Why is ‘Future 3’ Curriculum Thinking so Important?
By Richard Bustin
With a new government, debates about the school curriculum return. The ‘Future 3’ framework offers a way to balance knowledge, skills, and capabilities to prepare students for a changing world.
The change of government in 2024 has once again reignited debates about what we should be teaching in schools and why. Advocates of a more progressive curriculum built around basic skills and employability are vying for space alongside those who see a more traditional role for subject knowledge. With the increased proliferation of AI technology, the climate crisis and recent calls to decolonise the curriculum, it is clear that whatever emerges from the current review of curriculum and assessment will need to engage young people and prepare them for a changing world.
One framework that might be helpful in thinking about curriculum is that of the three Futures heuristic developed by Michael Young and Johan Muller (2010). Here they identify three ways of approaching curriculum thinking, but rather than being in the future they are timeless approaches to thinking about what we teach.
A Future 1 (F1) curriculum is characterised by learning facts in siloed academic subjects. Each subject has a canon of academic knowledge built up, often over centuries of wisdom, and the teacher’s role is to pass this on uncritically to the students they teach. Pedagogies that support this curricular vision can include scripted lessons, direct instruction, retrieval practice, rote learning, teaching to the test and regular testing. It is a traditionalist position, often supported by seating students in rows, silent corridors and no excuse approaches to behaviour.
Its corollary is the ‘Future 2’ (F2) position. Here generic values and skills lead curriculum thinking. Subjects, and the knowledge they impart is less important than enabling students to develop what some have dubbed ‘21st Century skills’ such as media literacy, communication, teamwork, leadership and a focus on skills for the workplace. Subjects become a means to an end; they might still structure a school day, but their aim is less about learning a body of academic knowledge and more about developing the so called ‘soft skills’ needed in life. Pedagogies that support F2 thinking could include discovery learning, group work and lots of interdisciplinary activities. This, typically, is a more ‘progressive’ approach to curriculum thinking.
But, there are deep problems with both the F1 and F2 positions. An F1 approach to the curriculum simply equates knowledge with facts, the learning of which is the end point of schooling. The more facts a student can recite the more they can be said to be achieving. It says nothing about the values and skills that a young person can gain through their time at school.
There is also the vexed question about whose knowledge is being learnt; this is a key question in humanities and literature subjects, which have been accused of offering a predominantly white, male discourse. Michael Young (1971) has called this knowledge ‘of the powerful’ to illustrate how powerful people, cultures and organisations have shaped what is being taught to students over time.
Under an F2 curriculum students miss out on exposure to the greatest discoveries of humanity, some of the most significant art, literature, or science that has shaped the modern world and people in it. They don’t have a grounding in the nuance of language, or the background understanding required to make sense of themselves or the world. All claims to truth are treated with equal respect, whether from NASA or a TikTok influencer.
These debates are significant in national political discourse: successive governments seem to flip between F1 and F2 thinking. It could be argued the previous Conservative government’s focus on a knowledge led curriculum tends towards an F1 position, the preceding Labour years had a more F2 approach. A focus on ‘oracy’, without a framework of subject knowledge to have something meaningful to be talking about, has the danger of another pendulum swing straight back to F2 thinking.
Yet Michael Young and Johan Muller offer us a positive solution in the form of their Future 3 (F3) position. This tries to break the deadlock between the two opposing positions of F1 and F2 whilst still maintaining some of the traits that make them educationally valuable. At the heart of F3 curriculum thinking is subject knowledge, but not the sort of reductive list of facts that defines F1 thinking nor knowledge that is simply a means to a greater goal (encapsulated by F2 thinking).
Knowledge under the F3 scenario is that which is drawn from subject disciplines. It includes knowledge of how meaning is made within a discipline (disciplinary knowledge), knowledge of subject specific procedures that can lead to the development of skills (procedural knowledge) as well as the various knowledge claims of the world that the subject is able to make (substantive knowledge).
It is deemed to be the best knowledge available in that subject at any time, but importantly can be replaced at any time by ‘better’ knowledge as more developments and advances are made. It would identify that a statement from NASA has greater claims to validity than something found from a blogger online.
Access to this knowledge can be empowering for young people hence its description as ‘powerful’ knowledge, explored in the work of Michael Young and David Lambert (2014). The empowerment can come in the form of educational capabilities, itself drawing on the work of Amartya Sen (e.g. 1999) and Martha Nussbaum (e.g. 2000). The development of capabilities focuses not on exam grades but on what students can achieve with the knowledge they have gained—how it empowers them to think, act, and understand their place in the world.
Exploring how a Future 3 curriculum might work in practice has so far been limited to a few subjects and curriculum development projects. The GeoCapabilities project was borne out of geography education, and Arthur Chapman’s (edited, 2021) work explores powerful knowledge in school history.
In ‘What are we Teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum’ I (Bustin 2024) have worked with teachers across three schools to articulate how powerful knowledge might be expressed across a whole range of different subjects, and how these might enable a set of knowledge derived educational capabilities.
This task is not straightforward. The whole idea of powerful knowledge is problematic for some subjects such as those in the arts which draw their inspiration less from a unified academic discipline and more from the creative world. The notion of ‘better’ knowledge works well in sciences as new discoveries are made, but less so in humanities where differing perspectives add nuance to debate rather than replace prior understanding.
Drawing on the empowering knowledge that subjects can enable, I have identified a tentative set of educational capabilities which can encapsulate the ambitions of F3 thinking. These include capabilities about how young people can make sense of themselves and the world; capabilities such as critical thinking, which should not be seen as a skill to be taught in isolation (which would tend towards an F2 approach) but an intellectual activity derived from different subjects; and capabilities associated with choices about how to live and work and the agency that enables.
A curriculum that aims to achieve this is ambitious, and teachers are key if the ambition is to become a reality. To realise this vision of curriculum, we need to make sure we have subject specialists in front of each class who are inducting young people into the specialised thinking of their subject as much as teaching them the facts needed to pass an exam. It means we need to trust teachers to think carefully about their lessons, not grabbing off the shelf resources or relying on textbooks. It means trusting teachers to think about what they want to teach, why and how, and supporting them to do this.
This is perhaps a long way from where we currently are, where the end point of curriculum thinking seems to be a set of exams designed to differentiate between candidates at age 16 and then again at 18, and where a teacher’s job is to get students through the exams.
Not only that, but a well-conceived curriculum that empowers and, crucially, trusts the professionalism of teachers could play a role in meeting recruitment and retention challenges, as well as improving the ways in which teachers are perceived in wider society.
References
Bustin R (2024) What are we Teaching? Powerful knowledge and a capabilities curriculum, Carmarthen: Crown House.
Chapman (Ed.) (2021), Knowing history in schools: Powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge. UCL Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: University Press.
Young, M. (1971). Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education. London: Collier-Macmillan
Young, M., & Muller, J. (2010). Three Educational Scenarios for the Future: Lessons from the Sociology of Knowledge. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 11–27.
Young, M., & Lambert, D. (2014). Knowledge and the Future School: Curriculum and Social Justice. London: Bloomsbury.
