Which curriculum area should your school enact first? All five compared for 2026/27

September 2026 brings the redeveloped curriculum into every school. Language and Mathematics have been in classrooms since 2025/26, and now every school begins enacting at least one further curriculum area, with roughly two years to embed each one. The order is yours to set. That freedom is welcome, but it also means the first real decision of the enactment year lands on your staff: where do we start?

This guide compares the five areas so you can choose deliberately rather than by default. It is the companion to our guide for principals on leading enactment, which covers the closure days and the whole-school plan itself. Here we stay on the one question teachers keep asking each other in the staffroom: which area first?

The one rule that shapes everything

There is a single hard constraint. Wellbeing must be among the first three areas your school selects. Everything else is genuinely school-led. So the practical question is not really “which one of five” but “do we start with Wellbeing, or hold it for year two or three and open with something else”. If your staff is undecided, opening with Wellbeing removes a decision you would otherwise have to make soon anyway.

Beyond that, three questions from the Whole-School Curriculum Planning Guidance are worth asking of your own context before you read the comparison below: where is the energy on your staff, what has your school self-evaluation already surfaced, and what would children in your school actually notice a change in. The strongest first choice is usually the area where a couple of teachers are already keen and where enactment changes something visible in classrooms, not just a line in a plan.

The five areas, compared

Wellbeing (incorporating PE and SPHE)

Start here if your staff wants a confident, low-risk opening year, or if your self-evaluation has been circling wellbeing already. It is familiar territory, it draws on strong existing practice in most schools, and getting it out of the way satisfies the first-three rule early.

Hold it if you have a genuinely stronger candidate with more staff energy right now. You still have to fit Wellbeing into your first three years, but it does not have to be year one.

Social and Environmental Education (History, Geography and related learning)

Start here if your school has good local project and outdoor work to build on, or if your SESE provision has felt dated against the redeveloped approach. The move toward inquiry and local place suits schools that already do fieldwork and community links well.

Hold it if your staff feels least sure about the shift in emphasis. This is an area where a year of familiarisation before formal enactment can pay off.

STEM Education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths thinking)

Start here if you have a teacher or two who will champion it, and you want an area where enactment visibly changes classroom activity: more hands-on investigation, more design and problem solving. It tends to generate momentum quickly because children respond to it.

Hold it if resources and teacher confidence in the “technology and engineering” strands are thin. That gap is workable, but it is easier to close in year two than to carry in year one.

Arts Education (Visual Arts, Music and Drama)

Start here if the arts are a point of pride in your school and you want an enactment year that lifts staff morale rather than adds strain. It is often the area teachers most enjoy leading, and display and performance make the change easy for the whole community to see.

Hold it if you have thinner cover in Music or Drama specifically, and would rather use a familiarisation year to share expertise across the staff first.

Modern Foreign Languages (from third class)

Start here only with your eyes open. This is the genuinely new element: a modern foreign language from third class upward, in schools that have never planned for it before. That newness is exactly why most schools should not open with it. Treat the first year or two as familiarisation, decide which language, sort resources and teacher capacity, and enact it once the ground is prepared. It is the area most likely to feel like starting from scratch, so give it room.

A worked example

A typical mainstream school with steady staff energy might land on an order like this:

1. Year one: Wellbeing. Confident start, clears the first-three rule, builds the habit of whole-school enactment on familiar ground.
2. Year two: STEM or Arts, whichever has the stronger champion on your staff.
3. Year three: SEE, with the remaining area and Modern Foreign Languages sequenced last so MFL gets the longest run-up.

There is no inspectorate-preferred answer here. The guidance is explicit that these are professional decisions made in context, so the right order is the one you can give your school’s reasons for and write down. That written reason is the first line of your whole-school plan.

What this means for your planning

Whichever area you choose, enactment only works if the whole-school decision actually reaches each teacher’s planning. The guidance describes a flow: whole-school decisions feed each teacher’s long-term plan, which feeds their short-term recorded preparation, with each level adding detail and none of it repeated. If your agreed approach for the chosen area never changes anything in an individual teacher’s long-term plan, the decision never became practice.

That flow-down is exactly what Pleanáil is built to carry. A principal writes the whole-school plan once, and it becomes reference material inside every teacher’s long-term and fortnightly planning, so the connection the guidance asks for happens automatically. Teachers keep full ownership of their own preparation, and the curriculum content for each area is there to select.

If you are still weighing which document to plan from for each subject during the transition, our subject-by-subject guide for 2026/27 sets that out in full. And if you would like a planning tool that carries the whole-school plan straight into every teacher’s folder, Pleanáil is free to try for 30 days.