"Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return… each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline."

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

All eras and ideas change, evolve, and end. In education, it is usually a change of government, followed by a curriculum shift or an accountability turn, that ushers in the end of an era. Over the last decade and more the 'knowledge-rich' era in England has reigned supreme. Its end is just as inevitable.

The end of an era isn't a cliff-edge, but instead a complex mix of change and continuity, growth and decline. Beyond the end-of-era anxieties, it is an apt time to reflect on what changed and what might be next too.

Knowledge rich: A very short history

It is commonly agreed that the knowledge-rich era was ushered in by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb's reforms in 2010. It ushered in curriculum reform, latterly an Ofsted focus on curriculum, along with an emphasis on cognitive science and 'traditional' teaching methods.

The ideas that percolated were rooted in the influence of E. D. Hirsch and Cultural Literacy, with its argument that a well-sequenced, knowledge-rich curriculum was essential, equitable, and necessary to raise standards. Dylan Wiliam puts the equity case well in his essay:

"A knowledge-rich curriculum systematically builds for all pupils the background information that affluent pupils may acquire incidentally, giving every learner the intellectual capital needed to read deeply, reason flexibly and create authentically."

'The Value of A Knowledge Rich Curriculum', Civitas

Out of this era came some of useful insights that helped me at the end of my teaching career. It made me reconsider careful sequencing, so that each lesson had a clear signpost to the next. I considered much more how what I taught in February was remembered in June, once retrieval practice exploded into teacher consciousness. An emphasis on explicit instruction, such as Rosenshine's principles, helped me consider how best to craft my explanations in ways I simply hadn't considered enough before.

Many teachers (and their pupils) experienced gains during the era. At the same time, it also became easier to teachers to access research evidence and deploy it to their practical ends. The Education Endowment Foundation developed is guidance reports and made evidence easily accessible. Social media created grassroots networks, such as ResearchED, 'Reading Rocks', and more - where teaching, learning, curriculum, research evidence, and more, were discussed.

All that said, there were inevitable struggles along the way. The curriculum resources that were developed were not always robust enough to survive the complex classrooms they entered. A slew of resources, such as the topic booklet, the knowledge organiser, and the weekly quiz, were a practical attempt to make good curriculum thinking translate into busy classrooms. They may have raised the floor in many cases, but in reality they were implemented with variable success.

It is worth remembering too that the approach to a 'knowledge rich' curriculum was accompanied by a response to workload issues and not just notions of knowledge richness. The DfE was committed to reducing workload. This included teacher planning, with hopes of bringing to an end the era of countless teachers each writing their own version of a scheme of learning in the far corners of a Sunday night. This approach came with gains in saved time, but also in some cases it may have resulted in subtle losses of professionalism and a drive for (over)standardisation.

Many gains for teachers and leaders during this era were real and they were shared by teachers in blogs and on social media too. I am less sure the gains held up consistently in primary schools. Primary school subject leads found themselves accounting for the sequencing and rationale of a plethora of subjects they had never been asked to think about in such depth before, often without the required time or resource to do so in many cases. Whatever time was saved in shared lesson planning was often spent in writing curriculum intent documents and leadership time.

In retrospect, it is also fair to say that quite what ’knowledge-rich‘ meant was never entirely settled. This left the term open to ambiguity and problems of variable implementation throughout the era. Many schools transformed for the better, but lots quietly went unchanged, or even struggled under the weight of choreographing curriculum and teaching as they struggled to retain and recruit teachers.

Like any era in education, wins were coupled with losses. Some argue that international assessments tout the success of the era, whereas others claim issues with non-attendance, engagement and the 'forgotten third' of students, were a result of the narrow approach to curriculum and learning. The consistency of the positive international assessments, especially comparing the impact of the pandemic with other anglophone countries, proved stark. However, the self-professed unhappiness of too many English children was equally striking in those same international comparisons.

A tale of two classrooms

Picture the knowledge-rich classroom at its best. Every pupil experiences the same demanding content: the poem, history source, or maths problem, with careful forethought for knowledge building and sequence. The explanation is crafted and the practice is well designed. Nobody is quietly handed the easier worksheet on the 'special' table. The principle is curriculum entitlement: these children, all of them, have access to 'powerful knowledge'.

Now, picture the inclusive classroom at its best. The teacher starts from what is actually in front of her. She notices the boy who has stopped writing, or the girl who answered correctly but only by copying her partner word for word. The teacher shifts the worked example, explaining the idea to a small group who were stuck. The principle is pupil responsiveness: this pupil, right now, needs a small adaptation to access the curriculum and learning more successfully.

Look a little closer at the two classrooms and they have many parallels.

Are we shifting to a new 'age of inclusion'? If we are, we need to understand what came before, what to retain and what to drop. To put it plainly, a shift to inclusive classrooms shouldn't be an outright rejection of what came before. It retains many similar sequences: effective retrieval practices, with expert explicit instruction, along with close attention to what the pupil knows and can do. The EEF's guide to inclusive teaching starts from quality teaching for everyone that aligns with many touchstones of the knowledge-rich era. But we need to privilege teacher expert judgment and intelligent adaptations too, otherwise the issues that accompanied teaching in the knowledge-rich era will reemerge in classrooms in the coming years too.

