This article examines the theoretical and empirical influences informing the term knowledge-rich curriculum, a concept increasingly central to education policy but often only loosely defined. Drawing on an analysis of the term in Australian and English education policy, the article argues that the concept has been most strongly influenced by two distinct fields: social realist curriculum inquiry and cognitive science. It considers both how these influences may be in tension with each other and the potential implications of this for policymakers and educators. Specifically, it argues that the take up of instructional practices only superficially informed by cognitive science can distort the disciplinary practices valued by social realists. The article emphasises the importance of empirically informed instructional design cohering with disciplinary practice. It further recommends that policymakers and educators emphasise in their curriculum making the types of knowledge their school communities value and embody, in addition to disciplinary knowledge.
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Introduction
Curriculum policy and practice has been shaped by a ‘knowledge turn’ (Deng Citation2022, 599) over the last decade or so, with references to the importance of knowledge and a knowledge-rich curriculum increasingly common in both England and Australia. However, despite (or perhaps because of) its ubiquity, the term knowledge-rich curriculum is often only loosely defined by those who invoke it. The lack of definitional clarity here is problematic, because it risks adding more complexity and confusion to curriculum debates and discussions already characterised by a lack of shared meaning. The ‘problems of definition’ relating to the term curriculum are already ‘serious and complex’ (Kelly Citation2009, 13), so continually adding the term knowledge-rich without a clear explanation risks it becoming meaningless, belying any educational potential.
This article examines the theoretical and empirical influences on definitions of knowledge-rich curriculum in two contexts where it has become particularly dominant: England and Australia. It highlights the influence of two distinct theoretical traditions which have influenced understandings of knowledge-rich curriculum: social realist curriculum inquiry and cognitive science. It considers both how these influences may be in tension with each other and what the implications may be for policymakers, school leaders and teachers. The discussion draws both on an analysis of prominent work in these fields and their conceptualisations of knowledge and scholarly contributions from educators in practitioner journals examining the practical uptake of knowledge-rich curriculum in schools. Its contribution is thus primarily theoretical and aims to highlight possible issues which would benefit from further empirical exploration.
Our analytical approach is informed by interpretivist approaches to policy analysis, specifically Yanow (Citation2000, 11), who asks ‘How is the policy issue being framed by various parties to the debate? A “frame” … sets up an interpretive framework within which policy-related artifacts make sense’ (see also Fischer Citation2003). The structure of the article follows this approach which first involves identifying ‘the artifacts that are significant carriers of meaning for the interpretive communities relative to a given policy issue, and (identifying) those communities relevant to the policy issue that create or interpret these artifacts and meanings’ (Yanow Citation2000, 20). Our analysis shows that social realist curriculum inquiry and cognitive science represent two community discourses (Yanow Citation2000) relevant to contemporary understandings of knowledge-rich curriculum in Australian and English policy contexts. Subsequently, we summarise key literature to describe the social realist and cognitive science perspectives on the place of knowledge in the curriculum, that is, how social realists and cognitive scientists ‘talk and act with respect to the policy issue’ (Yanow Citation2000, 20). The final step in Yanow’s (Citation2000, 22) interpretive policy analysis is to ‘identify the points of conflict and their conceptual sources … that reflect different interpretations by different communities’. We show how conflicts between cognitive science and social realism emerge in practice when instructional advice ostensibly informed by cognitive science research is artificially separated from the work of the disciplinary communities valued by social realists. Specifically, we argue that the take-up of one instructional practice derived from cognitive science, retrieval practice, can distort the disciplinary practice valued by social realists when it is only shallowly informed by cognitive science and generically applied across subject areas. Although researchers engaging in interpretive policy analysis may stop after identifying any key points of conflict between communities, the next step is intervention in the form of practical recommendations and actions (Yanow Citation2000), which we address to policymakers, school leaders, and teachers: curriculum makers across the range of sites of activity (Priestley et al. Citation2021).
Our findings stand to contribute to Australian and English education policy and practice in two ways. First, by specifying the theoretical and empirical roots of the term knowledge-rich curriculum in a way that might inform clearer and more detailed definitions in policy and practice. Second, by highlighting practical examples of lethal mutations (Counsell Citation2023; Jones and Wiliam Citation2022) that might occur when instructional practices underpinned by cognitive science and intended for realisation within disciplinary communities are instead conceived of and applied in generic ways. The issues raised are relevant to a range of age groups from early primary through to the end of secondary school. Though primary school instruction has historically de-emphasised ‘the range of separate subjects compared with more integrated teaching’ (Yates et al. Citation2017, 221), compared to secondary school teachers who tend to be subject specialists, there is some evidence of change associated with the transnational emphasis on knowledge-rich curriculum. For example, Cabell and Hwang (Citation2020, S101) describe a move from a siloed approach to teaching reading in primary schools in the United States, encouraged by federal initiatives with a focus on reading disconnected from the broader curriculum, to a stronger focus on other subject areas and greater uptake of ‘content-rich’ curriculum resources in the primary years following the introduction of the Common Core State Standards.
