A Litdrive blog | June 2026
Mark Enser’s recent piece on foundational knowledge in geography is worth reading by anyone who thinks seriously about curriculum, not only because of what it says about geography, but because of the questions it prompts about other subjects. This is my attempt to ask the same question of English: what, precisely, are its foundations, and what does it mean to build them well?
Few phrases circulate more confidently in curriculum conversations than ‘foundational knowledge’, and few are defined with less precision. Schools speak of building foundations as though the term is self-evident, as though everyone in the room shares a common picture of what those foundations consist of and, crucially, what they are for. In English, this vagueness carries a particular cost, because English, perhaps more than any other subject on the curriculum, has been vulnerable to the assumption that its foundations are obvious. That they belong more naturally to primary than to secondary. That they are somehow already secured by the time the interesting work of the subject can begin.
They are not. And the consequences of proceeding as though they are show up, reliably, in the quality of what children are able to do when the work becomes genuinely demanding.
The false comfort of content lists
It is worth beginning with what foundational knowledge in English is not.
It is not a checklist of texts studied, or a glossary of literary devices, or a set of grammar rules appended to a scheme of work. The confusion arises because these things are visible and auditable: they can be pointed to in a curriculum document, and their presence can be taken as evidence that a subject is knowledge-rich. What they cannot do, on their own, is constitute a foundation. A foundation is not the same as content. It is the thing that makes content meaningful, that allows knowledge to connect and accumulate and eventually generate the kind of disciplinary thinking that English, at its best, produces.
The knowledge versus skills debate has done particular damage here. English has been pulled, at different moments, towards generic transferable competencies on one side and heavy factual recall on the other, as though the choice were between those two positions and nothing else. Daisy Christodoulou has written compellingly about why the dichotomy is a false one: skill is bound up with knowledge and the two are not separable. But in English, the practical consequence of the debate has often been a curriculum that oscillates rather than settles, drifting between text-response tasks that assume knowledge children do not yet have, and knowledge-building exercises that are not connected to any sustained intellectual purpose.
What a genuinely foundational curriculum in English provides is neither facts in isolation nor skills in abstraction. It provides the disciplinary structures that allow a child to participate meaningfully in the intellectual life of the subject.
What the foundations of English actually consist of
If we are going to be precise about this, it helps to think about the different kinds of knowledge that make English possible as a discipline.
The first and most important is conceptual knowledge: the organising ideas that give the subject its coherence. Narrative, voice, perspective, genre, form, context. These are not decorative add-ons to a text study. They are the intellectual scaffolding through which a text becomes legible as more than a story. Take voice as an example. A Year 8 class encountering a first-person narrator in a Dickens extract will, if they have a secure working concept of voice, begin to ask questions about reliability, about distance, about what the narrator chooses not to say. Without that concept, they are likely to read the passage as though the narrator and the author are the same person, treating the text as biography rather than construction. The concept does not make the reading easier; it makes it possible in the right sense. Conceptual knowledge in English is foundational precisely because it is the lens through which everything else is seen.
The second is linguistic knowledge: understanding of how language works, not just at the level of identifying features, but at the level of understanding what those features do. Think of a Year 10 student writing analytically about a writer’s use of a simple declarative sentence at a moment of high tension in a novel. A student with secure linguistic knowledge understands why that choice matters: that simplicity in a moment of complexity creates a particular effect on the reader, that the contrast is doing deliberate work. A student without it will note the technique and move on, because they do not yet have the knowledge to say anything meaningful about what it does. Linguistic knowledge is the bridge between noticing and understanding, and it is a bridge that has to be deliberately built rather than assumed.
The third is literary and cultural knowledge: the awareness of texts, traditions and contexts that allows a reader to recognise what a piece of writing is in conversation with. A child reading Animal Farm without any sense of the political history that shapes it is reading a different and thinner text than the one Orwell wrote. But this kind of knowledge extends beyond background context in the factual sense. When a student in Year 9 reads a war poem and recognises that the speaker is positioning themselves in deliberate tension with a Romantic tradition of the heroic soldier, they are drawing on accumulated literary knowledge that allows them to see the poem as a response to something, rather than simply a statement in isolation. That recognition does not arrive naturally. It is built, text by text, through a curriculum that treats literary knowledge as cumulative rather than incidental.
