Eye-catching research – why IOE leads on people and ideas

When Richard Maurice came to choose a Master’s programme, he knew there was really only one choice – IOE.

Richard Maurice was already a few months into a new role as Federation Geography Consultant and Lead Practitioner at the Harris Federation when he started the MA Education (Geography) programme. In charge of overhauling the geography curriculum across the charity’s 22 secondary schools, Maurice had written his first draft – when he had a realisation.

“There was deficit in my own knowledge of geography curriculum. It was really important to me to have an academic rationale for what I was doing: not just what the geography teachers in the Federation’s schools were going to teach, but also why I had put that on the curriculum in the first place. The result was that the Master’s became my CPD.” 

Maurice was drawn to the IOE in the first place because of the presence of a particular academic: David Lambert, Honorary Professor of Geography Education. “He’s a leading figure in geography and curriculum and he was the person I was reading most in the run up to the Master’s,” Maurice recalls. 

It was Professor Lambert’s writing on ‘powerful knowledge’ that had caught Maurice’s attention in particular, and this idea – that there exists disciplinary knowledge that is accessible to young people only via specialist and academic routes, rather than through their day-to-day lives – became the focus of Maurice’s time at the IOE. 

“A central theme is social justice,” he explains. “More affluent students will come into contact with powerful knowledge through additional opportunities that they have outside of school, and maybe because they have educated parents as well, whereas for less affluent students, school may be their only opportunity to come into contact with powerful knowledge. 

“But I believe that irrespective of who you are, you are entitled to this. It's not about passing exams, it's just about engaging with subject matter at as complex a level as your intellect will allow you to get to.”

Maurice’s research immediately informed his work at the Harris Federation – for example, in his decision to to run focus groups to gather evidence on what, when and why Federation teachers were opting to teach. “I read probably two journal articles each week. All of them were intimately linked to what I was doing in my day job. I’d do my reading, get to work the next day and apply it in some way or other to what I was planning for all the different schools,” he says. “It made the whole process very efficient in terms of managing the time commitment of studying while working!” 

Having established a new geography curriculum for the Harris Federation, Maurice is now in a new role, leading on curriculum and learning as Vice Principal Academic at Harris Academy Wimbledon. His time at the IOE is still bearing fruit today.

“Powerful knowledge is the absolute heart of what we do at the school. I run training on it for all of our teachers. I expect all of my heads of department to be able to identify the powerful knowledge within their own subject areas. 

“It’s a way of holding subject leaders to account for their curriculum. You can take a scheme of work or programme of study and you can say, ‘Why are you teaching this in week six of Year 8? What's its value?’ It's a way of getting teachers to really think very critically about what they teach rather than just picking up a kind of off the peg scheme of work and just running with it. And I have the IOE to thank for that insight.”