The ‘big ideas’ in curriculum design are a series of overarching, broad concepts and themes that help you to establish and articulate the purpose of your curriculum. When setting out to design any curriculum, we should ask the questions: ‘What is the purpose of our curriculum? What broader concepts do we want our children to understand by the time they reach the end of their primary education?’
What are the Cornerstones 10 Big Ideas?
There are 10 big ideas at the heart of the Cornerstones Curriculum. They include humankind, comparison, nature, materials, creativity, significance, processes, investigation, place, and change. These big ideas thread throughout all the projects but you’ll find them outlined in the skills and knowledge framework on Maestro (Objectives by Big idea) and in the Library section.
Where do they feature in national guidance?
Overarching themes and concepts like the big ideas are not explicitly defined in the national curriculum, Curriculum for Wales or Ofsted’s inspection framework but they are alluded to, for example when Ofsted refer to the importance of ‘larger concepts’ in a curriculum. With careful analysis across all subject programmes of study, there are some common or recurring ideas that shape the primary curriculum. As a school, you should also consider adding any other big ideas that you feel are relevant to your own context and curriculum.
How did Cornerstones identify them in the national curriculum?
If you look at the national curriculum, there is quite a disconnect between subjects, both in the ways that they are written and in the volume of content. There are no visible bigger ideas or concepts identified which connect the subjects and this is a flaw, because we know such connections between subject content, skills and knowledge are what makes learning stronger and more meaningful.
The team at Cornerstones started by analysing all the national curriculum subjects and carefully drawing out some common themes. Through a period of refinement, these became our big ideas.
Some big ideas were more difficult to define than others. For example, the idea or concept of significance is a familiar aspect of the primary curriculum and most teachers would recognise this as being a historical concept. But what we did was look for examples of significance across all subjects. For example, in our curriculum, children study significant people and events in history and art and significant places in geography.
It’s a complex and time consuming process for a school to do themselves, but in using Cornerstones, this work has already been done for you. In our curriculum, the big ideas have been broken down into smaller, subject-specific aspects, skills and knowledge and we use these to plan lesson series. Teachers can use the planned lessons in the confidence that all those links are already established.
How do big ideas help children to connect their learning?
We met Matthew Purves from Ofsted and he spoke clearly about how inspectors will want to talk to children about what they are currently learning and how it connects to previous learning. The big ideas lay the foundations for an interconnected curriculum. The connections are there; teachers simply need to make them explicit and visible to the children.
Over time, children will become more knowledgeable about what those big ideas are and begin to see them more clearly for themselves. For example, if you are teaching plants in science, you might say ‘this is part of the big idea of nature.’ Then, probably in that same topic, when children are making observational drawings of plants, you can say, ‘We are learning about nature here, too.’ It’s also the perfect opportunity for you to revisit parts of a plant, asking children questions about the different plant parts they are drawing. It's s a more three dimensional approach to learning about nature and the natural world, but it doesn’t lose the subject discipline.
Final thoughts
Connecting a curriculum through big ideas is like creating a complex tapestry. We’ve mapped out the threads thoughtfully to ensure that children build on knowledge and progress throughout the subjects of the curriculum in a meaningful, cohesive manner.
Having big ideas in your curriculum also gives children a broader, more global context for their learning – all part of delivering a primary curriculum that has the power to transform children’s lives.
Useful reading
- 10 Big Ideas – FREE home learning challenges for children and families | (cornerstoneseducation.co.uk)
- Episode 44: Curriculum intent: big ideas and larger concepts | (cornerstoneseducation.co.uk)