Policy context: knowledge-rich curriculum in Australia and England
The contemporary policy emphasis on knowledge-rich curriculum has manifested in a range of ways in different contexts. In some places, including parts of the United Kingdom and Europe, the knowledge-rich movement has emerged in response to criticism of the so-called new curriculum (Priestley and Biesta Citation2013) that preceded it. The new curriculum ‘tended to place less emphasis on the specification of content, instead focusing on the importance of the development of skills’ (Priestley et al. Citation2021, 23). Examples of the new curriculum in practice arguably include the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (Priestley and Biesta Citation2013), which has sustained recent public criticism for allegedly eroding students’ access to disciplinary knowledge (see, for example, Seith Citation2024).
In Australia, the different states and territories have historically taken a range of perspectives on the place of knowledge in their various curricula, depending on their local cultures and political influences (Yates, Collins, and O’Connor Citation2011). However, the introduction of Australia’s first national curriculum in the early 2010s heralded what Lingard and McGregor (Citation2014, 90) have described as ‘a strong return to “the disciplines”’, albeit one complicated by a range of cross-cutting general capabilities, cross-curriculum priorities and a national programme of annual assessment focused on literacy and numeracy. This was a particularly significant shift for states such as Queensland where an experimental, future-focused and skills-based curriculum with ‘quite a bit in common with, for example, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’ (Lingard and McGregor Citation2014, 94) had been trialled.
Policy documentation including the national Australian Curriculum website emphasises that the curriculum ‘recognises the importance of disciplinary knowledge, skills and understanding’ (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Citationn.d.). However, it is only recently that the term knowledge-rich has begun to be applied to describe the curriculum and its reinterpretation by some jurisdictions. In particular, Australia’s two most populous states, New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, recently launched new curriculum documents described as knowledge-rich by their curriculum authority (The Premier and Minister for Education and Early Learning Citation2024) and Education Minister (The Hon Ben Carrol MP Citation2024) respectively. While teachers in most jurisdictions use the Australian Curriculum as written, these states have developed their own documents interpreting its requirements as part of their responsibilities for its implementation. At the national level, the term knowledge-rich has also been used in recent speeches and media articles by the former CEO of the body responsible for the Australian Curriculum (De Carvalho Citation2023a; Citation2023b).
Before releasing its state-based interpretation of the national curriculum, the NSW Government commissioned Australia’s independent education evidence body, the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), to develop a guide for policymakers and practitioners, entitled A knowledge-rich approach to curriculum design (Australian Education Research Organisation Citation2024). AERO was created followingan agreement of Australian governments in 2019 to improve education outcomes for Australian students and it has subsequently become part of the national education policy architecture in Australia (Australian Education Research Organisation Citationn.d.). Its report therefore represents a key policy document defining knowledge-rich curriculum in the Australian context. The report draws heavily on cognitive science research to define what is meant by knowledge-rich curriculum and what is needed to support its enactment in practice. For example, it argues that ‘A knowledge-rich curriculum aligns with the science on how students learn’ (Australian Education Research Organisation Citation2024, 4) and, in a section entitled ‘Evidence base underpinning a knowledge-rich curriculum’, it focuses on ‘an explanation of how memory works to support effective teaching and learning, the strong link between knowledge and skills and the importance of vocabulary and background knowledge for reading comprehension across all subjects’ (Australian Education Research Organisation Citation2024, 11). Several researchers from the field of cognitive science are cited throughout the report, demonstrating the influence of empirical evidence from the field on the framing of knowledge-rich curriculum.
Alongside this focus, the AERO report also draws on what its authors refer to as ‘seminal curriculum research’ (Australian Education Research Organisation Citation2024, 8). The key reference here is to ‘powerful knowledge’, a concept developed by social realists Michael Young and Johan Muller (see, for example, Young and Muller Citation2013), and defined by report authors as ‘the right of all students to progressively and systematically build specialised content knowledge and disciplinary learning that enables them to link concepts, gain new insights and make inferences’ (Australian Education Research Organisation Citation2024, 8). By connecting Young and Muller and powerful knowledge to their conception of seminal curriculum research, the authors of the AERO report underline the influence of social realism on their definition of knowledge-rich curriculum.
