The 'C' Word (Part 1)

Crafting curriculum with poverty and inequality in mind

May 27, 2025

gray concrete stairs inside building — Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

In this three-part blog series, I’ll be exploring what it means to shape an equitable curriculum; one that aims to meet the needs of those facing the most complex barriers to learning. Poverty and inequality.

Along the way, I’ll aim to draw on real-world examples from schools and research evidence. In this first blog, I begin by considering what the purpose behind curriculum decisions are and who we are serving with these.

Curriculum is more than content. It is a signal of what is valued, who is seen, and how systems believe learning should unfold.

As Christine Counsell brilliantly writes,

Curriculum is all about power. Decisions about what knowledge to teach are an exercise of power and therefore a weighty ethical responsibility. What we choose to teach confers or denies power. To say that pupils should learn ‘the best that has been thought and said’ is never adequate. Start the conversation, and questions abound: ‘Whose knowledge?’; ‘Who decides on “best”?’
Taking curriculum seriously (2018)

In schools serving communities experiencing poverty and inequality, the curriculum is not just a pedagogical tool; it becomes a mirror, a map, and perhaps a wall.

To make curriculum equitable, educators (and others) must go far beyond tweaking subject content, choosing exam boards or tracking assessment data. We must rethink intent, design, and delivery through the lens of lived and living experiences.

An example to begin this post…

In 2023, Year 6 pupils across the country sat their national reading assessment. One of the texts, themed around bats, formed part of a well-structured paper and one that undoubtedly required children to apply a range of reading skills.

Yet some content stood out to me for other reasons.

Like this one, which asked pupils to consider why someone might want to encourage bats to visit their garden. For some, this would be a straightforward prompt. It formed part of an interview in magazine style format.

(Source: 2023 Key stage 2 English reading booklet; Standards & Testing Agency)

I couldn’t help thinking about the child reading that question from a flat with no outside space, or from a home surrounded by concrete.

For that child, the idea of having a garden, let alone one where wildlife might be invited, is not just unfamiliar, but potentially othering.

Of course, the paper itself is not designed to shape practical habits or expect every child to have direct experience of the scenario. And credit must be given where the author appears to have considered cost and feasibility.

But the example raises a broader reflection: how often do our curriculum materials and pathways assume a shared knowledge or reference that doesn’t exist?

This isn’t a call to dilute challenge. Far from it. We should absolutely aspire to a curriculum that is ambitious and stretching. But ambition must be matched by accessibility.

Our curriculum should not rely on assumed knowledge of lifestyle, space, or circumstance. Instead, it should be rooted in the rich and varied living experiences of all children; including those growing up in contexts of hardship. This is complex if you have not ever lived or observed this hardship.

When curriculum content connects to life as it is actually lived, it not only becomes more accessible, but it can also become transformative. Yet, the challenge of crafting curriculum with inequality in mind is not easy.

Who are we serving with curriculum?

Ofsted first introduced the "Intent, Implementation, and Impact" language for evaluating curriculum as early as 2018. This shift moved the emphasis away from data-driven outcomes alone and towards a broader understanding of curriculum quality.

Intent refers to the aims and design of the curriculum; what is being taught and why.
Implementation considers how the curriculum is delivered; the quality of teaching and learning.
Impact looks at what children have learned and how well they progress as a result.

The framework was developed in the preceding year and piloted before full roll-out. It aimed to encourage schools to develop a well-sequenced, knowledge-rich curriculum and to reduce excessive emphasis on exam performance data. In principle, I didn’t have any issues with this approach and over time as an education leader I’ve found the framing of intent-implementation-impact to be of some benefit.

But, my work around understanding and tackling inequality has led me to consider if initial and vital questions are missed as part of intent.

Who is the curriculum for? Who are we serving with the curriculum?

Let’s begin with an assumption: that many educators genuinely aim to design a curriculum that serves the most disadvantaged pupils. There’s many issues even with this assumption, but also the starting point.

Too often, even definitions of “disadvantage” are narrowed to fit government metrics; pupils eligible for free school meals, those attracting pupil premium funding, or figures on persistent absence. These indicators are important, but they are not enough. They risk turning disadvantage into a data category, rather than a lived or living experience. As such, curriculum can receive a false start and so can any attempts to make it equitable.

