Resist the panicky zeitgeist and be brave curriculum makers

We can shape the curriculum to broaden horizons and ensure young people find work or training, but it takes time and courage, says Carolyn Roberts

How do leaders think when they make choices? Could they be helped to resist the panicky zeitgeist and think about what’s best for children in the longer term?

The Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education was designed to encourage us all to understand our responsibilities as public servants, so it starts with the seven values of the principles of public life: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. 

School leaders were never meant to be robots, but role models for the young. How they behave is as important as what they do.

Leadership is rooted in personal characteristics and these are the virtues of the framework: trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism.

Let’s become curriculum makers

We hold trust for children when we think hard.

How can we take advantage of reduced prescription? What local opportunities open up, especially for those who cling onto academic expectations by their fingertips?

More arts and PE? Learning outside the classroom?  With local employers? What about tackling real-life challenges collaboratively: racism, poverty and the climate emergency?      

We can show wisdom in a principled response to the transition challenge, planning curriculums smoothly and collaboratively, ending the own-goal repetition at secondary transfer which is particularly disastrous for disadvantaged higher-attaining students who switch off by the end of year 7.

We can demonstrate kindness in the practicalities of enabling teachers to become curriculum makers rather than other peoples’ curriculum-deliverers. They’ll need time to think in a new way.

NEET prevention

Justice runs through the curriculum and assessment review (CAR). It aims to stop so many of the forgotten third dropping into NEET (not in education, employment or training).

It seeks to broaden horizons through music, and for young people to see themselves in the revised curriculum and take their proper place in the world. And it aims for a better approach to enrichment.

Service means we take our responsibility to sustain a national high-quality education system seriously, rebuilding curriculums thoughtfully and resisting any pressure to be the first or the best to do it, take shortcuts or adopt others’ oven-ready solutions.

Curriculum-making teachers are expected to “innovate and respond to local needs”, using “flexibility to extend the curriculum and draw out its relevance for the young people in their classrooms”. They’ll need principled support from their leaders. It is hugely important.  

We can show courage as we embrace this chance to rebuild a broad, effective and creative education for all children and young people, trusting that our hard work now could effect a better future for them. 

That’s how we stay optimistic.

Despite difficulties and pressures, we are developing excellent education to change the world for the better.

We are moving from the closed, static “best that has been thought and said” to “an entitlement to the most important knowledge that we expect children and young people to learn, both for their benefit and for the benefit of the nation’”.

We need courage

The Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education is not a manual. It requires a leader to scrutinise motivations and choices though personal, professional reflection before any decision.

It expects a commitment to consistent self-analytical thinking and a level of scepticism about simple solutions.

School leaders are battered by blunt accountability measures, and many will be wary of their own curriculum thinking capacity. 

The CAR’s vision of each school offering better engagement, enrichment and place-based learning alongside the best of all knowledge will indeed need trust, wisdom, service, and optimism.

A bit of justice and kindness from the Department for Education wouldn’t go amiss either, because none of it can happen without time. Time, as ever, is money.

Most of all, we need courage. Courage to allow ourselves to think big about what we can do with a bit less prescription and a bit more time. It’s time to be brave enough to make a difference.