The term ‘the curriculum is the progression model’ is increasingly thrown around today, not least because it has become part of the language of the school inspectorate. I find the language and concepts of education deeply fascinating at the best of times, but this one has a particular resonance for me as, to the best of my knowledge, it was a term first used by me and Christine Counsell. Yet I have on several recent occasions found myself discussing it with people and realising that the way it has been understood is some distance from how Christine and I originally used the term. I want to use this blog post to set out what I understood the term to mean when I first began to use it.  Some time around 2014 I was sat with Christine discussing the end of National Curriculum Levels. For around two decades, the National Curriculum Levels had become the progression model used from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 3, and their use was ubiquitous in schools. It is easy to forget that we are now six years on from their aboliti on: the sad retention stats in education mean that there are large numbers … Continue reading What did I mean by ‘the curriculum is the progression model’?