This week’s publication of the Government’s Curriculum Review has renewed the conversation around what it truly means for education to be ambitious. The review highlights the importance of curriculum design that not only prepares students for assessment, but also cultivates curiosity, confidence, and critical thinking.
In our latest journal, we explored the importance of an ambitious curriculum in raising attainment at GCSE. Below, we explore four principles that underpin an ambitious approach to curriculum design.
1. Prioritise Intellectual Challenge
- Ambition begins with the belief that every student is capable of complex thought. A challenging curriculum builds in opportunities for reasoning, creativity, and evaluation, not simply recall.
- Intellectual challenge is about depth over coverage, creating space for extended thinking rather than accelerating through topics. This might mean spending more time unpicking a difficult concept, allowing students to question, hypothesise, and test their understanding, rather than pushing through to the next unit.
- High challenge must also be coupled with high support. Scaffolds should enable access and over time, these supports are deliberately removed so that students internalise processes and gain independence.
2. Connect Learning to the Real World
- Ambitious curricula make learning feel significant. They help students see that what they learn has relevance beyond the classroom, to their future studies, careers, and the wider world.
- This doesn’t mean adding superficial “real-life” tasks, but rather building meaning into the curriculum narrative: showing how disciplinary knowledge helps explain or shape the world. For example, science explains the systems underpinning life and technology; history develops our understanding of perspective and power; maths offers the tools to interpret uncertainty.
- When students recognise that their learning connects to issues of ethics, innovation, and global change, they can become more engaged. When they can see the relevance of the topic they are studying, they can feel a purpose which can, in turn, sustain their efforts.
3. Teach Threshold Concepts
- Every subject has pivotal ideas – “threshold concepts” – that transform understanding once grasped. These are the deep structures that make knowledge in that domain coherent. Ambitious curricula identify and foreground these thresholds, recognising that students often need to linger on them, revisit them, and reframe them before they take hold.
- This approach requires teachers to be subject experts, engaged in the topics and inspiring through their delivery. It means sequencing learning so that students encounter core ideas in multiple contexts, gradually refining their understanding. For example, a threshold concept might appear in simplified form early on, then re-emerge in increasingly abstract ways across the course.
4. Introduce Desirable Difficulties
- An ambitious curriculum embraces the fact that struggle is not a sign of failure, but part of the process of learning itself. Research on desirable difficulties reminds us that when learning feels slightly effortful, it tends to be more durable.
- Techniques such as retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and varied practice are valuable not because they make lessons harder, but because they make memory stronger. For teachers, this means designing sequences where forgetting and reactivation are built in, where students return to ideas after time has passed and must reconstruct meaning rather than repeat it.
- Over time, these “productive struggles” help students to think more metacognitively: to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning.