At Tees Valley Education, our schools work alongside families navigating insecure work, poor-quality housing, chronic illness, and the ongoing impact of structural inequality. These realities rarely show up neatly or cleanly in national datasets. Free Schools Meal (FSM) data and pupil premium eligibility datasets won’t tell you who didn’t eat before school, who’s struggling caring for siblings, or who’s dealing with mould on their bedroom walls.

I’ve written more about the shortcomings of these proxies as a starting point here.

As Marc Rowland says,

“Pupils are not at risk of underachievement because of any particular label, such as Pupil Premium. Rather, it is because of the impact of socio-economic disadvantage on their learning.”
Marc Rowland (2012)
Addressing Educational Disadvantage in Schools and Colleges: The Essex Way

If curriculum is to be truly equitable, it must be poverty-informed—shaped by a hyperlocal understanding of what life is like for the children and young people we teach and serve. This understanding cannot remain abstract; it must attend to the specific, granular realities of their everyday lives, as much as this is possible. Crucially, we won’t access this level of insight from educators or educational institutions alone.

The question of what content to include in the curriculum should not rest solely in the hands of individual educators either. Nor do I believe there is a perfect, fixed point where the curriculum can fully meet the needs of pupils facing poverty-related barriers to learning.

An equitable curriculum must be understood as an ongoing process, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, constantly attuned to the lived realities of the communities it seeks to serve.

To draw on Counsell’s thinking again:

"The contentious questions – Which works of literature? Which historical stories? Which art? … cannot be resolved by some optimal blend of diversity, some nirvana of neutrality, as though distribution across the sources of knowledge or types of knower will settle things. No matter how redemptive of former injustice, no holy grail of content selection will be reached."
Christine Counsell (2018): Taking curriculum seriously

Context and challenge

love to learn pencil signage on wall near walking man — Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

School leaders and educators will, of course, already have reflected on the intent behind their curriculum. In my work supporting schools across the UK, I’ve often supported them to sharpen a poverty-informed lens across many aspects of school life; curriculum being no exception. Yet, when discussing curriculum intent, many curriculum leaders tend to focus solely on the knowledge they want pupils to acquire. While this is undoubtedly important, it’s only a component part of the picture.

Some leaders go a step further, identifying the perceptions, assumptions, and orthodoxies pupils may hold that the curriculum seeks to challenge. This is a powerful ambition, but again it comes with complexities.

I recall working in a school community in Northumberland with a predominantly white working-class demographic. At the time, a far-right presence was growing in the area, and we were witnessing an increase in racially motivated incidents within the community and the region. In response, we intentionally designed opportunities in the curriculum to address and challenge some of the deep-seated prejudices we knew existed; particularly around Islam.

We introduced a revised curriculum unit focused on Islam and Islamophobia. In our first lesson, we wanted to dispel myths and challenge the rhetoric that frequently (and inaccurately) links majority Islam with terrorism. Part of our intent was to foster empathy and understanding, and one of the core questions we built into the lesson was:

“What might be the challenges of growing up as a British Muslim in the North East?”

The pupils looked at me blankly. There was no hostility; just confusion. One pupil raised their hand and, with innocence, asked, “What’s a British Muslim?”

I used every strategy I had to explore their thinking, gently challenge assumptions, and probe for understanding. But it became clear that, in this mind, the terms "British" and "Muslim" simply did not belong together. “But I thought all Muslims were from other countries?” they said, earnestly. The idea that someone could be both British and Muslim was entirely outside their frame of reference.

a union jack flag hanging on a fence — Photo by Adrian Raudaschl on Unsplash

In that moment, I realised that our curriculum design had made a flawed assumption; that pupils already had a foundation understanding of religious and cultural diversity within the UK. But without that foundation, how could we hope to challenge deeper misconceptions? Before we could address stereotypes about Islam or explore Islamophobia, we first had to establish the reality that British Muslims exist; and that Islam is a well-established religion for many communities in the UK.

