I'm a bit surprised that I have to explain that. But ok...
I was a teacher for many years before I became a curriculum developer, and maybe that is exactly why I find this so difficult to watch now.
There is a very common idea in schools that sounds almost noble on the surface. Teachers are given enormous responsibility for planning, sequencing, materials, assessment, differentiation, and the overall logic of what happens in the classroom, and all of this is presented as autonomy, flexibility, or professional trust. But very often it is none of those things.
It is simply the absence of structure, transferred onto teachers and renamed responsibility.
I think this is one of the biggest blind spots in education right now. A teacher should know how to TEACH. A teacher should understand methodology, children, subject content, classroom management, feedback, and developmental logic. That is already an intellectually and emotionally serious profession. But expecting that same person to also function as a full curriculum team, to design progression across lessons and units, align objectives, create materials, build assessments, and hold the coherence of the whole system together after finishing a full teaching day is not trust. It is overload.
And what makes this even more striking is that curriculum is not some invisible technical layer that only teachers see. It is one of the most visible REPRESENTATIONS of the school itself.
The materials, the structure of lessons, the clarity of progression, the quality of presentations, the way tasks are phrased, the way thinking is guided — all of this communicates what the school actually is. Not what it says in its mission statement, but what it DOES in reality. Curriculum is BRANDING in its most honest form, because it cannot pretend. It either reflects a clear philosophy and standard, or it exposes the lack of it.
This is why I genuinely struggle to understand how some school leaders overlook it. If a school positions itself as a serious, reputable organisation with a clear educational vision, then curriculum is NOT optional. It is not something to be improvised by individual teachers in isolation. It is a leadership decision. It is part of governance. It is part of how the school defines itself publicly and professionally.
And yet, in many cases, this responsibility is still pushed downward.
The language around it sounds positive. Teacher agency. Teacher ownership. Teacher freedom. But if there is no shared architecture underneath, what we call freedom is very often just teachers being left alone with structural work that should never have been individual in the first place.
emiliashend.com
There is such a difference between walking in familiar with the materials and walking in still figuring them out. That preparation time is everything.