Several other curriculum researchers are also referenced throughout the report, notably Elizabeth Rata and Zongyi Deng, both of whom are associated with social realist ideas. For example, Rata is co-editor of Knowledge and the Future of the Curriculum: International Studies in Social Realism (Barrett and Rata Citation2014) and is a member of the Knowledge and Education Research Unit (KERU) at the University of Auckland. KERU is a ‘research centre for the study of knowledge in education’ in the theoretical tradition of Durkheim and Bernstein, to whom social realists owe their debt (Wheelahan Citation2010), and ‘using realist approaches’ (University of Auckland Citationn.d.). Conversely, Deng has both critiqued social realist approaches to knowledge in the curriculum and built on them by advocating for a focus on the purpose of knowledge and the pursuit of human flourishing (Deng Citation2020). The AERO report also cites The ResearchED guide to the curriculum: An evidence-informed guide for teachers (Sealy Citation2020), which includes a chapter by Michael Young on powerful knowledge (Young Citation2020), in addition to several other sources developed by and for practicing teachers.
Comparatively in England, the National Curriculum has also centred a focus on disciplinary knowledge and has been recently described as taking a knowledge-rich approach. For example, Nick Gibb, the former English Minister of State who was closely involved with the reform of the National Curriculum in the early 2010s, said in a 2021 speech entitled ‘The importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum’ that ‘the reforms that we put in place have been driven by the idea that the transmission of rich subject knowledge should be the priority for schools’ (Gibb Citation2021). Additionally, Zongyi Deng, an academic who sits on the national curriculum and assessment review panel, has described the ‘promotion’ of the current version of the National Curriculum as a ‘model of a “knowledge-rich” curriculum’ embodying a ‘knowledge turn’ in England (Deng Citation2020, 599).
While there are no policy documents clarifying the conceptualisation of a knowledge-rich curriculum in England in the same way AERO’s report offers in Australia, similar influences on how this is interpreted are also evident. In relation to social realism, Michael Young’s work has been particularly influential and challenged a culture of curriculum policy and practice in England under the former Labour government that was characterised by a focus on generic skills or outcomes instead of disciplinary knowledge (see, for example, Young Citation2011). Young’s work also informed the 2011 report by the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum review, a document that shaped the development of the present version of the English National Curriculum (Department for Education Citation2011; see also Deng Citation2022). It has been prominently invoked in a range of other texts, including speeches made by education system leaders in England (Duoblys Citation2022) and referenced in Ofsted’s school-facing research reviews for History (Department for Education Citation2021a), Geography (Department for Education Citation2021b) and Music (Department for Education Citation2021c). Young is also one of only a few curriculum theorists referenced in the Curriculum and Assessment Review Interim Report released by an independent review panel appointed by the recently elected Labour Government (Department for Education Citation2025).
The influence of cognitive science research on curriculum policy directions is also becoming increasingly apparent. This is most evident in recent work conducted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), an ‘independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement’ by supporting the ‘better use of evidence’ (Education Endowment Foundation Citationn.d.). Like AERO in Australia, the EEF produces a range of published resources designed to inform professional practice in educational settings. An EEF blog entitled ‘What do we mean by “knowledge rich” anyway?’ (Quigley Citation2019), draws both on cognitive science understandings of ‘how children learn’ and curriculum theory, including from the social realist school, in its discussion of how the term should be understood. More recently, the EEF has published a series of reports and tools to help inform the uptake of cognitive science principles in classrooms in support of effective teaching and learning (see, for example, Perry et al. Citation2021). Further, research evidence from cognitive science has been cited in support of principles included in the Initial Teacher Training Core Content Framework, such as retrieval practice and spaced practice, described as ‘Requiring pupils to retrieve information from memory, and spacing practice so that pupils revisit ideas after a gap’ (Department for Education Citation2019, 12). These developments, while not always specifically focused on the development or enactment of curriculum, are certainly intended to shape it, especially in schools and classrooms.
Overall, policy conceptualisations and discussions of knowledge-rich curriculum are predominantly focused on disciplinary knowledge. This emphasis does not reflect the full complexity of what is understood by knowledge or what might be meant by knowledge-rich as it relates to curriculum and has been subject to a range of critiques. For example, Deng (Citation2020, 6) has argued that the curriculum should reflect ‘the world of knowledge, the social conditions and needs of a society, and the nature and needs of the learner’ (emphasis added). Further, Riddle and colleagues (Citation2023, 143) have argued for a ‘knowledge + plus approach to curriculum,’ ‘in which the knowledge of powerful groups and discourses are matched with the embracing of diverse and plural ways of being and knowing, drawing on the lifeworlds of young people and their communities’. Knowledge-rich curriculum is typically invoked as a stand in for disciplinary-knowledge-rich curriculum but this has a tendency to sidestep important curriculum questions about the place and purpose of knowledge in the school curriculum, including ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’, ‘How is knowledge selected and organised into curriculum content?’ and ‘How is content taught in classrooms’ (Deng Citation2020, x).
