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Questions of children's agency have experienced a resurgence in education theory over the past years. Yet, there have been few attempts to examine children's agency in the context of a primary classroom from the viewpoint of the curriculum. This gap is being addressed by a longitudinal project exploring the impact of the National Curriculum for England on children's agency through a critical discourse analysis of the curriculum text and an ethnography of three primary schools in England. This paper reports on the results of the critical discourse analysis examining how children's agency is talked about (or silenced) in England's curriculum.

Knowledge and its acquisition are central to the field of curriculum studies, but the ways in which empirical studies of pedagogical approaches relate to theories of knowledge acquisition are under researched. This paper reports the outcomes of a rapid evidence assessment about the impacts of experiential learning (EL), regarded by some as progressive pedagogy, on the school attainment of children aged 4–14. Database searches of the Education Resources Information Center, the British Education Index, the Teacher Reference Center, the Education Database and APA PsycINFO were carried out to review peer‐reviewed research studies published between 2013 and 2023. In total, 465 studies were screened for their relevance, and the Mixed methods appraisal tool was used to assess the methodological quality of relevant studies; 44 studies were included in the final analysis. The findings of the research showed the overall positive impact of EL pedagogies on children's academic achievement. Key examples of positive impact included evidence for the beneficial effects of EL on the achievement of children with lower academic achievement; strong links between EL and science achievement; and the positive impact that EL has on domain‐general academic skills including memory and vocabulary development. Some links between EL and children's motivation, engagement, agency, and wellbeing, factors which underpin academic achievement, are also noted. The findings indicate that EL can be a highly valuable approach to enhancing children's acquisition of knowledge, skills and understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]