Clearly IPC is designed for innovation and getting away from the dross of a static curriculum-offering many opportunities within its themes for teachers to embrace creativity. As with all approaches to learning the pedagogy is the key! With MoE approaches, the engagements with classes are based on dramatic contexts securing imaginative enquiry methods and skills that challenge teachers to teach beyond knowledge acquisition to the 'leadership' models explained by Dorothy Heathcote in her key note address at Newcastle and Birmingham.

The way the IPC has been set up was originally for schools in the International circuit outside the UK, but UK schools got wind of its brilliance and brought it back home.

So schools wishing to go along NEW lines of enquiry in innovation have a great deal of choice now-and that is very welcome. QCA has endorsed both MoE and IPC.

Recently Luke was training a team in Hertfordshire where a HT had bought into IPC and wanted to use MoE as well to facilitate the themes and units within the IPC designed curriculum schemes. Her school had just come out of an ofsted category and was now flying. The concerned HT felt her staff were too 'tired' emotionally and spiritually, to redesign the whole curriculum as this was her next big step after the inspection and perhaps too high a mountain for her staff to climb. Much better for her school, she felt, was to explore the range of planning in the IPC and run with a planned curriculum already mapped and one her staff would all sign up to. She felt she wanted to use MoE as the main pedagogy for creativity and mastery skills alongside IPC structures.

There are of course schools that feel they can map all MoE frames with the curriculum designs that will hold water for the 'NC Entitlement' scrutinisers at Sanctuary House and HMI. These schools often have a fluid skills based view of the curriculum anyway and are not necessarily in need of the IPC prepared landscape, as they can prepare their own and have staff with the expertise to create the design needed.

Both IPC and MoE organisations are aware that our joint paths cross almost constantly and indeed we are making these bondings even more secure for the future. What would be most useful for our MoE community would be for schools exploring either IPC and MoE or vice versa - to make contact us with messages about how they are finding the choices on offer.

Alongside IPC and MOE is of course Edison UK who also offer curriculum and school design that is highly innovative and very powerful for change. One school in Essex is embarking on MoE approaches and is a flag ship for the Edison Schools model.

Whatever is good for the learning and enjoyment of our children has to be looked at without prejudice as choices beyond a mundane curriculum diet of porridge that proved to have worked and have been evaluated are what we are in desperately in need of.