Curriculum Journal

About Curriculum Journal

The Curriculum Journal — Profile and Guide

The Curriculum Journal, also catalogued without the definite article as Curriculum Journal, is an international peer-reviewed journal published by Wiley as an official journal of the British Educational Research Association (BERA). This site's record gives print ISSN 0958-5176 and online ISSN 1469-3704, with Wiley as publisher, and those identifiers are corroborated by BERA, by Wiley's journal presentation, and by Scopus-based listings that use exactly the same ISSN pairing for this title. The journal publishes original contributions to the study of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, welcoming papers that report empirical studies and theoretical analyses from a range of perspectives, including philosophical and historical perspectives. It particularly welcomes work that attends to the implications for policy and practice that arise from theoretical and empirical research. In its fuller current statement of purpose, the journal aims to contribute to the renewal of the field of curriculum studies, to enrich curriculum conversations, and to enable practitioners and scholars to engage with curricular issues, placing consideration of curriculum firmly at the heart of educational discourse and practice.

That positioning distinguishes this title from two near neighbours with which it is regularly confused. It is not the Journal of Curriculum Studies, a separate Taylor and Francis title with different ISSNs, and it is not Curriculum Inquiry, another separate title. Authors checking a quartile, a submission portal or an editor should confirm the ISSN before acting, because curriculum studies has several similarly named journals and aggregator pages do not always keep them apart. The journal in this profile is the BERA journal, founded in 1990, rooted originally in British curriculum debate, and now explicitly international in authorship, readership and subject matter while retaining a close connection to school-based practice.

Origins and Development

An editorial history of the journal records that it was launched in 1990 by the Association for the Study of Curriculum (ASC), at a turbulent moment for educational systems in the United Kingdom and globally, to provide independent and critical appraisals of curriculum reforms. In 1995 the British Curriculum Foundation began providing grants to support activities connected with that curriculum community. The journal later became an official journal of BERA, the learned society for educational research in the United Kingdom, and publication moved to Wiley, which now publishes BERA's journals. That history explains two enduring features of the title. First, it has never treated curriculum as a purely technical matter of sequencing content; from the start it appraised reforms critically, asking who decided, on what evidence, and with what consequences for teachers and learners. Second, it maintains a deliberate bridge between scholarship and practice, a tradition associated in British curriculum thought with Lawrence Stenhouse and the idea of the teacher as researcher, whose process model shifted attention from delivering specified content toward enquiry, critical thinking and the professional judgement of teachers.

Coverage listings confirm publication from 1990 to the present. Over that period the journal's centre of gravity widened. Early British debates about a national curriculum remain part of its memory, but recent volumes address curriculum making in many national systems, decolonising and culturally responsive curriculum questions, curriculum in the early years, further and higher education, vocational and work-based learning, and the curriculum implications of assessment reform and of digital technologies. The journal appears four times a year, a frequency reported in journal listings and consistent with its Wiley volume pattern. Its first Journal Impact Factor was received in 2022, a relatively late entry into that particular metric system for a journal founded in 1990, reflecting its indexing history rather than its age or its standing among curriculum specialists.

Scope: What Counts as Curriculum Research Here

The journal's stated scope covers curriculum theory and curriculum-making practices. It encompasses issues relating to governance and policy development, teacher professional learning, assessment and pedagogy, insofar as they pertain to curriculum. It welcomes papers that address current and historical global debates and traditions in the complex landscape of curriculum studies; that pose challenging curricular questions from different perspectives, including reflexive questions about whom curriculum research is for and what its purposes are, and wider historical, sociological and political questions about curriculum; and that draw on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. Settings include formal and informal education within and beyond schooling: early years, primary and secondary schools, further education, higher education and teacher education, vocational education and training, community education, the professions and work-based education. BERA's own summary adds that the journal makes a specialist contribution to knowledge related to the educational phases that affect children from the early years to adulthood.

Continuing its long tradition of connecting scholarly research and school-based practice, the journal particularly welcomes contributions focusing on the basics of curriculum in practice settings: curriculum structure, organisation, development, enactment and evaluation. That sentence is a useful test for authors. A paper about a teaching technique with no account of what is being taught, why that content was selected, how it is organised, or how teachers and learners experience it in practice is unlikely to fit, however sound its methods are. Conversely, a paper that begins in a classroom, a department meeting, a policy text or a textbook, and uses that material to say something transferable about curriculum as a field, is squarely within scope. Curriculum here is a question about knowledge selection and organisation, authority, culture, identity and purpose, not a synonym for lesson planning.