To further engage with the underlying influences informing conceptions of knowledge-rich curriculum, we now turn to look in more detail at the theorising of knowledge within the two bodies of literature we have identified as particularly prominent: social realism and cognitive science. We acknowledge that these are not the only theories influencing understandings of knowledge-rich curriculumFootnote1, but they are becoming particularly apparent in Australia and England and therefore worth examining in more detail.
Social realism and knowledge in the curriculum
The term knowledge-rich is not necessarily common across literature associated with social realist ideas, with a few exceptions (see, for example, Deng Citation2022; Rata Citation2019), but all social realists are concerned with the place of knowledge in the curriculum. Social realists believe that ‘providing students with access to knowledge should be the raison d’être of education’ (Wheelahan Citation2010, i, emphasis in the original). This is because they believe that access to theoretical knowledge, traditionally ‘organised as academic disciplinary knowledge’ (Wheelahan Citation2010, 2) that takes students beyond their everyday experiences is powerful and prises open the possibility of thinking ‘the unthinkable and the not-yet-thought’ (Wheelahan Citation2010, 13). Social realists draw on the Durkheimian distinction between ‘sacred or esoteric knowledge on the one hand, and profane or mundane knowledge on the other’ (Wheelahan Citation2010, 18) and argue for the critical and democratic importance of the former. Social realists believe that sacred or esoteric knowledge exists across the disciplines (Young and Lambert Citation2014) and is understood, made and remade within disciplinary communities observing epistemic rules (Rollett and Cruddas Citation2024). Ultimately, for social realists, this sacred or esoteric theoretical knowledge, traditionally reflected in the academic disciplines, is powerful and it is emancipatory, offering young people the opportunity to break from their daily experience (Young and Lambert Citation2014).
The social realist school emerged around the turn of the millennium, influenced by Basil Bernstein, who ‘argued that access to abstract theoretical knowledge is a precondition for an effective democracy’ (Wheelahan Citation2010, 2). It emerged partly in response to the belief that curriculum had been too influenced by theorists who focus on social problems and messages embedded in the curriculum that serve to reproduce perceived inequities and injustices (Yates et al. Citation2017).
Social realists maintain that the purpose of education and of the school curriculum is to provide all students, including and especially those from working class families, with access to disciplinary knowledge. Access to disciplinary knowledge is, for social realists, an issue of ‘distributional justice’ because it provides the key to unlock ‘society’s conversation’ about itself (Wheelahan Citation2010, 16). Social realists believe that such knowledge is socially produced and that, in an equitable society, all people should have the opportunity to access a shared body of powerful knowledge, and, through their schooling and further education, to learn how to contribute to it. For example, Young and colleagues (see, for example, Young Citation2020; Young and Lambert Citation2014) have advocated for powerful knowledge, the ‘better knowledge’ across disciplines that all students, ‘not just those identified as having “academic ability” have the right to acquire’ during their schooling (Young Citation2020, 24-25). For Young, the concept of powerful knowledge is inexorably linked to social justice and the equal provision of educational opportunity. Indeed, Young has argued that curriculum based on powerful knowledge ‘is found in most selective and fee-paying public schools’ (Young Citation2020, 22) in England, and should also be available to all students outside of these elite institutions.
While social realism has gained traction in the United Kingdom through Young’s scholarship (see, for example, Young Citation2020), and in Australia (see, for example, Wheelahan Citation2010) and in some other places internationally (Yates et al. Citation2017), it has also been critiqued as conservative and ‘too tied to specifically Western traditions’ (Yates et al. Citation2017, 29), obfuscating the inherently political nature of disciplinary knowledge and drawing a false binary between powerful knowledge and knowledge of the powerful (see, for example, Rudolph, Sriprakash, and Gerrard Citation2018). Social realists, however, seek to draw a distinction between their arguments and those of conservatism, which they maintain ‘subordinates knowledge to tradition’ and renders the ‘features of knowledge … less important than the purpose it is designed to serve’ (Wheelahan Citation2010, 16), which is the maintenance of that tradition. Social realists believe that ‘our knowledge is always a work-in-progress towards the truth, and that it is fallible and revisable in the light of new evidence’ (Wheelahan Citation2010, 10), and that disciplinary communities play the key role in the generation and examination of new evidence.
