Rethinking curriculum development: The risks of driving standardisation at scale, and alternative approaches to building teacher professionalism

AMARBEER SINGH GILL, AMBITION INSTITUTE & GREENSHAW RESEARCH SCHOOL, UK NICK POINTER, AMBITION INSTITUTE, UK Introduction In the past decade, there has been significant emphasis on curriculum in UK schooling (Allen et al., 2021). Prior to this, research suggested that curriculum thinking had  been under-prioritised in favour of generic approaches to teaching and learning (e.g. Ofsted, 2019a) and that there had been a narrowing of the curriculum in response to accountability pressures (Oates, 2017; Spielman, 2017,. Six years later, while policy changes like the reformed Ofsted Education Inspection Framework (EIF) (2019a) appear to have led to increased curriculum activity in schools (DfE, 2025), research suggests that there is still significant variability in outcomes based on socio-economic status (Beynon, 2024). In this article, we examine some of the approaches that schools and trusts have taken to curriculum development in the light of policy reforms and evaluate the impac