Themes Readers Will Find

Curriculum theory is the first theme. Papers revisit and extend the work of curriculum theorists, examine concepts such as powerful knowledge, knowledge-rich curriculum, curriculum coherence and progression, and debate whether curriculum should be understood as product, process, praxis or a combination of those understandings argued through in context. Historical papers trace how curriculum categories were formed and how subjects acquired their present boundaries. Philosophical papers ask what justifies including particular knowledge in a curriculum offered to all children, and who bears the burden of that justification. A second theme is curriculum making and teacher agency: how teachers, departments and schools interpret national frameworks, select and sequence content, adapt materials, and exercise professional discretion, and how policy conditions expand or narrow that discretion. Research on teacher professional learning belongs here when it concerns teachers learning to make curriculum, individually and collaboratively.

Assessment and pedagogy form a third theme, treated as curriculum questions rather than as separate technical fields. Papers examine how high-stakes examinations narrow or reshape the taught curriculum, how formative assessment interacts with curriculum intentions, and how pedagogical choices enact a curriculum in ways that official documents cannot predict. A fourth, growing theme is equity, inclusion and decolonisation: whose knowledge is represented, whose languages and histories are centred or marginalised, how curricula serve or fail learners with special educational needs, and how culturally relevant curricula are built in specific communities rather than announced in general terms. A fifth theme is curriculum policy and governance, comparing national reforms, analysing policy texts, and following reforms from announcement into schools. Subject-specific curriculum research, including mathematics education and the humanities, appears throughout, provided the paper speaks beyond its subject to curriculum questions that other readers can use.

Editors, Editorial Team and the BERA Connection

BERA lists the editors of The Curriculum Journal as Gordon O. Ade-Ojo of the University of Greenwich, United Kingdom, and Carol Azumah Dennis of The Open University, United Kingdom. The associate editors listed by BERA are Kason Ka Ching Cheung of The Education University of Hong Kong; Grace Healy, associated with the David Ross Education Trust, University College London and the University of Oxford; Alex Kumi-Yeboah of the University at Albany, United States; Juhong Christie Liu of James Madison University, United States; Arlyne C. Marasigan of Philippine Normal University, Philippines; Claire Sinnema of the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and Ismail Özgür Zembat of the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Paulette Johnson of The Open University is listed as Book Reviews Editor, and Olivia Kelly of The Open University as Social Media Editor. That geographic spread — the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the United States, the Philippines and New Zealand — matches the journal's stated international ambition and is worth noting for authors outside Britain who wonder whether their context will be understood by the editorial team.

BERA membership is relevant to access. BERA directs its members to use their member access route to read the journal online, and membership of the association is one practical way in which many United Kingdom education researchers read BERA journals. Book reviews remain a named part of the journal's operation, with a dedicated editor, which signals that the journal still treats sustained engagement with curriculum books as part of scholarly conversation rather than as filler. Editorial teams change, however, and authors should confirm the current editors and the current submission instructions on the BERA or Wiley page at the moment of submission rather than relying on any profile, including this one, as a permanent record.

Metrics, Indexing and Standing

BERA reports that The Curriculum Journal received its first Journal Impact Factor in 2022, and that its 2025 Journal Impact Factor is 1.9. BERA also reports that the journal ranks 268 of 760 in the Education and Educational Research category, placing it in the second quartile, with a Journal Citation Indicator of 0.74 and a CiteScore of 4.1. Those figures are attributed here to BERA's journal page, which is the association's own presentation of its journal's performance, and they supersede older figures still circulating on aggregator sites, such as a CiteScore of 3.4 and an impact factor of 1.7 reported for the previous cycle. Authors should always quote the cycle year with any metric, because a bare impact factor without a year is not a verifiable claim. Scopus-based listings independently place the journal in the second quartile for Education and give it an h-index in the forties in earlier snapshots, with later snapshots higher as citations accumulate; this profile does not present any single h-index as current, because snapshots from different years disagree and the live Scopus record is the authoritative source.

Standing in curriculum studies is not captured by metrics alone. This is one of a small number of journals devoted specifically to curriculum as its central object, rather than to education in general, to a single school subject, or to teaching methods alone. For a curriculum scholar, publication here places work in front of the specialist community that will actually debate it, including the BERA curriculum community and the international readership built around BERA's journals. For practitioners and policy readers, the journal's insistence on implications for policy and practice makes its articles more usable than purely theoretical treatments published elsewhere. Indexing in Scopus and in the Web of Science education categories, as reflected in the Journal Citation Reports figures quoted by BERA, supports discoverability for literature reviews and for systematic searches on curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Writing for the Journal: Fit, Structure and Review

Successful submissions begin with an explicit curriculum question. State, early in the paper, what the paper contributes to the study of curriculum, not merely what it found in a particular setting. Empirical papers should give a strong theoretical framing, a clear account of context — country, phase, subject, policy environment — a transparent method, and an analysis that returns to curriculum concepts. Theoretical and philosophical papers should engage the existing curriculum literature directly, including positions the author disagrees with, and should avoid presenting a personal position as though the field had not debated it before. Historical papers should work from sources and should explain why the history matters for present curriculum argument. Across all types, the journal particularly welcomes attention to implications for policy and practice, so a closing section that speaks honestly to teachers, curriculum leaders or policy makers, within the limits of the evidence, strengthens a submission.

