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The Wonder Years

The Wonder Years was a curriculum conference that was held in central London on Saturday 26th January 2019, with the aim of helping attendees to discuss what a knowledge-based curriculum is, and what it could look like at their school. The PowerPoint presentations from the afternoon sessions are now available online for anyone to download.

This event was inspired by a comment the great Clare Sealy made at our inaugural conference. She said that if we accept that Reception and Key Stage 1 is about teaching pupils “to write and not bite”, and that Year 10 onwards is inevitably driven by exam specs, why can’t the time in between be “The Wonder Years”?

She described a glorious period where children are taught a curriculum jam-packed full of the very best that has been thought, said, and done, so that they enter the latter part of their schools with a broad, deep and rich base of cultural & communal knowledge, to draw upon in later life and, yes, exams.

The event saw keynote speeches from Amanda Spielman and Nick Gibb, as well as a wonderful panel consisting of Michael Young, Christine Counsell, Ian Bauckham, Amelia Walker and Clare Sealy. The day was then split into various sessions aimed at people with varying levels of experience with knowledge-led curricula, and PowerPoints from all but one of these sessions are available online.

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