In 2016 I was recruited as a Lead Practitioner for a large catholic multi-academy trust in Merseyside. Based in the lead school for the trust, I was seconded to our sister schools to support in elevating their provision to meet that of our own outstanding status. In 2019 I was appointed to the role of Curriculum Lead across the trust and it is through this role that I came across Kat Howard and Claire Hill. I had no idea that their small and humble book, Symbiosis, would be so pivotal in my own understanding of the rationale and potential of the school curriculum. Research is fundamental to my role and I read a lot of what is out there so that I can disseminate the best to our amazing teachers who crave the time to be able to read the research that I have at my fingertips. Never before, or since, has there been a book that has impacted so much of my practice, nor one that has made such a profound difference in the experience of education our students receive in the classroom. This book, quite literally, changed my world. At the time of my reading Symbiosis, I had been in high school education for nearly 20 years. I had read hundreds of pieces of research, if not thousands. I knew our curricula inside out and, being an outstanding academy for 13 years, we knew what a great curriculum looked like, right? Possibly... but what this vital lesson taught me was that, especially in the ever changing landscape of education, we can always be better. Symbiosis made me realise that we had achieved our outstanding status and our exceptional results despite the fact our approach to curriculum was convoluted, clunky, disjointed and highly variable. My question became "what if we had done things differently, what then?" 

In my role as trust curriculum lead, I was line managed by an inspirational woman who "got it". We audited, deconstructed and re-constructed every department curriculum across our trust and worked with middle leaders towards producing something so streamlined that any teacher in any department could thrive just by delivering it. We created a curriculum that was classroom practice, not words on paper.