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Teacher involvement in curriculum design has a long tradition. However, although it fosters implementation of curriculum reforms, teachers encounter various problems while designing related to conditions set for the design process, and lack the knowledge and skills needed to enact collaborative design processes. Providing support to enhance teachers' design expertise is essential, since most teachers are novice designers. However, little is known about the nature of the support offered to improve teachers' design expertise. In this explorative study, six teachers and six facilitators offering support reflected on an enacted design process, the problems they experienced and the support offered. The findings indicate three gaps in teachers' design expertise related to three domains (1) curriculum design expertise, (2) pedagogical content knowledge and (3) curricular consistency expertise. The outcomes of this study illustrate the importance of supporting teacher designers during the design process and enhancing teachers' design expertise. By offering (tailored) support to teachers, the enacted design process and the quality of the design materials are expected to improve.

The extent to which the goals and contents of (compulsory) education should to be regulated has been a complicated balancing act in the Netherlands. Against a background of a longstanding statutory tradition of freedom of education, governmental decisions about 'what knowledge is of most worth' have been delicate. The purpose of the analysis described in this article is to disentangle, interpret and discuss this complicated balancing act between curriculum regulation and curriculum freedom during the past 40 years and to learn from other countries by putting the results into a wider European curriculum policy perspective. The contribution will end with discussing issues that need to be carefully considered with respect to the recent Dutch policy shift towards output regulation by means of mandatory achievement tests for mathematics, mother tongue and English at the end of lower secondary education.

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Supporting Teacher Design Teams (TDTs) during local curriculum development efforts is essential. To be able to provide high‐quality support, insights are needed about how TDTs carry out design activities and how support is valued by the members of TDTs and how it affects their design expertise. In this study, the design and support processes of two TDTs assisted by an external facilitator were investigated using a case study approach. The results revealed that support offered to TDTs depended on the contextual boundaries and the focus of the design process. The focus, coherence and form of support affected the opportunities for developing teachers’ design expertise. In both cases, teachers’ curriculum design expertise had grown, whereas their pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge were hardly developed. Findings show that the most conducive support activities and materials were those that could directly be applied in the design process.