The ‘knowledge turn’ has been accompanied by the emergence of the school curriculum as a more clearly delineated discursive object. In the past, the curriculum tended to be assumed: a natural aggregate of whatever subjects that schools were teaching. Today, due to develop-ments external and internal to education, the curriculum is argued to be of central importance for schools if they are ‘to define and own their own purposes’ (Young in Young et al., 2014: 45, our emphasis).More recently, the turn to knowledge is reflected in the 2019 concepts, ‘sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning and employment’ (Ofsted, 2019b: 10, our emphasis). In preparation for 2019 inspection framework, Ofsted undertook initial curriculum research in which they found one-third of the schools they visited to be ‘knowledge-led’, half as ‘knowledge-engaged’ and the remainder as ‘skills-led’ (Ofsted, 2019a: 6), although there is little clarity about what these characteriza-tions mean in practice.