The real barriers to engagement: why schools must rethink leadership, not curriculum
Why blaming the curriculum misses the point and what leaders can do to make teaching both rigorous *and* engaging
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in response to a comment from the CEO of Lift Schools, Becks Boomer-Clark, blaming ‘the curriculum’ for falling attendance.
She told the House of Lords Social Mobility committee,
We’ve got a more discerning group of young people who are telling us, by voting with their feet, that what we’re offering many of them day-in-day-out in school, does not match their needs. … It’s not relevant to where they are or what their future aspirations are, and it’s something we’ve really got to address, and I think probably with some quite radical solutions.
When challenged about what these radical solutions might be she suggested something a bit vague about climate change, sustainability and “what the future might look like”.
Happily, she’s now clarified what she meant. In a Schools Week article she expresses surprise, albeit of the “wry” variety, that anyone might have “rushed” to “frame” her comments as “anti-knowledge”.1
it turns out we were all wrong because what she meant all along was that she “believe[s] deeply in the importance and power of knowledge. But we must also confront how we teach it, and how we make it stick.” I think we’d be hard pressed to find anyone to argue against that. She goes on to point out that we cannot force children to attend school and so “we have to look to ourselves. In the face of this more discerning, demanding audience, it’s for us to work out how we teach “the best that has been thought and said in the world” not just rigorously, but imaginatively and engagingly too.”
Absolutely. But then, mystifyingly, she goes on to say,
Critics of this line of thinking claim it risks undermining the case for rigour. They are wrong. Strong curricula and strong engagement are not at odds. We must marry academic excellence with teaching that sparks curiosity, makes space for discussion and connects big ideas to the real world young people inhabit, now and in the future. [my emphasis]
Who are these critics? Who is arguing that children being engaged in a rich curriculum will undermine rigour? Does she really think that there are “trads” out there defending some imaginary “frontline” where children being disengaged by the curriculum is considered rigorous? If there is anyone who would like to make the argument that teaching should not spark curiosity, make space for discussion and connect what’s taught in the curriculum to the ‘read world,’ I invite them to make it the comments.
Back in the real world that both young people and everyone else inhabits, everyone would like to teach in a way that results in children being excited about the curriculum, making meaning from it and being able to use the knowledge they’re taught to think new, previously unthinkable thoughts.
If I’m right and there aren’t actually phantom “trads” and “critics” working to prevent the curriculum from being taught engagingly, then it’s helpful to adopt a surplus model to school leadership and ask what’s stopping teachers from teaching in this way.
Why isn’t teaching engaging?
“Systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get.”
If one teacher’s lessons are not engaging, this might be an issue with that teacher. If many teachers’ lessons are not engaging there will be systematic pressures responsible for creating the results you’re getting.
When I work with schools, the criticism leaders most often make of their school is that ‘students are too passive’ and that they are not engaged in lessons. This seems to be endemic and my observations bear it out.
Some months ago, I visited a school in which, during an hour spent popping into different lessons, I didn’t see a single teacher ask a single question. They told students stuff, gave them instructions and corrected mistakes but at no point was any attempt made to find out whether anyone was listening or understood anything that had happened. By the simple expedient of asking a sample of students whether they could tell me what the teacher had just said, or whether the task they had been given made sense, I was able to quickly establish that a good number of students were neither attending or understanding what was taking place.
That’s an extreme example, but I see similar things in pretty much every school I visit: in almost every classroom, significant numbers of students have disengaged from the lesson being taught. And, even worse, in many cases teachers are not even aware of this fact.
How does this happen? I’d like to suggest a number of possibilities, none of which have much to do with whether the curriculum itself is ‘knowledge-rich,’ or whether teachers believe in ‘sparking curiosity.’ The problem, as ever, lies in the conditions in which teachers are expected to work.
1. Behaviour
In too many classrooms, teachers are forced to battle for attention. In these environments, talk of sparking curiosity or connecting learning to the wider world feels almost cruel. When you’re spending every lesson trying to get children to sit down, be quiet and do as they’re asked, you’re hardly in a position to make space for discussion or to model intellectual wonder. Good behaviour is not a nice-to-have: it’s the bedrock on which everything else rests.
What I increasingly find is that there’s often a tacit agreement in classrooms: if the teacher agrees not to bother the students, they agree not to be difficult. When teachers expect students to participate, they are often met with bewildered hostility. In some schools, students are routinely given active permission not to participate in the form of out-of-lesson passes or instructions to teachers that they should not be ask a question. This makes any kind of engaging approach to teaching untenable.
Good schools2 are ones in which teachers are supported to build a classroom culture in which children are expected to participate. You know that this is happening because these schools are full of classrooms in which it’s normal for teachers to ask all students to answer questions using Mini-Whiteboard routines, where there are regular paired discussions to check that all students understand what has been taught, where students are expected - and to account - for listening to the teacher and each other. None of these things are hard to do in schools with good behaviour but they are an uphill struggle in schools where the established culture is to opt out.
2. Workload
Time is the most precious commodity in schools, and the one most routinely squandered. Imaginative teaching - teaching that combines rigour with engagement - requires deep thought and preparation. It demands rehearsal, reflection and refinement. None of this can happen when teachers are expected to conjure up brilliance in the cracks between meetings, data entry, marking and the latest initiative. Leaders who want imaginative teaching must protect teachers’ time, and must resist the endless temptations to steal it.
