Review by Stephen Lane

Everyone loves a gimmick, right? At time of writing, my favourite TV show has undergone a regeneration: as we waved farewell to Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor Who, we were met with a familiar face exclaiming, “What? What?! WHAT?!”

To avoid spoilers, I won’t name the actor who has stepped back into the role other than to say it isn’t Tom Baker. Within hours of the broadcast of Whitaker’s final episode, the official social media accounts of BBC Doctor Who also revealed a ‘new’ logo, which long-standing fans of the show instantly recognised as a revamp of the one used for most of Tom Baker’s tenure in the 1970s.

I was ecstatic. I love a bit of nostalgia. It’s the same logo as before, but better, more refined. What’s more, it will look brilliant on the menu screen of Disney+ where the show will now be found outside the UK.  Regeneration is a clever gimmick that allows the show to remain the same, while simultaneously completely reinventing itself. The cycle goes on.

And so it should be with a school’s curriculum, argues Martin Robinson in his latest book, Curriculum Revolutions, which offers a ‘curriculum wheel’ that, according to the blurb, ‘leads you through a continuous cycle of planning, designing, delivering, reflecting upon and reviewing your curriculum’. The book accomplishes this goal fairly well, offering a tool to help teachers and curriculum leaders to continually evaluate and re-evaluate the material being taught in classrooms and how it interacts with pedagogical and assessment practices.

Robinson uses the conceit of a wheel – a proverbial subject of perennial reinvention – to conceptualise the process of curriculum design, implementation and review, with the gimmick being an actual ‘pop out and keep’ wheel that you can use with a paper fastener through the middle. This is amusing enough, but don’t let that put you off the more serious discussions at the heart of the book.

Robinson has a good understanding of curriculum ideas and has written extensively about them in his previous titles, Trivium 21c (2013) and Curriculum: Athena Versus the Machine (2019). This book is not a sequel to those, which were perhaps more philosophical in nature; Curriculum Revolutions is more grounded in the practicalities of curriculum design. While there are some philosophical considerations about the nature of knowledge and who owns it in, for example, the chapter on ‘Knowledge Trees’, the discussions are always related back to how teachers can practically use them.

For example, Robinson challenges us to think about how we sequence our curriculum: What needs to be learnt when? In complex subjects, where do you begin? ‘Where would you place Thales in your curriculum?’ asks Robinson. He gives the analogy of the Dewey decimal system employed in libraries, suggesting that ‘the broader subjects should come before you dive into the more detailed “geeky” knowledge’.  

The chapter on ‘Curriculum Shapes as Cognitive Architecture’ was of particular note for me, challenging me to think about the organisational elements of my own teaching. Robinson is keen to talk about subject narratives and ‘curriculum stories’, but goes beyond this in thinking about multi-spiral shaped curriculum planning that helps to form ‘webs of meaning’ for pupils – Robinson calls these ‘interleaved/dialectical spirals’ – in which he shows how ideas can be revisited, but also compared and tested against each other.

The design cycle is nothing new, and neither is the idea of a spiralling curriculum. Indeed the logo for the 2007 National Curriculum under New Labour resembles nothing if not the interleaved spirals Robinson is presenting here.

But regeneration is in the very nature of curriculum – national or otherwise. That is Robinson’s point here, so it’s no surprise to find old ideas come back. Better, more refined. There will always be those who exclaim: “What? What?! WHAT?!” just as there will always be suckers for a gimmick. But there’s no sense wishing for Tom Baker back when you can have Ncuti Gatwa.

On the whole, Curriculum Revolutions is not a dense book, and this fairly quick read is definitely worth teachers taking some time over.