What can schools do? In this lecture I want to talk about changing times and the research I've been doing and, more generally, about how I see curriculum as a field for university study. The main argument I will be making about curriculum is that it is a field that requires quite challenging intellectual work and collaborations, as well as an appreciation that very practical, pragmatic, political and personal issues are an inescapable part of the field. I want to sketch out some of the

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... s facing curriculum in these changing times: in particular the changing forms of knowledge and of work, and the challenge of developing curriculum that looks forward not just back; issues of identity and social values and diversity and inequality and the need to go on looking sensitively at what we are doing in education in relation to these; and the problem of ever-changing innovations in technology and ever-changing reforms of schools and the problems these pose for teachers and for schools as a place for students to be heard. I want to talk about curriculum as a place where big questions are taken up and put into practice, not always well. And where we need to do research that brings together a range of complex issues, as well as the more familiar testing and surveys of who gets what, or what technique produces the best test scores on x.