Cognitive science and knowledge in the curriculum
The term knowledge-rich curriculum is also not common across the vast body of work that falls under the banner of research in the cognitive sciences, but findings from cognitive science have been commonly applied to the curriculum and instruction. Some cognitive scientists advocate for knowledge in the curriculum and are concerned with demonstrating how knowledge should be structured within the school curriculum to support its retention in long-term memory, in line with a common definition of learning in the field (see, for example, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clarke Citation2006). As such, discussions of the place of knowledge in the curriculum in cognitive science literature, unlike in education philosophy, are arguably more concerned about how to structure the curriculum around domain-specific knowledge rather than how to select specific content per se. Some cognitive scientists emphasise the critical role of domain-specific knowledge in building schemas, or mental structures, that connect new knowledge to previously learned knowledge in support of new learning and task completion (see, for example, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clarke Citation2006; Surma et al. Citation2025). Domain-specific knowledge is ‘the realm of knowledge that individuals have about a particular field of study’ and it includes ‘declarative (knowing that), procedural (knowing how) and conditional (knowing when and where) knowledge’ (Alexander Citation1992, 34) required for performance in a specific domain.
For cognitive scientists who study it, knowledge is important because it aids the construction of a domain-specific ‘schema’, ‘a mental structure of already learnt and available knowledge, skills, and even ideas that is used for organising and perceiving new information’ (Kirschner and Hendrick Citation2020, 6). Schema development is thought to facilitate the recognition and organisation (or ‘subsumption’, see Ausubel Citation1960) of new knowledge and its retention in long-term memory. The overarching thesis is that, when learners recognise links between previous learning stored in their long-term memory, and new knowledge, they will be able to integrate the new knowledge more effectively into their schemata, which effectively comprise their internal understanding of the world.
The development of schemas is thought to be important for learning and performance on tasks. For example, people with significant domain-specific knowledge in pre-existing schemas have been found to be better at problem solving than people who do not have these schemas of domain-specific knowledge in place. Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser (Citation1981) demonstrated in their classic studies of novices (for example, undergraduate students) and experts (for example, advanced PhD students) within a tertiary Physics department, that these two groups approached the same set of physics problems in different ways, with implications for their success. While novices appraised problems using ‘surface features’ superficially apparent in the problem statement, like key words or objects, experts instead identified the ‘major physics principle governing the solution of each problem’ (Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser Citation1981, 125). By appraising the physics problems in this deep rather than superficial way, experts demonstrated an activation of existing schema containing the knowledge of the ‘general form that specific equations to be used for solution will take’ (Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser Citation1981, 149). Novices did not have the existing schema containing this abstract procedural knowledge about how to solve the problems, even when they could demonstrate some understanding of their characteristics and outline steps to attempt to solve them.
Subsequently, Australian researcher John Sweller (Citation1988, 257) summarised the ‘considerable evidence’ from the field demonstrating that ‘domain specific knowledge in the form of schemas is the primary factor distinguishing experts from novices in problem-solving skill’. Further, Sweller (Citation1988) argued, based in part on his experimental study involving mathematics problem solving tasks at a Sydney high school, that conventional approaches to problem solving involving a means-ends analysis (working to reduce the gap between the initial and goal states) hinder rather than help the formation of schemata due in part to the associated load on cognitive processing capacity.
The role of domain-specific knowledge ‘as a subset of background knowledge’, broadly defined as ‘all of the world knowledge’ (Smith et al. Citation2021, 216) possessed by a learner, is especially relevant to the science of reading and reading comprehension research in particular. For example, in their critical review of literature on the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension in primary school children, Smith et al. (Citation2021, 226) ‘consistently found that higher levels of background knowledge enable children to better comprehend a text’ (see also Kim et al. Citation2023). Indeed, a famous example from Recht and Leslie (Citation1988) demonstrated that students with higher background knowledge of baseball were better able to recognise and recall important ideas in a passage of text about baseball.
Some cognitive science research is also concerned with teacher instructional practices, including specific techniques that strengthen knowledge in students’ long-term memories. Such work promotes strategies like spaced learning, for example, spreading learning in a specific area over a period of time (Smolen, Zhang, and Byrne Citation2016) instead of ‘blocking’ practice within a single session (Cepeda et al. Citation2008) and ‘retrieval practice’, ‘the act of recalling previously learned information’ (Agarwal, Nunes, and Blunt Citation2021, 1409) to strengthen its retention in long-term memory, and has been drawn on in the EEF and AERO advice discussed above.
