Curriculum Development – Golden Threads
By Alex Neophitou
Golden threads provide an extremely useful guide for curriculum development. Alex Neophitou explores…
For a number of years, working in different schools as a subject leader and a member of SLT, I’ve loved developing different areas and aspects of a school curriculum. Now, as a consultant, I’ve found I can support schools even more through training and CPD sessions and bespoke support focusing on developing their curriculum in a more tailored way.
An aspect of this that I really enjoy is making connections. To me, curriculum development is an everchanging jigsaw puzzle, whereby the pieces often change shape or fit together in different ways. The nature of education is that it is developing all of the time, dependent on the cohort that are being taught or the changing demographics of the local area a school serves. What worked for your children two, or five or ten years ago, may or may not be right for them now.
But I think what you can put in place, is a framework that helps to develop a curriculum that can change organically and successfully with the right structure or back bone to support it. A big part of this, potentially, is developing ‘golden threads’ – the key concepts which run through areas of the curriculum.
What are ‘golden threads’?
The truth is, the ‘golden threads’ that one school chooses to focus on may be different from another school. It’s all dependent on the culture and values of your school, and the only right answer as such, is to find the ‘golden threads’ that work for your school community. But what do I mean by ‘golden threads’? Well, I’ll start by using history as an example.
In history there are some substantive concepts. I think of the main five set out within the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2 as: chronology, similarity and difference, cause and consequence, continuity and change and significance. Now most would argue that these are disciplinary aspects of history learning, and I would tend to agree. They are the overarching concepts or ‘big ideas’ that we want children to be able to understand and develop their knowledge of across their history studies. But in order to enable this learning to happen, we can use ‘golden threads’ throughout our history curricula in order to support children with understanding these bigger ideas. The ‘golden threads’ are the more refined or specific concepts that are visible throughout your school’s curriculum.
I often refer to the concept of ‘empire’ as being a potential golden thread, but you can apply it to any concept that runs through your curriculum. You can see the example of empire as a golden thread below. In KS1, learning about famous people of the UK and then the world, certain figures will be linked to aspects of the British Empire. Learning about the Victorians in Year 2, a lot of the economic prosperity of Britain at the time (including the industrial revolution) was a direct result of the British empire. Further on in Year 3, the children will look at the empire of Alexander the Great and then the Roman Empire in Year 4, and then there are further links to the units studied in Year 6. Ultimately, a ‘golden thread’ is a concept or theme that pops up in multiple units across the children’s studies throughout their time at primary school – and potentially secondary school too. And imagine, if you had five or six threads that you really focussed on as part of your history curriculum. In the example I’ve given, how many times would the children revisit the theme of empire. And that brings me to my next talking point nicely – why should we bother thinking about golden threads?
Page taken from an upcoming publication by Clive Davis and Alex Neophitou – ‘Taking your curriculum to the next level – history’
Why bother with ‘golden threads’?
When building a curriculum, we are developing it for the children we teach. We are looking for the best ways to support children with their learning so that they can commit what they’ve learned to long term memory, recall it when needed and apply it to new learning.
Here’s a diagram I have created which I think demonstrates this principle clearly:
The basic idea here is that when you encounter something new, if you can link it to something that you have learned before, you are more likely to make sense of it and be able to understand and utilise that new knowledge. In essence, knowing what your ‘golden threads’ are and making them clear to the children as they move through each year group and phase, allows the children to make clear links to learning that they have completed previously. It’s about enabling children to activate that prior learning and be more successful in future learning. Now applying this back to history specifically, imagine if you had five or six of these ‘golden threads’ running through the design of your curriculum. Three key things would happen:
- As a subject leader, you know and can explain how your curriculum links together and can demonstrate how it’s progressive over time.
- As a teacher, you can see the learning that has taken place clearly, and the future links that children will need to make, so you know exactly how to approach teaching your part of the ‘thread’.
- The children are clear on how prior learning links to what they are learning currently. They can recall that prior knowledge and talk about it articulately within the progression of what they have been and are currently learning. They’ll also be able to apply it to future learning too.
How do I know that they work?
Developing these ‘golden threads’ is something that I have been doing for a number of years, both in the schools I have been working in and in my current role as a curriculum consultant. In particular, I have done a lot of work around the humanities subjects – history and geography – but it can apply to other areas as well. I’m currently working on a couple of publications with Clive Davies (@Clive_FocusEd on X) and Focus Education (@focuseducation1 on X) to explain and show why it is so important to think about these threads in terms of supporting our children to become life-long learners. Something which I think underpins it is the work of Biggs and Collis on Solo Taxonomy. It surprises me a little that we don’t talk more about it, because I think it provides a great framework in terms of how our children perhaps enter our education system and how we want them to leave it.
Page taken from an upcoming publication by Clive Davis and Alex Neophitou – ‘Taking your curriculum to the next level – history’
In the diagram above, the five stages of learning as stated by Biggs and Collis 1982 can be seen. I won’t go through them all here, but the red circle is representative of ‘pre-structural’ learning whereby children show no understanding of the learning or knowledge presented to them. The final stage represented by the three purple rectangles, all linked together and linked to a mini world symbol represent the ‘extended abstract’ stage. This is where we want our children to end up in terms of their understanding of the learning. It is here, where they can be presented with a new idea, make links to prior learning and to other new elements, understand relationships between new knowledge and then apply it to new concepts independently. By understanding the threads that run throughout each area of the curriculum, and ensuring that the children understand those links too, can help them to develop a greater understanding of the relationship between different aspects of knowledge and how this can be applied in new contexts.
We’ve been working on building this into Focus’s Learning Challenge Curriculum too (https://www.learningchallengecurriculum.com/) and we’ve carefully chosen the threads that we think apply through the design of the LCC. This doesn’t mean that schools who subscribe can’t choose different threads, but it provides a solid starting point for schools who are beginning on their journey of developing ‘golden threads’. Those schools who are implementing the Learning Challenge Curriculum and working closely with Clive and I to do so are already making headway in this area and seeing the benefits it is having on their children. I’ve talked a lot about history, but we’ve applied this to geography too:
Page taken from the Learning Challenge Curriculum’s Geography Long Term Overview
The beauty of these threads, is that some will overlap into different subjects areas. The concept of trade, for example, is a huge thread in geography, but there are so many aspects of history that can be linked to this thread too. And so, children will be regularly encountering these threads, learning new knowledge and applying it across different contexts. It’s all about giving children the opportunities to develop that ‘extended abstract’ level of understanding.
If you want to have a conversation about golden threads, you can find me at @NeophitouA on X, connect on LinkedIn (Alex Neophitou) or you can book a chat with me by following this link – https://calendly.com/alexneweducationoutlook/chat-with-alex
