is embedded in a cultural ‘ecosystem’, defined by the sociocultural structures, relationships, norms and interactions within a staff body. Strong school culture, then, is imperative to the work of school improvement (Sharma, 2022). Teacher agency, for example, is not just about individual teachers but rather sits within an ecological approach that recognises the importance of the environmental conditions (Priestley et al., 2015). This school culture very often shapes curriculum development in ways that can’t always be easily articulated or add