Eras in education cyclically evolve and break down. Matthew Evans and Becky Allen described school improvement as a series of waves that build, gather advocates, then break under the weight of daily realties in real schools. The wave analogy works because educational eras are complex and merge into one another. Each one gathers up the water and energy of those that came before, so that every 'next big thing' carries within it some remnants of the last.

We are at the point in England where the knowledge rich era is crashing into an inclusion era. Some habits will shift and move; others will stay the same behind the closed classroom door. The only thing we can be sure about is that we don't know what the new era will look like yet!

The knowledge rich classroom is unlikely to be radically different from an inclusive classroom. Change is slower in real classrooms compared to the lively arguments and quick shifts in new ideas debated on social media and conference stages. But new curricula and assessment does usher in more significant change. Routines and habits are broken as teachers slowly grapple with new curricula challenges.

What next for schools?

There are potential pitfalls and promises as the knowledge rich era shifts to an era of inclusive classrooms. We need to ensure the new era ahead is not another fuelled by hope but quickly trampled over by experience.

The first pitfall is shared language and teacher understanding of inclusive teaching. It is likely to be misinterpreted at scale, just like 'knowledge-rich' was in some quarters a decade ago. If such terms come to mean just about anything we want, then they really end up becoming a justification whatever a school already does. Ugly mutations are likely to follow close behind. If we cannot say plainly what inclusive teaching is and what it is not. We will end up with inclusion policies that are window-dressing documents, rather than signposting the actual teacher behaviours that translate into effective practices.

The second pitfall is dropping the best of the last decade as we make the inevitable era shift. Sequencing, retrieval, explicit instruction, subject specificity: none of this becomes less true because our attention has moved elsewhere. The risk is a swing back into talking only about 'belonging' or the latest popular teaching strategy, as though the 'what' of curriculum was incidental once more. The answer to 'inclusion' will still differ by subject and by phase: adaptive teaching in Year 1 phonics is not adaptive teaching in Year 12 history. Any advice that forgets this will be too vague and general to use.

The third potential pitfall worries me most, because it arrives dressed up as kindness for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds or for those pupils with SEND. If we begin from the position that every child might have unmet needs, or doesn't feel they belong, it is a short step to treating every challenge as something to be made easier. Adaptations intended to support pupils with SEND could unintentionally become a general lowering of expectations for any and every pupil. Scaffolding could proliferate and stay in place too long. Strategies could multiply that quietly stop pupils from taking on the difficult challenges they needed to actually learn hard things. That is not inclusion: it is a well-intentioned way of lowering expectations. It is most damaging to the children already furthest behind, or with least support outside the school gates.

The promise of inclusive teaching can supersede the pitfalls. Knowing when to scaffold and when to hold back, or when a struggle is productive and when a pupil is quietly failing, is within the grasp of the well-supported teacher. There is promise, but when schools are short of time and tight for funding, pitfalls are not far behind.

Where policy is heading

There are significant policies marking the beginning of a new era. The curriculum and assessment review reported in November, with a revised curriculum due in 2027 and first teaching in 2028. Now, new technical qualifications have been announced from 14 too. The SEND white paper commits hundreds of millions to training every teacher in inclusive practice and adaptive teaching, alongside a new duty to publish an inclusion strategy by Christmas.

There is lots of change: new curricula and qualifications, new policies, along with a new-found emphasis on inclusion, all at once.

The devising of a new curriculum and newly-coined technical qualifications will draw a lot of bandwidth from already busy school leaders. There is a well-meaning push from the prime minister to devise technical qualifications for pupils from the age of 14. That debate cuts to the heart of the last era's equity case: is powerful knowledge an entitlement for all, or will choosing routes at 14 quietly decide which children get it? Will pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with SEND really get a better deal from this new era and newly coined qualifications? Will other people's children be told to trudge down the easy technical route, or will the opportunity be different and better this time?

We should heed issues of the past when hurried changes led to flawed implementation. National training programmes delivered at speed to every teacher in the country can be brilliant and timely, but they are most likely to end up with variable implementation and lethal mutations for the pupils who can least afford it. Not only that, but making inclusion an accountability measure sets the same trap as last time: schools will spend ample time writing inclusion plans and preparing for OFSTED. A published strategy is easy to check and tick off: supporting the teacher who is trying to plan and adapt for their diverse class of pupils for a wet Wednesday morning biology lesson is not.

Eras end and new ones emerge: our new era will fare better if we understand what came before it.

Those who advocated for the last era and those arguing for this one are not really in total opposition, though it may sometimes feel that way. Both want the children who can find learning hardest to flourish and both recognise some children have more support outside the school gates than others. Both privilege learning and care deeply for children in their care.

The key step now is not to waste all our energy fighting on theoretical grounds, but to listen more carefully to teachers describing what is has happened to them and their pupils, in their particular school, phase and subject. We need to hear their gains and losses; their hopes and challenges. We need to understand their interpretations of inclusion, along with their current practices and tactics. That has always been where the best ideas came from.

Then we need to prepare teachers with the time, tools and training to enter the next era with renewed confidence for new possibilities.