When teachers are crushed under the weight of performative nonsense - data drops, marking policies that achieve nothing but exhaustion, endless initiatives designed to impress observers or bizarrely convoluted seven-part lessons3 - there is precious little time left to convert centrally planned curriculum respources into lessons that are thoughtful, coherent and engaging. The work of designing learning that connects ideas and makes knowledge stick is difficult. It demands time and attention, both of which are in desperately short supply in many schools. If we want lessons that are both rigorous and engaging, we have to start by stripping away the distractions that prevent teachers from focusing on the core of their work.
I’ve argued before that if schools are taking the implementation of curriculum seriously teachers need a minimum of an hour week to work together on co-planning. Ideally, they’ll get more. Centrally planned resources - slide decks or booklets - are prone to being used ‘off the shelf’ with no time given to the intellectual preparation required to make them come to life.
One simple recommendation that I’ve found to be effective is to set arbitrary slide limits. If your centrally planned slide deck as, say, 15 slides per lesson, tell teachers they are allowed to select 5, or even 3 of those slides to display in class. Whilst this by no means guarantees engaging teaching, it does force teachers to engage thoughtfully with the resources before they teach.
3. Curriculum coherence
It’s all very well to say that teaching should connect big ideas to the real world, but this is impossible if the curriculum is a hodgepodge of unsequenced content with no clear purpose or narrative. Teachers can only make meaningful connections if they themselves see the connections. When schools treat curriculum as a set of isolated units or schemes cobbled together from different sources, it is little wonder that lessons fail to engage.
The key here - and it connects back to the points about workload - is that teachers need time and support for the intellectual preparation required to teach a rich curriculum in a way which is engaging. This is my bread and butter. If you want to watch me teach rigorous content in an engaging way to your students in your school, get in touch. If you’d rather just read about what this looks like, this series of posts might be for you.
Coherence means knowledge is sequenced deliberately so that each new idea builds on what’s gone before and prepares for what comes next. This cannot be done via ‘curriculum snakes’ or other attempts to impose the appearance of coherence by stitching disparate schemes into a patchwork monster. It means the curriculum tells a story, not a series of disconnected episodes. When teachers see this story clearly, they can make the connections explicit. This is where imagination flourishes: in the space created by certainty. Teachers don’t have to waste time trying to work out how today’s lesson fits the bigger picture, because that picture is clear.
Curriculum, whatever else it is, is the lived experience of the classroom. Whatever has been planned is mediated by individual teachers. If they are encouraged and supported to adapt resources to their students, the likelihood that the curriculum can sing is much greater. If we insist, in a misguided belief that all teach must comply to the letter with centrally prepared resources, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that students - and teachers - are disengaged.
4. Leadership
All of this boils down to leadership. Leaders always set the tone. When leaders are obsessed with compliance, with the outward signs of learning rather than learning itself, teachers learn that it’s safer to play the game. When leaders peddle false dichotomies between rigour and engagement, or knowledge and curiosity, they create the very divisions they claim to deplore. If we want teachers to teach imaginatively, we must create the conditions in which imagination can thrive.
So what are those conditions? What would we see in a school where rigour and engagement aren’t at odds, but part of the same enterprise?
First, clarity of purpose. Too many schools have mission statements full of empty platitudes about excellence and aspiration, but underneath there’s no shared understanding of what children should know and be able to do. Without clarity, curriculum design becomes a patchwork quilt of disconnected units cobbled together on the fly or borrowed from elsewhere because they look impressive or tick a box. In schools with clarity of purpose, everyone knows what matters. The curriculum is designed from that shared end point. This gives teachers confidence and frees them to focus on what’s important: helping children make meaning from what they’re taught.
This requires us to hold teachers to account intelligently. The invisible thread that creates the conditions for teachers - and therefore students - to thrive is trust. Teachers who are trusted to use their judgement, to focus on what matters most, will do so. Teachers who are constantly second-guessed, who are judged on surface performance or compliance with nonsense policies, will learn to play it safe. Trust doesn’t mean abandoning accountability; it means holding teachers accountable for the right things: what children learn and remember, not what can be performed in a lesson observation.
These are the conditions in which imagination can thrive. They are simple, but they are not easy. They require leaders to set the right tone, to stop chasing shiny distractions, and to focus relentlessly on the main thing. Everything else follows from that.
If you’ve found this post interesting, you might enjoy this week’s essay for paid subscribers on the Fundamental Attribution Error. I keep subscription as low as Substack will allow: £3.50 per month or £30 per year.
I find it useful to apply the principle that if lots of people misunderstand my argument the fault is probably with me rather than them. For some reason Boomer-Clark thought it useful to write that, “The front line between so-called trads and progs still seems remarkably well-defended.” If I wanted to be divisive, that’s definitely what I’d write but I’m probably rushing to frame her comment uncharitably…
Increasingly, the Ofsted judgement ‘good’ has come to mean anything from genuinely good to really quite bad.
Yes, honestly. I’m afraid the ‘seven-part lesson’ is alive if severely unwell.
Great post, David. A lot of it resonates with me. We’ve connected before about better instructional practices and my concern that they’re often overemphasized. My view is that what counts as “better” is usually tied to student outcomes. Of course, those outcomes matter. But the paradox is that when they're too closely tied to metrics and data, they can crowd out meaningful learning. The leaders who push this approach often seem so task-oriented and politically driven—and lacking in vision—that they don’t really seem to care. So the question is: how do we get around this operational conundrum?