Subject knowledge

Written by Mary Myatt

‘Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.’
Kofi Anan.

Let’s start with a thought experiment. As the owner of a restaurant, you spend a great deal of time making sure that your customers have a good experience. So, you make sure that you pay attention to the different aspects of your business: you make sure that the front of house is welcoming, that the tables are well-presented, staff well-trained, health and safety standards met, the kitchen is clean and so on. But for some reason, you don’t think it is important to check the quality of the ingredients. You just assume that the chef will know what to do, that she doesn’t need support and that it is irrelevant whether she is in touch with the latest thinking.

I think it would become clear fairly quickly that there was something wrong. While the quality of the food reaching the table is ok, the ingredients are not as fresh or clear-cut as they might be. In fact, it’s all a bit stale. Let’s be clear: this is not the chef’s fault. You, as restaurant owner, have not checked that the quality of what is going into the dishes is as fresh and as high-quality as it could be. Why? Because in this thought experiment, you were caught up and busy with the ephemera, without going back to basics and making sure that the core ingredients, namely the raw materials, were of sufficient quality.

This thought experiment is a way of thinking about how subject knowledge and subject expertise have been treated across the sector. There are some settings where subject knowledge development has been a high priority, but they have been the exception rather than the rule. This is not to blame leaders for the current lack of focus on subject knowledge, but rather to shine a light on how we got here.

It is fair to say that a number of factors have clouded the focus on developing teachers’ subject knowledge. An over-emphasis on generic aspects of school life, such as marking and feedback, for example, assumed that secure subject knowledge on the part of the teacher was a given.

Similarly, there have been unholy contortions trying to fit generic skills into the highly diverse subject structures; again, a mistake to think that progress looks the same across all subjects. It is fair to say that parts of the sector have been seduced by ephemera or showy lessons which may or may not have had substance, a misplaced focus on whether pupils were engaged and what it would take for them to be engaged. What followed from this was that many lessons were distorted in order to produce pseudo ‘wow’ factors, superficial activities which valued whizziness over substance, prettiness over content and ‘box office’ over scholarly work.

And then again, much subject CPD has been limited to exam changes at GCSE and A level. This has meant that a lack of imagination and an instrumentalist view of education have seen such training as important to get pupils through exams. The default model has been for one teacher to attend a course and return to ‘cascade’ to colleagues. This is hardly continuing professional development. Much provision for subject knowledge development at primary and Key Stage 3 has been run down.

This is due in part to the slimming down of local authorities, many of which used to provide regular networks, conferences and courses to support professional knowledge, and as a result, many of these are no longer running.

It is important to emphasise that there are some schools and groups of schools where the sidelining of the curriculum beyond English and Maths in primary and a distortion at Key Stage 3 in secondary has not been the case.

In some areas, schools are working together, subject specialists within an MAT are providing resources and training and subject associations are building capacity, but this is ad hoc to say the least.

It is important that the development of subject knowledge moves up the pecking order of competing school priorities. And the reason for this, at its heart, is that it is an entitlement for pupils to have an honest curriculum, not one which is distorted by a misplaced focus on accountability measures.

There are two aspects to subject knowledge and the first is teacher knowledge. We cannot possibly know everything we are expected to teach and so we have an obligation to keep in touch with the latest thinking on curriculum developments. Subject associations such as the Historical

Association bring together the latest scholarship in, for instance, medieval history and show how this can be used in lessons. As Philippa Cordingley’s work has found, teachers say that they find subject-specific continuing professional development more beneficial to their teaching than generic pedagogic CPD – and the evidence suggests that they are right in this judgement. It seems strange then, that teachers in the UK generally do less subject-specific CPD than generic CPD and less, also, than their colleagues in high-performing countries.  One way to audit this is to use the CPD Quality Audit from the Teacher Development Trust.

The second aspect of subject knowledge is what pupils are expected to know.  They will not know and understand material unless it is made explicit, they are expected to learn it, are tested on it (via low stakes tests) and have the chance to produce something which gives an indication of the extent to which they have mastered the knowledge. This cannot be done through random worksheets, which have a tendency to fill a space rather than being part of a coherent whole. We need to stop being squeamish about talking about scholarship, deep learning and our pupils having access to and mastering robust knowledge.

Michael Young, Professor of Education at IOE and UCL, has argued for the right of all children and young people to be taught what he terms ‘powerful knowledge’. He makes the distinction that this ‘is not knowledge of the powerful; rather powerful knowledge comes from specialist communities and centuries of learning, and it does change, but much more slowly than people believe. It is context-independent. It can lift children and young people out of their lived experience. And this is not to decry that experience. It is the job of the teacher to engage with the prior experience of pupils and to give them access to the powerful knowledge.’

As Carolyn Roberts, headteacher at Thomas Tallis School says, ‘schools share powerful knowledge on behalf of society so we teach them what they need to know to make sense of and to improve the world. They need that knowledge in order to interpret and improve the world. It enables them to grow into useful citizens. It enables them to grow into citizens who understand one another. It’s fair and just that all children should have access to this kind of learning and this kind of knowledge.’

She summarises her school’s philosophy in this powerful aide-memoire:
(1) Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this: never apologise that you need to learn things.
(2) Schools transmit shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society. We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
(3) Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities. We need to keep in touch with universities, research and subject associations.
(4) Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world. Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it.
(5) Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience.
(6) Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world
together.
(7) Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good.
(8) It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children.
(9) Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission. The teacher’s authority to transmit knowledge is given and valued by society.
(10) Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. We need quality professionals to achieve all of this for all our children.

^[1] https://www.history.org.uk/

^[2] developing-great-subject-teaching.pdf

^[3] https://tdtrust.org/cpd-quality-audit

^[4] https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/insights/the-attack-on-knowledge/

^[5] https://policyexchange.org.uk/event/creating-a-powerful-knowledge-curriculum-in-schools/