Stop Designing ‘Relevant’ Curricula for the Poor

In education, we sometimes encounter a view – sincerely held, often compassionately motivated – that children from disadvantaged backgrounds need a different kind of curriculum. A softer one. A simpler one. One that prioritises what they find familiar or interesting over what they find challenging or alien. It is a view I have heard many times, in many schools, from well-meaning professionals who want to do the right thing. And yet it is a view we must robustly, repeatedly, and unapologetically resist.

There is a lie that continues to circulate in our system, subtle and smiling, dressed in the language of relevance and engagement. It suggests that the children who come from homes without books, without tradition, without stability, need something less demanding. That they should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics. That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.

This lie is not new. But it it remains potent. And it often passes unchallenged because it speaks in the gentle tones of care. But when we scratch beneath the surface, what we find is not compassion: it is condescension. It is a poverty of aspiration, and it falls most heavily on the children who most need us to lift them up.

It may or may not be the case that a child growing up on a council estate will encounter Shakespeare at home. Or Plato. Or Pythagoras. Or Hildegard of Bingen. Or the music of Miles Davis or the poetry of Keats. That is precisely why we teach it. School is not meant to reflect back a child’s existing world. It is meant to offer new worlds. It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their postcode, places they have every right to belong

And while we must not make lazy assumptions about working-class families – never forgetting that many children in poverty are surrounded by fiercely aspirational parents, grandparents, family and friends – we must also not close our eyes to the truth that there are children who grow up in homes where no one has the inclination or capacity to reveal to them the grandeur of human thought.

If schools do not do this, who will?

If we allow cultural capital to be inherited rather than taught, then we give up on justice. We allow background to dictate future. We let go of one of the very reasons schools exist.

To offer a demanding, powerful curriculum to every child is not elitist. It is egalitarian. It says to the child: you are worthy of this knowledge. You are capable of wrestling with complexity. You deserve access to the accumulated wisdom and accomplishments of those who came before you. This is your birthright and it is now yours to own and protect.

To deny children that, under the guise of empathy, is not kindness. It is surrender.

I do not want our schools to produce children who feel affirmed in the limitations that society has placed around them. I want them to walk out of our schools ready to transcend those limitations entirely. Not because we told them they were special, but because we gave them the tools to discover what is special in the world and in themselves.

George W. Bush once warned of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” The phrase has stayed with me since. It remains one of the most devastatingly accurate descriptions of what happens when we mistake compassion for capitulation. When belief in the child is replaced by sympathy for the circumstances. And though many claim this battle has already been won, I remain convinced that it is a fight we must keep fighting. Because even now, there are those who speak, with unearned certainty, of the ‘relevant’ curricula we should design for the poor. As though the great works of humanity belong only to the fortunate.

But we know better.

We know that a great teacher meets a child where they are, but refuses to leave them there. They explain. They model. They practise. They build the bridge across the gap. But they never make the gap smaller. They never bring the destination nearer by pretending it lies somewhere else.

Every child deserves access to the best that has been thought, said, and discovered. Not because they already possess it. But because it is theirs by right. Education is not about tradition for tradition’s sake. It is about justice. About power. About freedom.

We are not gatekeepers.

We are door openers.

And if we do not open those doors, especially for the children least likely to find them on their own, then we are complicit in keeping them shut.