Establishing strong connections between homes and schools is often considered influential for a child’s social, emotional and academic success at school. However, the home-school relationship in practice is often dominated by an imbalance of power in favour of school knowledge and curricula and, as such, there are few opportunities for teachers to: i) engage in focused dialogic activity with parents in order to learn about the nature and affordances of children’s home knowledge and experiences or ii) examine the extent to which homes and communities offer potential for enhancing the school curriculum.

In response to this, we have applied a ‘funds of knowledge’ (FoK) approach to help define the type of knowledge accumulated in children’s and young people’s homes and communities and have used this as a starting point for school curriculum design. FoK methodologies typically establish family/community members as teachers with in-depth knowledge about the multiple activities children engage with within the social network of the family and community. The home environment is viewed as vibrant, active and driven by children’s interests and questions. In contrast, school-based learning is positioned as a series of activities in which knowledge is imparted by teachers with the end goal of improving academic performance.

In this paper, we bring young people’s home and community knowledge into dialogue with the school curriculum and analyse the challenges and opportunities this presents for designing a more situated school curriculum relevant to children’s everyday lives. We draw from two examples of our work to demonstrate the challenges and successes we experienced when implementing a FoK approach to curriculum design within the highly regulated context of English primary and secondary schools.

First, we bring primary school teachers and parents into dialogue in an attempt to dismantle the power imbalance of the home-school relationship in favour of acknowledging the value of children’s home FoK as an asset at school. We created a space for three primary school teachers of children aged 4/5 to learn about children’s home practices and FoK from five parents with children in their classes. Our data show that although the teachers acknowledged children’s home FoK as an asset, they felt restricted in their power and agency to make substantive changes to a fixed school curriculum.

Our second example demonstrates more potential in a secondary school for redesigning a series of science lessons in order to connect the curriculum to local community knowledge, career opportunities and young people’s interests. We examine a case study of one teacher who has found a way to enact their agency in the classroom to authentically incorporate home and community FoK into the science curriculum.

The impact of our work highlights the potential of dialogue between educators, parents and local communities for establishing ways in which to embed a FoK approach into designing the school curriculum. Through this approach, we advocate for a school curriculum which values and integrates children's and young people's' home and community cultural assets, leading to the increased motivation of pupils and enhanced educational outcomes.

Keywords: Funds of knowledge, curriculum, primary/secondary education.