Lethal mutations: identifying potential tensions between perspectives on knowledge-rich curriculum informed by social realism and cognitive science
Demonstrably, both social realists and some cognitive scientists are focused on knowledge, including its possibilities for education. Social realists are interested in disciplinary knowledge and communities (Deng Citation2020; Wheelahan Citation2010; Young Citation2020) and some cognitive scientists focus on the importance of domain-specific knowledge for learning (Kirschner, Sweller, and Clarke Citation2006; Surma et al. Citation2025; Tricot and Sweller Citation2014). While they may overlap in some definitions, disciplinary knowledge and domain-specific knowledge are not the same (Alexander Citation1992), and social realists and cognitive scientists approach the purpose and place of knowledge in the curriculum with distinct theoretical lenses (Surma et al. Citation2025).
One evident tension concerns the social realist emphasis on specialist disciplinary knowledge and the importance of structuring curriculum around that, compared with the promotion of more standardised pedagogical practices under the banner of cognitive science. While no conflicts between social realist and cognitive science perspectives on knowledge are cited in the policy document drawing on both bodies of research discussed in this article (Australian Education Research Organisation Citation2024), they may emerge in practice, especially as a result of the generic application of instructional principles ostensibly informed by cognitive science research. Prominent educators in England have warned of the potential dangers of applying instructional strategies informed by cognitive science in a generic way, divorced from disciplinary curriculum. Key examples, outlined briefly here, provide important insights into the ‘lethal mutations’ (Counsell Citation2023; Jones and Wiliam Citation2022) that might occur in the name of knowledge-rich curriculum if its disciplinary basis is not respected. In highlighting these tensions, we are not aiming to provide a critique of cognitive science nor of the place of disciplinary knowledge in the curriculum, but rather to highlight potential unintended negative consequences for teaching and learning that could occur if instructional strategies only ostensibly informed by cognitive science are applied in a generic way across school subjects under the banner of knowledge-rich curriculum.
We take as our focus one particular instructional principle informed by cognitive science, retrieval practice, which is increasingly commonly employed in tandem with ostensibly knowledge-rich approaches to curriculum making in schools. Indeed, retrieval practice has been explicitly referenced in both the recent English (Department for Education Citation2019) and Australian (Australian Government Citation2023) initial teacher training reforms and in the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0 (Victoria State Government Department of Education Citation2025), to give one state policy example. The Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0 is a state-wide pedagogical model specifying elements of teaching and learning to be embedded in all Victorian government schools by the beginning of 2028 (Victoria State Government Department of Education Citation2025). ‘Elements of learning’ include ‘Knowledge and memory’, referring to students ‘processing new information in their working memory’, and ‘Mastery and application’, referring to ‘consistent practice and retrieval’ (Victoria State Government Department of Education Citation2025).
According to Hendrick (Citation2025), retrieval practice should be clearly linked to the curriculum. History teacher and curriculum expert, Christine Counsell, in her recent piece for the practitioner journal, Teaching History, provides compelling examples of the potential damage to teaching and learning that may occur if retrieval practice is not properly integrated with the discipline (Counsell Citation2023). Counsell argues that there is increasing evidence of ‘A routinised use of retrieval practice’ as a form of formative assessment in History classrooms in England ‘that has lost connection with the subject’s natural forms of accounting’ (Counsell Citation2023, 11, emphasis in the original). The natural forms of accounting in History, narrative and argument, are essential to an effective, knowledge-rich History curriculum (Counsell Citation2023). As Counsell explains, ‘A knowledge-rich history curriculum’ both ‘weaves narratives’ and ‘trains children to question those narratives’ (Counsell Citation2023, 11). It shows evidence of both a selection of a range of specific content and weaves that knowledge into a compelling story designed to paint ‘complex worlds in human scale’ and make a lasting impression on students’ understanding (Counsell Citation2023, 11).
Narrative and argument are the chief forms of accounting in History, a discipline characterised by the cumulative sufficiency of its knowledge (Counsell Citation2020). Counsell explains that the difference between History and subjects with a more hierarchical structure, like Science, for example, is that the former is characterised by its ‘semantic gravity’ and is a subject that is ‘pulled downwards into particulars’ (Counsell Citation2023, 11). Whether students are learning about the Vikings, or about Japan under the Shoguns, for example, ‘there is no avoiding the particular, the crowded scenery of period detail, the texture of a society or institution, the idiosyncrasy of particular stories’ (Counsell Citation2023, 11; see also Yates et al. Citation2017). This detail is the rich heart of History for teachers and students, anchoring both the generalisations that shape their broader understandings of the world, and their capacity to question generalisations they encounter (Counsell Citation2023).
