Curriculum reform has a dubious reputation, with more sobering than real and lasting success stories. One might even say that large-scale curriculum reform has a tendency to fail, as a universal experience (Cuban, 1992; Fullan, 2007; Leyendecker, 2008). Hargreaves and Fink (2006, p.6) put this succinctly: ‘Change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement, and extraordinarily difficult to sustain’. And it could be argued that curriculum changes belong to the hardest category.

Notwithstanding big investments in research and development and in-service education, the target group of teachers often appears poorly informed about the intended innovation, while its practical application remains limited and its impact on student learning is unclear. Simplistic explanations (e.g. about top-down versus bottom-up approaches) for those innovation failures are inadequate, but a few gaps are often visible:

·        weak connections between various system levels (national, local, school, classroom)

·        lack of internal consistency within the curriculum design

·        insufficient cooperation between various actors in educational development (especially between curriculum development, textbook production, teacher education and assessment; see Thijs & van den Akker, 2009)

The general pattern is that the worlds of policy, practice and research are widely separated. A crucial challenge for more successful innovation in education is to build bridges between many levels, factors and actors (van den Akker, 2010).

Three pillars for large-scale curriuculum change seem to be:

- availability of generic curriculum frameworks to give direction to the efforts of many actors;

- investing in curricular professional development of many system actors;

- curricular capacity building of (cooperating teams of) teachers.

All interventions will eventually have lead towards interaction between curriculum and teacher development at schoool and classroom level. Without such a perspective, chances on substantial, sustainable improvements are slim.

This symposium (round table) will focus on those actions and conditions at system and school level that will influence how teachers realize curriculum changes in their classroom practices. Presenters from four different countries (Scotland, Albania, Sweden, the Netherlands) will try to identify and analyze those approaches that stimate (or hinder) successful, large-scale (and hopefully sustainable) curriculum change. In view of the wide acknowledgement of the compexity of these challenges, a lot might be learned from such exchanges and discussion.

Akker, J. van den (2010). Buiding bridges: how research may improve curriculum policies and classroom practices. In S. Stoney (Ed.), Beyond Lisbon 2010: Perspectives from research and development for education policy in Europe (pp. 175-195). CIDREE Yearbook 2010. Slough, England: NFER. Cuban, L. (1992). Curriculum stability and change. In P. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 216-247). New York: Macmillan. Fullan, M. (2007). The new meaning of educational change. Fourth Edition. New York: Teachers College Press. Hargreaves, A. & Fink, D. (2006). Sustainable leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Leyendecker, R. (2008). Curriculum reform in Sub-saharan Africa; opportunities and obstacles. Doctoral dissertation. Enschede, the Netherlands: University of Twente. Thijs, A., & van den Akker, J. (2009). Curriculum in development. Enschede, the Netherlands: SLO.