Who owns the school chemistry curriculum?

Some months ago, I was talking with a young teacher who, five years earlier, had left his job to teach chemistry in a secondary school. Like many others, he’d found the change difficult and the first couple of years particularly challenging and exhausting. Now, more confident and successful in his role, he confessed that he ‘still didn’t own the GCSE chemistry curriculum’. I assumed that he meant he had still to familiarise himself thoroughly with the demands of teaching GCSE chemistry. Apart from thinking that wanting to ‘own’ a curriculum was a strange turn of phrase, I attached no other significance to it at the time. Only later did it occur to me that a sense of ‘owning’ a curriculum involves much more than familiarity. Something that is owned is valued. It gives the owner the responsibility for maintaining and improving quality that lies at the heart of what it means to be a professional.