Practical points follow from the journal's identity. Define national terminology for an international reader: examination names, phase labels, governance bodies and reform programmes that are obvious at home are opaque abroad. Avoid treating one country's framework as the universal norm. Where a paper reports classroom or school research, report ethical approval and consent arrangements as the publisher's author guidelines require. Follow the current Wiley author guidelines for The Curriculum Journal for article types, length, referencing style, data and supporting information, and submit through the journal's Wiley submission route linked from the BERA journal page, checking that route at the time of submission. Article processing charges, open-access options and licence choices for this hybrid subscription journal are set by Wiley's current policy for the title; where a specific charge is not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted here, authors should confirm it in the submission system or with the publisher rather than relying on figures quoted for other Wiley education journals.

Reading and Using the Journal

For literature reviewers, search this journal with curriculum synonyms, not only with the word curriculum itself: knowledge selection, subject knowledge, curriculum making, curriculum enactment, curriculum coherence, powerful knowledge, and assessment washback all retrieve relevant material that a single keyword would miss. For teachers and curriculum leaders, the most useful reading strategy is to start from the practice-focused papers and the book reviews, then follow their citations back into the theoretical literature as questions arise. For doctoral students in curriculum studies, a run of recent issues is one of the fastest ways to learn the field's current vocabulary, its live disagreements, and the standard of contextual detail expected in curriculum writing. For policy analysts, the journal offers a corrective to reform announcements: its papers document what reforms became once teachers, subjects, examinations and local conditions acted on them.

Two cautions apply. First, do not confuse this journal's metrics or editors with those of similarly named titles, as noted at the start of this profile; always verify by ISSN 0958-5176 and 1469-3704. Second, do not treat a paper's setting as a limitation to be apologised for: curriculum is always made somewhere, and this journal expects thick description of that somewhere. Generality here is earned by analysis, not claimed by pretending a study had no context.

Special Issues and Community Role

Like other BERA journals, The Curriculum Journal participates in the wider scholarly community of its association, whose conferences and special interest groups in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment provide a natural audience for its papers and a source of its authors and reviewers. Themed collections and special issues, announced through BERA and Wiley channels, periodically gather work on a single curricular problem so that a debate can be read together rather than reconstructed from scattered articles. Readers following a particular reform, phase or subject should check the journal's Wiley page for such collections before concluding that coverage of their topic is thin, because a themed issue may collect in one place papers that a general search disperses. That community role also explains the journal's book reviews and social media editorship: curriculum is a field conducted partly through books, conferences and professional conversation, and the journal deliberately maintains those channels alongside its research articles.

Structured Summary and Verification Notes

Title: The Curriculum Journal (catalogued also as Curriculum Journal). Identifiers: ISSN 0958-5176 (print) and 1469-3704 (online). Publisher: Wiley. Society: official journal of the British Educational Research Association (BERA). Founded: 1990, launched by the Association for the Study of Curriculum, per the journal's editorial history. Frequency: four issues a year. Editors (per BERA): Gordon O. Ade-Ojo, University of Greenwich, and Carol Azumah Dennis, The Open University. Scope: curriculum, pedagogy and assessment; curriculum theory and curriculum making; governance and policy, teacher professional learning, and assessment and pedagogy insofar as they pertain to curriculum; early years through adulthood, formal and informal settings. Metrics (per BERA): 2025 Journal Impact Factor 1.9; rank 268/760 in Education and Educational Research, second quartile; Journal Citation Indicator 0.74; CiteScore 4.1; first Journal Impact Factor received in 2022. Peer review and article types: peer-reviewed original contributions, empirical and theoretical, including philosophical and historical work, with book reviews under a dedicated editor.

Structured-field notes for this site's record: the publisher field giving Wiley is correct, but a complete record should also name BERA as the owning association, because BERA membership governs many readers' access and BERA presents the journal as its own. The record's ISSNs are correct and match the twin record discussed below. No conflict was found between this record's publisher or ISSNs and the official BERA and Wiley sources. One duplicate candidate was found, described in the worker report accompanying this profile: a separate thin post titled Curriculum Journal carrying the identical ISSN pairing. Both records refer to the same journal; the existence of that twin should be resolved through the site's normal merge process rather than by publishing competing profiles.