For Counsell, it is certainly possible, and even natural, to apply retrieval practice to History in a manner consistent with the subject’s natural forms of accounting, ‘as the inevitable desire to predict galvanises a pupil’s imagination, the story’s journey itself prompts retrieval’ (Counsell Citation2023, 11). However, Counsell laments that retrieval practice is not always applied effectively in History classrooms in England, too often resembling generic quizzes inappropriately shoe-horned into a lesson. This is despite (or perhaps, because of) the recent proliferation of advice on how to embed principles of cognitive science into curriculum making in schools and classrooms.
Counsell’s example suggests an ironic outcome of retrieval-practice-gone-wrong in History: that it risks overloading students’ working memory with out-of-place thinking that does not fit with the ‘lesson’s unfolding narrative or puzzle’ (Counsell Citation2023, 12), antithetical to its intended purpose. The solution, as both Counsell and fellow educator and curriculum theorist, Ashbee (Citation2021), make clear, is the leadership of disciplinary experts in curriculum making, a thoroughly social realist ideal (see, for example, Young Citation2020). As Ashbee (Citation2021, 18) explains,
In all of this, it is vital that the subject specialisms lead the application of the theory, and not the other way around. It is not enough to have ‘retrieval practice’ or ‘components’ in all subjects, that is to say, the nature of these things must be appropriate to the subject in question and may look very different across specialisms. There are no short-cuts: subject-specific curriculum must always take precedence.
Counsell and Ashbee’s arguments, derived from their experiences as educators in England, provide important lessons for policymakers and practitioners in both England and Australia grappling with knowledge-rich curriculum and commonly associated instructional practices.
The tensions highlighted by Counsell connect with debates about genericism, specialisation and the place and purpose of disciplinary knowledge (Yates et al. Citation2017). Writing about the tension between disciplinary knowledge and generic conceptions of skills such as problem solving, Yates et al. (Citation2017, 213) explain, ‘the attempt to manage schools and universities through the more generic forms (capabilities, outcomes) unwittingly cuts across the conditions required for specialist knowledge production’. This same issue is potentially also evident when instructional principles ostensibly informed by cognitive science research are applied in a standardised way across the curriculum, instead of being considered and explicated within disciplinary communities (including teachers). Muller (Citation2015, 13), writing about the same tension between generic skills and specialised knowledge in science and technology higher education, suggests that the way forward ‘is to confront the tendencies towards de-specialisation and dedifferentiation inherent in the scenario, and thereby to at least foreground the tendential limitations of the position’. Educators and policymakers should be wary of this tendency towards de-specialisation including attempts to divorce instructional principles informed by cognitive science from the domain-specific knowledge that has anchored the research demonstrating their utility.
These arguments are consistent with detailed findings from the 2021 EEF publication Cognitive Science in the Classroom: Evidence and Practice Review (Perry et al. Citation2021). Indeed, as Perry et al. (Citation2021, 78, 5) explain: while ‘retrieval practice is highly relevant across the U.K. education system, for all learners and subjects’, ‘ideas from cognitive science must be applied to specific subjects, phases, students, and learning contexts’. Their review found that research on retrieval practice covers a range of subjects, including History, adding ‘confidence to our ability to make more general claims’, but that this practice heterogeneity ‘reduces our ability to make claims about specific approaches to eliciting knowledge within retrieval practice’ (Perry et al. Citation2021, 76). More research with higher ecological validity (‘validity in real classrooms, across the curriculum and for different pupil groups’ (Perry et al. Citation2021, 5)) would strengthen our understanding of retrieval practice in action. This may especially be true for ‘non-science content areas’ (Agarwal, Nunes, and Blunt Citation2021, 1429).
Conclusion: implications for education policy and practice
Knowledge-rich curriculum may have important potential for strengthening student learning, depending on how it is defined and enacted. However, vague invocations of the term knowledge-rich curriculum risk it becoming meaningless, belying any educational potential. By understanding two significant empirical and theoretical influences on the term knowledge-rich curriculum, namely social realism and cognitive science, policymakers and practitioners may be better equipped to prevent the lethal mutations described in this article and realise in practice the intent of a curriculum designed both to afford students access to disciplinary knowledge and successfully encourage their mastery of it.