More on assumptions and misconceptions in part 2 (coming soon)

If we’re serious about building an equitable curriculum, we must interrogate the foundations on which it stands. Too often, these foundations are quietly shaped by assumptions; about poverty, about families, about what pupils need in order to ‘catch up’ or ‘get out.’ But whose assumptions are these? And what happens when the knowledge we select is rooted more in deficit thinking than in a true understanding of lived and living realities?

Michael Young has long argued that curriculum should provide pupils with access to powerful knowledge; knowledge that enables them to make sense of and engage with the world. While some have critiqued his framework as overly traditional, more nuanced readings (e.g. Young & Muller, 2016) suggest something deeper: that curriculum content must be selected with a clear awareness of social inequality and that who decides what counts as powerful knowledge matters.

“Curriculum design is not a matter of choosing between ‘knowledge for all’ and ‘knowledge of the powerful’, but rather of building curricula that are sensitive to context while giving all pupils access to the knowledge that takes them beyond their experience.”

Young & Muller (2016)

This demands more than a surface-level review of curriculum intent. It asks those shaping curricula (e.g. educators, curriculum leaders) to reckon with their own orthodoxies. Much like the pupil whose mental model of Islam excluded the possibility of someone being both British and Muslim, I wonder to what extent are we, as educators, designing curriculum with implicit biases about pupils in poverty?

Place making myths

I’ve written before about the myths and assumptions that are often held about low income communities and pupils facing poverty-related barriers to learning.

There’s also the trend of packaging middle-class cultural norms as ‘essential experiences’ for pupils in low-income contexts; offering theatre trips, outdoor pursuits, or visits to the opera as though these alone might unlock social mobility. It’s important that I state I am not disagreeing with all children having access to these opportunities. It is the intent behind them and the way in which they are implemented that I am calling into question. While often well-intentioned, these approaches risk suggesting that children must be enriched by exposure to a specific cultural lens. One built on an assumption that they will never get it at home or because families somehow don’t aspire for it. What is being claimed as a fair and equitable practice is merely expecting pupils and families to fit in and adapt to the existing system, without that system changing to genuinely accommodate difference.

This isn’t equity; it’s assimilation in disguise.

selective focus photography of chess pieces — Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

I’d recommend a read of this research from Elwood et al (2014) to help make sense of what I’m saying here. The study looks at how class identities and attitudes toward poverty are shaped through everyday neighborhood activities in two Seattle communities. Using a relational poverty framework, they argue that while middle-class efforts often reinforce white, middle-class norms about what a neighborhood should look and feel like, these same actions also create opportunities for poverty politics; that is, discussions and tensions around inequality and class. The researchers focused on how middle-class and low-income residents interact through ‘place-making’; things like community organising, neighborhood improvements, or conversations about local changes. Even when middle-class people try to improve neighborhoods for all, many can unintentionally push poorer residents to the margins. But under the right conditions and understanding, these efforts can also open up space for empathy, solidarity, and new ways of thinking about poverty.

To build a curriculum that truly serves all pupils, educators must reflect critically on what needs the curriculum is intended to meet; both within classrooms and across the broader lives of children and young people. This often means confronting long-standing narratives that have go largely unchallenged. Take, for example, the well-worn idea that children in poverty suffer from low aspirations. This narrative continues to shape education policy and school interventions, implying that by simply raising aspirations, we can close attainment gaps.

Research by Treanor (2017), based on a longitudinal birth cohort study, helps to dismantle this myth. Her findings show that parents and carers in low-income communities consistently hold high hopes for their children.

The real issues, she argues, is not aspiration but opportunity and access:

to knowledge
to networks
to navigational tools

And that is precisely where curriculum must play a transformative role; not simply in expanding horizons, but in illuminating the paths that make those horizons reachable.

If we want curriculum to be equitable, it must be poverty-informed; not built on deficit assumptions, but grounded in deep, contextual understanding. That means listening to communities, questioning our own biases, and accepting that an equitable curriculum is not a finished product. It is an ongoing, evolving process not revolutionary, but evolutionary.

The ‘c words’ here are context and care. Both are important

Curriculum matters. But an equitable curriculum even more so.

In part 2, I share more about misconceptions in curriculum design and learning I’ve been able to gain from my SHINE funded research with young people and teachers at Tees Valley Education.

That Poverty Guy

Comments