An exploration of how curriculum is designed and delivered in the English primary school to provide pupils with what is needed to ‘succeed in life’, through an analysis of the perceptions of pupils, parents and their teachers

This thesis explores how the curriculum in English primary schools is designed and delivered to provide all learners with what is needed to ‘succeed in life’, through an analysis of the perceptions of pupils, parents, teachers and headteachers. It is intended for school leaders, curriculum designers, teachers, policymakers and researchers. The study engaged 45 pupils, 20 parents and six teachers across two primary schools in the Northwest of England, investigating how they defined success in life and how they perceived the National Curriculum in supporting this. The research was motivated by Ofsted’s claim in the Education Inspection Framework (2019:6) that ‘knowledge and cultural capital’ provides all learners with what ‘they need to succeed in life’, a claim both causally unclear and insufficiently defined. The methodology combines Husserlian phenomenology with Deweyan pragmatism in a pragmatic phenomenology designed to capture both the lived essence of ‘success in life’ and the practical implications for primary curriculum design. Analysis shows that success was consistently understood by participants in relational and affective terms, happiness, fairness, belonging, adaptability and contribution, rather than solely in terms of knowledge and cultural acquisition. The thesis critiques Ofsted’s narrow and vague framing of cultural capital, situating the findings in relation to Bourdieu’s theory of economic, social and cultural capital (1986) and Yosso’s (2005) concept of community cultural wealth. While these frameworks illuminate patterns of advantage and resilience, they cannot fully account for participants’ emphasis on coherence and alignment across values, relationships and learning. Drawing also on systems thinking (Meadows, 2008; Capra and Luisi, 2014), the thesis introduces the concept of congruent capital: a dynamic, relational form of capital that emerges when curriculum, pedagogy, relationships and environments align to support learners in connecting who they are with what they know and how they act. This original contribution advances understanding of how schools might cultivate the conditions for all pupils to flourish, offering both theoretical insight and practical implications for curriculum policy and design. It highlights the risks of leaving cultural capital ill-defined and causally overstated, while also presenting congruent capital as a constructive alternative for rethinking how success in life can be fostered in primary education.