This paper has focused particularly on the national contexts of Australia and England, but its findings are potentially relevant to other global contexts where debates about the place of knowledge in the curriculum are also taking place. These contexts include countries as diverse as Portugal (Crato Citation2022) and Scotland (Priestley, Smith, and Rushton Citation2024), where policy analysis has considered the emphasis (or lack of thereof) on disciplinary knowledge in the macro curriculum. Similarly, the place of knowledge in the curriculum has been a primary consideration in systemsother than England currently undertaking a review of their macro curriculum, including New Zealand (Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga (Ministry of Education) Citation2024) and Northern Ireland (Department of Education Citation2024). Demonstrably, the considerations set out in this article about the development and enactment of knowledge-rich curriculum are potentially global in their scope, despite diverse country contexts and specific timelines for, and catalysts of, macro curriculum (re)development.
We make four recommendations to policymakers and practitioners in Australia, England and elsewhere interested in developing and enacting knowledge-rich curriculum. First, it is important that policymakers and school leaders consider the future development and implementation of curriculum frameworks and pedagogical advice together, emphasising the critical interaction between curriculum and pedagogy in schools and classrooms. We have established in this article that subjects may interact with pedagogical principles informed by cognitive science, such as retrieval practice, in different ways. By developing an understanding of these subject-specific nuances, policymakers and school leaders may be less likely to attempt to implement pedagogical principles or models in a generic manner across subject specialisms. This work in schools and systems internationally would be strengthened by further, ecologically valid research into best practice pedagogies across a broader range of global contexts, especially in non-Western cultures underrepresented in applied research on retrieval practice, for example (Agarwal, Nunes, and Blunt Citation2021).
Second, it is critical that teachers be granted time to work in their disciplinary communities within their schools and school networks, to develop and refine curriculum and to consider how it may be enacted in a way that best supports student learning. Teacher time is a scarce commodity in schools and a fraught issue politically, especially in the context of ongoing teacher shortages in many parts of the world. However, if teachers do not have time to consider the subject-specific interpretations of evidence-based pedagogical practices, including those enshrined in system-wide guidance or reflected in externally produced curriculum materials, then these cannot be applied in a way that is consistent with social realist and cognitive science understandings of the place of knowledge in the curriculum.
Third, it is critical that all education stakeholders are supported to understand, via initial teacher education and programmes of ongoing professional development, the disciplinary basis of prominent conceptions in policy of knowledge-rich curriculum. Social realists would contend that knowledge is made in disciplinary communities, and this would resonate with many expert educators working across schools, universities, and departments of education. Enriching disciplinary practice should therefore be seen as a primary goal of teacher development and should be promoted by policymakers and leaders who advocate for knowledge-rich curriculum in Australia and England.
Finally, policymakers and school leaders should continue to consider the knowledge their communities value and embody. The focus of social realists and cognitive scientists on disciplinary and domain-specific knowledge respectively have made important contributions to the ‘knowledge-turn’ (Deng Citation2020, 599) in both England and Australia. However, disciplinary or domain-specific knowledge is not the only knowledge that matters: our diverse students and communities are sources of abundant knowledge to inform curriculum making. The place of knowledge in the curriculum is heavily contested (see, for example, Deng Citation2020; Riddle, Mills, and McGregor Citation2023; Rudolph, Sriprakash, and Gerrard Citation2018) and these critiques demonstrate the risk of knowledge-rich curriculum becoming completely synonymous with disciplinary-knowledge-rich curriculum in education policy and practice. As social realists argue, equitable distribution of disciplinary knowledge is an important democratic ideal. However, that disciplinary knowledge is critically important to the curriculum does not preclude schools and education systems from drawing on the rich knowledge and experience brought by students and communities into schools every day as part of their local curriculum making. As Riddle, Mills, and McGregor (Citation2023, 141) have argued, ‘There is room for both’.
These recommendations are pertinent in the current context of reform in both England and Australia, and potentially in other parts of the world. The Labour-appointed curriculum and assessment review panel is due to report its recommendations later this year about possible changes to the English National Curriculum, including its treatment of knowledge. Conversely, Australian governments, like some other governments globally, are increasingly invoking knowledge-rich as a proxy for the quality of their own curriculum outputs. By highlighting an emerging tension between social realism and cognitive science in practice and making a series of recommendations for remediation, we intended to provide a practical way forward for educators committed to better understand knowledge-rich curriculum. The contribution of this article is principally theoretical, highlighting tensions that may emerge in practice drawing on the work of other scholars and our analysis of different scholarly traditions. Further empirical work is needed to explore these tensions and to understand the implications of emerging policies promoting knowledge-rich curriculum in Australian and English schools, and in other schools around the world.