Curriculum Coherence: Navigating from Gesture to Meaning
In the strait between Italy and Sicily, sailors have for centuries reported impossible sights – phantom ships, floating castles, even cities in the air. The Fata Morgana is a mirage that produces images convincing from a distance but which dissolve up close. Curriculum design can risk a similar illusion: features may seem connected and substantial, yet on closer inspection reveal a coherence that is more apparent than real, lacking the deliberate progression needed to build knowledge, understanding, and competence over time.
Curriculum coherence is often referred to in terms of alignment among content, sequencing, progression, and assessment – internal coherence – enabling learning to build in a deliberate, cumulative way over time (Schmidt & Prawat, 2006). Alongside this important design feature sits a less often spoken about dimension – purpose coherence: the alignment between the aims of education and the curriculum’s content, ensuring that what is taught serves these aims as well as the internal logic of progression (OECD, 2019; Priestley & Biesta, 2013). Achieving both forms requires a clarity of intention and design; shaping what is taught and how it is sequenced through sustained learning experiences. This purpose is of course realised most effectively within a school culture and ethos that support its enactment.
Anchoring Curriculum Coherence to Purpose
To replace the mirage with substance, curricula need clear structural links and coherence across four planes – horizontal (alignment across subjects at a stage), vertical (progression within a subject over time), subject (so a subject’s aims, disciplinary structure, and sequencing work together), and enacted (the match between intended and taught) – so that content and progression is deliberate, and core concepts recur and deepen (Schmidt, Wang & McKnight, 2005).
The five Futuring Education threads were developed with these grounding principles of coherence in mind, focussing on sustainability, digital literacy, health and wellbeing, economic understanding, and ethics. These threads emerged from a review of international curriculum frameworks (OECD, 2018; UNESCO, 2015, 2021), educational futures research (Fullan, Quinn & McEachen, 2018; Fadel, Bialik & Trilling, 2015), and analysis of the societal shifts shaping our present and future. They reflect domains essential for navigating contemporary life – addressing challenges from technological change and ecological crises to questions of health, equity, and how we live together. Drawing on the powerful knowledge of key disciplines, the threads provide conceptual foundations for learning that serve purposeful action for self, others, and the wider world. Disciplinary drivers ensure sustained progression, while dialogic learning – as both process and outcome – has the potential to animate.
From Tokenism to Coherence
The table below outlines a starting scope for each thread, offering examples that move from surface-level gestures to the detailed experiences that can build knowledge, skills, and dispositions over time. Well-intentioned enrichment as the main driver – a recycling week, a wellbeing day – may appear purposeful, but without thoughtful curriculum sequencing and meaningful enactment it risks remaining superficial, undermining the very aims it is meant to advance. Futuring Education’s ongoing framework development will expand on this scope, providing practical tools for schools to embed the threads in lasting and sustainable ways.
| Thread | Tokenistic Treatment | Curricular Potential |
| Sustainability | Earth Day posters, sustainability days | Weather–climate distinction; Earth’s energy balance & greenhouse effect; conservation of matter; water/carbon/nitrogen cycles; spatial scale (local–global); human–environment systems; land use and resource flows; risk, vulnerability and resilience; adaptation and mitigation pathways; environmental justice. |
| Digital | Isolated e-safety lessons, basic computing literacy teaching | Attention and habits (design nudges; focus/balance); safety and privacy (data trails/consent; help-seeking); information integrity (lateral reading/provenance; synthetic media); platforms & power (targeting/ads; incentives/moderation); identity, relationships and inclusion (self-presentation; conduct/repair; upstander moves); AI and machine learning – society and partnership (training-data provenance/bias/rights; AI as reflective partner with verification and human agency); dialogic participation and values-aligned decision-making. |
| Health & Wellbeing | Healthy eating standalone lessons | Body systems and homeostasis; sleep, nutrition, physical development of strength, stamina, flexibility, fundamental movement skills; stress response and mental health literacy; relationships and communication; behaviour change and habit formation; media/health-claims literacy; environmental determinants of health. |
| Economy | Budgeting games, career day events | Scarcity and choice; incentives; production, specialisation and trade; markets, externalities and public goods; money, risk and compound growth; inequality and distribution; sustainability and circular economy; policy levers and trade-offs. |
| Ethics | ‘Respect’ posters, opinion-driven superficial debates | Interthinking norms; reasons and evidence; fallacies and bias; ethical frameworks (virtue/duty/consequence); rights and responsibilities; plural values and respectful dissent; judgment under uncertainty; dialogue across difference. |
What’s There, What Isn’t
Curriculum honesty means looking beyond what can be displayed to what is genuinely learned, sustained, and lived. The appearance of coherence can mask the reality that, while strands such as sustainability or digital literacy are included, they are often upheld more by what can be shown than by what is meaningfully built. Does the implemented curriculum truly cultivate practical wisdom and support students’ ability to live well, or do such experiences fade in the realities of children’s lives? The valuable yet demanding task ahead is not to settle for a vision on the horizon, but to navigate toward it and build a curriculum coherent in both experience and design.
References
Fadel, C., Bialik, M., & Trilling, B. (2015). Four-dimensional education: The competencies learners need to succeed. Center for Curriculum Redesign.
Fullan, M., Quinn, J., & McEachen, J. (2018). Deep learning: Engage the world, change the world. Corwin Press.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2018). The future of education and skills: Education 2030. OECD Publishing.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2019). OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030: OECD Learning Compass 2030 – Concept note/position papers. OECD Publishing.
Priestley, M., & Biesta, G. (Eds.). (2013). Reinventing the curriculum: New trends in curriculum policy and practice. Bloomsbury.
Schmidt, W. H., & Prawat, R. S. (2006). Curriculum coherence and national control of education: Issue or non-issue? Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38(6), 641–658.
Schmidt, W. H., Wang, H. C., & McKnight, C. C. (2005). Curriculum coherence: An examination of US mathematics and science content standards from an international perspective. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37(5), 525–559.
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2015). Rethinking education: Towards a global common good? UNESCO.
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2021). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. UNESCO.
Wegerif, R. (2025). Rethinking Educational Theory: Education as Expanding Dialogue. Edward Elgar Publishing.
