Curriculum and syllabus design

Abstract

The terms curriculum and syllabus are often conflated within education. This has lead to a situation where the debates in the field of curriculum have ignored important ground related to the technical form of syllabus documents - the categories, grids, shape, structure and purposes of the syllabus – instead tending to focus on cultural and ideological debates about content. Two fields: English language teaching and higher education have dealt with issues of syllabus design, but little work related to school system syllabus has been completed. For a system to achieve high quality and high equity an effective balance of professionalism and prescription must be achieved, with the form of the syllabus playing a key role in setting the level of specification and locus of control and authority required.