The fourth is procedural knowledge: the knowledge of how English works as a discipline. How a reader makes meaning. How a writer makes choices. How an argument is constructed and evaluated. A student who understands why a close reading of a poem might begin with the most structurally significant word rather than the first word possesses disciplinary understanding. They have a principle, not just a method. That distinction matters enormously in practice, because a student who has only the method will be lost the moment the text does not behave as expected. A student who has the principle can adapt. Procedure in English is always grounded in reasoning, and it is the difference between a student who has been taught a formula and a student who understands why the formula exists.
And the fifth, which is often overlooked, is knowledge of what reading itself demands in the disciplinary sense. Reading in English is not a single activity. A student asked to read for comprehension is doing something genuinely different from a student asked to read as a writer, and both are doing something different from a student asked to read comparatively across two texts. Each mode of reading asks something specific of the reader, and each requires specific knowledge to do well. One of the most significant equity issues in English teaching is the assumption that children who can decode fluently can therefore read in the disciplinary sense. They cannot, necessarily, and closing that gap is a curriculum responsibility rather than something that can be left to classroom habit or good fortune.
Why this matters for curriculum design
If foundational knowledge in English is this complex and this layered, it follows that curriculum design in the subject is a more demanding task than it is often treated as being.
A curriculum that sequences texts without sequencing concepts is not building foundations; it is building content. If a student encounters the concept of an unreliable narrator in Year 7, meets it again without that label in Year 9, and then encounters it formally in a GCSE context, the curriculum has not treated that concept as something to be built and deepened over time. It has treated it as incidental. The student may well develop an intuitive understanding, but intuition is not the same as the secure conceptual knowledge that allows them to deploy the idea analytically and with precision under pressure.
What a well-designed English curriculum does is treat these different forms of knowledge as interdependent, and sequence them so that each encounter with a new text or a new writing task is also an opportunity to deepen and apply something already understood. This is what progression in English genuinely looks like: not increasingly difficult texts studied in isolation, but increasingly sophisticated disciplinary thinking, grounded in a body of knowledge that has been deliberately built.
Mark Enser, writing about foundational knowledge in geography, makes the point that the discipline is inherently integrative and that its foundations are relational rather than merely factual. The same is true of English. The subject’s foundations are not a list to be acquired and ticked off. They are a set of relationships between concepts, language, texts and practices that, when understood in connection with one another, allow a child to do something genuinely powerful: to read the world with greater intelligence and to write into it with greater precision.
That is what English is for. The question for curriculum leaders is whether what we design is equal to that purpose.
What this means for teachers and leaders of English
The practical implication is this: if we want teachers to build these foundations well, they need to know what the foundations are. That sounds obvious, and yet the professional development available to English teachers has rarely been organised around a clear articulation of English’s disciplinary structure. Teachers receive training in generic pedagogy and in assessment objectives and in feedback, but not always in the intellectual architecture of the subject itself.
This matters in very practical ways. A teacher with a secure understanding of conceptual knowledge can identify, in the moment, when a class discussion of a text is operating at the level of plot summary rather than meaning. They know what to do with that: not to push harder towards the right answer, but to return to the concept and make it more explicit before moving forward. A teacher who understands the relationship between linguistic knowledge and analytical writing can design a sequence where students practise the analysis of a single sentence before they attempt to sustain that analysis across a paragraph, because they understand what the building blocks actually are and in what order they need to come.
Foundational knowledge in English is not a problem that can be solved by a resource or a scheme of work, however carefully constructed. It requires teachers who understand the discipline deeply enough to make decisions about what to prioritise, what to revisit, and what their pupils are actually ready to do next. That understanding is itself something that has to be built, and it will not build itself. It requires investment in time, in professional community, and in serious engagement with what English is and what it demands of the people who teach it.
The children who most need teachers to get this right are those who cannot afford for us to get it wrong.
Further reading
Christodoulou, D. (2014) Seven Myths About Education. Abingdon: Routledge.
Didau, D. and Rose, N. (2016) What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology. Woodbridge: John Catt.
Enser, M. (2026) ‘Foundational Knowledge in Geography’. Teaching It Real [Substack].
Hill, C. and Howard, K. (2021) Symbiosis: The Curriculum and the Classroom. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational.
Hirsch, E.D. (2006) The Knowledge Deficit. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Shulman, L.S. (1986) ‘Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching’. Educational Researcher, 15(2), pp. 4–14.