One of the major potential benefits of being part of an academy trust is the ability to share ideas, practices and expertise across an even wider group of professionals and settings – to ensure all schools and pupils benefit as a result. This onus on pooling expertise and ideas for continuous improvement and consistency is at the heart of Inspire Partnership Academy Trust’s approach to the curriculum and teaching and learning. Their development of a trust-wide global curriculum -focused on the importance of community, both locally and globally, and linked to key themes such as sustainable development and diversity and leadership – demonstrates this. In this article Rob Carpenter, the CEO of Inspire Partnership, shares his insights into the development, implementation, and impact of their global curriculum, offering useful reflections for trust leaders on the importance of consistency and collaboration and the critical role of leadership within this.
Some background to developing and introducing the global curriculum
As a CEO, it has always been important for me to stay up to date with useful research and to challenge myself (and others) to ensure we are learning from what this research and intelligence might be telling us. So, through my own research, I started to identify that the most educationally successful and high performing regions and countries focus as much on engagement and agency within their curriculum – what some people call self-efficacy – as they do on the curriculum being ‘knowledge rich’. One author’s work which particularly resonated was Gert Biesta, author of ‘The Beautiful Risk of Education’, which is based on the concept that the purpose of education is not only to impart knowledge, but also to prepare young people for the complexities of the world. Our curriculum model is therefore rooted predominantly in this work.
Our aim is to support young people to develop an understanding of their place in the world, rooted in their lived experiences within their local communities, and also through engaging with global issues, to contextualise their learning. This helps prepare young people to meet the world with the ability to connect taught knowledge and skills with their own agency and purpose, to make a meaningful contribution within their local communities and beyond.
Across the three distinctive regions of our trust – Medway, Greenwich, and Croydon – the curriculum design reflects the local context of each area. By grounding education in each locality, students develop a strong sense of place and identity, understanding the roots and importance of the local community. A crucial aspect of the Inspire Partnership’s curriculum is the inclusion of local history, and we have particularly emphasised the contributions of local historical figures of colour within the communities. By exploring the stories and achievements of diverse historical figures, students develop a broader perspective of their community’s heritage and learn the value of representation and diversity.