Curriculum intent is the planning that happens before any teaching: what you want pupils to know and be able to do, and the order they’ll learn it in. Implementation is how that curriculum gets taught, in each subject and each classroom. Impact is what pupils have actually learned, and whether they’re ready for whatever comes next.
That’s the short version. The longer one is worth having, because the three words are easy to say in a meeting and much harder to pin down when you’re the one reviewing a curriculum.
Where did intent, implementation and impact come from?
The terms came into wide use with Ofsted’s Education Inspection Framework, which started in September 2019. It folded the old judgements on outcomes and on teaching into one judgement on the quality of education, and described the curriculum through intent, implementation and impact. The thinking was to stop schools narrowing what they teach, to move away from teaching to the test, and to give every pupil, whatever their background, the same ambitious curriculum.
Ofsted’s framework has changed since, so don’t read this as a guide to how inspection works today. The three terms have stuck anyway. They give you a sensible order for curriculum development: plan it, teach it, then check what it did. Plenty of schools still use them to structure curriculum reviews and subject leader conversations, whatever the inspection framework says.
What does curriculum intent mean in practice?
Start by asking what your curriculum actually is. It’s more than the timetable and more than the national curriculum, and it helps to think of it as several curriculums at once.
- The national curriculum: the content all pupils in maintained schools in England are entitled to, set out by statute.
- The local curriculum: what your school adds to reflect its own community, its local economy and the particular challenges and opportunities your pupils have.
- The hidden curriculum: what pupils learn just by being in your school. They pick it up from each other, from corridors and lunch queues, and from any gap between the values on your website and how adults actually behave.
Then ask whether the whole thing is broad and balanced. Schools in England have to offer a balanced and broadly based curriculum. A useful test for breadth is whether pupils get experience in each of the linguistic, mathematical, scientific, technological, human and social, physical, and aesthetic and creative areas, for as long as possible. Starting GCSE courses in Year 9, or giving some pupils fewer subjects, works against that.
Balance is about time. If English has five lessons a week and art has one, or design technology turns up for a term on a carousel and then disappears, the subject can’t do its job. Primary schools will know the same squeeze in Year 6, when English and maths can swallow most of the week.
How do you set end points and sequence a subject curriculum?
This is where intent gets specific, and it’s mostly work for subject leaders.
Decide the end points first. What should pupils know and be able to do at the end of this topic, this year, this key stage, that they couldn’t at the start? The course puts it nicely: plant a flag in the distance and plan the route towards it. If you want to be bolder, ask what you’d like pupils to remember about your subject five or ten years after they’ve left.
Then mark the waypoints. A waypoint is the knowledge a pupil needs from this topic to make sense of the next one. Waypoints make good learning objectives, and now that national curriculum levels have gone, they give you something meaningful to assess against.
Next comes sequencing, so each piece builds on what came before. In secondary that means knowing what pupils were taught in Year 6, so Year 7 extends it instead of repeating it (or contradicting it, which is worse). It also means using the same language about learning across subjects.
And make it ambitious for everyone. Disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND should get the same rich curriculum as their peers, with support to reach it. A thinner version doesn’t count.
What is curriculum implementation?
Implementation is the teaching. In plain terms it’s high-quality teaching that leads to learning pupils keep. Teachers explain key ideas clearly, encourage the right kind of discussion, check understanding and correct misconceptions, and help pupils get key concepts into long-term memory so they can use them fluently.
It works at two levels. At subject level, the questions are about consistency and what makes your subject itself:
- How do historians, scientists or mathematicians think, speak and write, and is that taught explicitly?
- Is the curriculum linear, or does it return to ideas with more complexity each time?
- Does a pupil get the same content whichever teacher they have?
- When science needs maths, do science teachers use the same methods the maths department does?
- Do words like “analyse” mean the same thing in every subject, and if not, do pupils know the difference?
At classroom level, it’s about what the subject looks and sounds like when it’s taught. How much is teacher-led and how much is pupil-led? How does the teacher model and think aloud, so that what an expert does without thinking becomes visible to a novice? What does assessment look like, and what happens to feedback once it’s given?
Hold on to one thing here. Assessment should support teaching without piling work onto teachers. If a new tracking system doubles marking time, it’s the wrong system.
What is curriculum impact?
Impact is whether the curriculum worked. Exam and test results are part of that, and they matter, because qualifications open doors. But they only sample what pupils have learned.
The bigger question is whether pupils are ready for the next stage of their education, employment or training. That brings in their wider development: their interests and talents, their confidence, resilience and independence, their physical and mental health, and their understanding of how to be a respectful, active citizen. If that’s what education is for, measuring only exam results leaves most of it out.
Impact really asks three questions. Is the curriculum well designed? Is it well taught? And how well are pupils progressing, and how ready are they for what’s next? Looking at pupils’ work, talking to pupils and staff, and knowing where your leavers go all count as evidence alongside the data.
How should you start curriculum development in your school?
Not with a blank page. This is the course’s firmest piece of advice, and it’s right. You already have a curriculum that does a lot well, and rewriting it from scratch is slow and exhausting. Usually it isn’t needed.
Take stock first. What’s working? What can you build on, or share between departments so quality is more even? Where does something genuinely need to change?
Then protect workload. Curriculum design is hard and time-consuming, and many teachers have never been asked to do it. If you’re asking subject leaders to take it on, decide what they can stop doing to make room, give them the training they need, and set a timescale that’s realistic for your school. Our curriculum intent, implementation and impact course comes with a set of questions to take into exactly this kind of review.
Curriculum development training for teachers
You can read about intent, implementation and impact in an afternoon. Turning them into a curriculum review your staff can actually carry out takes a bit more, and you’ll find more help with that on our curriculum topic page.
The course is written by a former headteacher and curriculum author. It takes each of the three terms in turn with a plain definition, then gives you a note-taking sheet and a set of questions for subject and leadership discussions. It suits senior leaders, subject and middle leaders, and any teacher who’s been asked to review a scheme of work. See the course.