Let the curriculum games begin! Another review is underway, and edu-gladiators and organisations are sharpening their pencils and elbows. The curriculum is overloaded, everyone agrees, but none want their particular passion removed. Some, in fact, want theirs added.
In 1999, a senior civil servant shared with me some submissions from that year’s review. The Campaign for Real Ale and the Anarchist Federation demanded that real ale and anarchy be included in the National Curriculum. Are we not entertained?
Now that I am back in class, the thought of yet more curriculum change is kind of exhausting. There are clear opportunity costs.
Every minute spent tweaking curriculum content is a minute lost to the less politicised but usually more profound choices – especially around task design – that make the daily differences to children’s learning.
However, as I battle to teach adverbials, or struggle to find time for developing pupils as active citizens, the chance to refresh, reduce and repurpose our national curriculum is welcome.
The guardrails for the current review are now set. They rule out revolution and rightly prioritise social justice and equity. However, they also exhibit three serious flaws.
Primary goals
First, the review will ‘work backwards through young people’s educational journey’ starting with Key Stage 5.
This seems to suggest that the primary curriculum is simply a ‘flight path’ to what needs to be achieved at and by secondary schools, rather than have any intrinsic, real-time value to enable a thriving childhood.
The accompanying evidence paper, which includes only data from secondary schools, subtly reaffirms this post-11 bias.
The whole curriculum
Second, the review fails to differentiate between the whole curriculum and the national curriculum. The 2011 review specifically noted this distinction, arguing that ‘the National Curriculum should not absorb the overwhelming majority of teaching time in schools’.
Looking back, this feels laughable. For academies as well as maintained schools, and for nearly forty years, the national curriculum has left almost no space for any locally-determined content, aims or outcomes. The OECD has noted as much.
As I have argued elsewhere, there is a compelling case for government to guarantee schools 20 per cent of their curriculum time will be reserved for ‘non-National Curriculum learning’, and to ensure that accountability systems protect, inspect and monitor this space.
If the review is serious about its principle to ‘support the innovation and professionalism of teachers’, it has to face up to this fundamental failure. Government should see itself as a curriculum space-creator as well as determiner. It needs to tread more lightly on schools’ lives.
Defining so-called skills
The third flaw is that the review wording refers to ‘skills’ on numerous occasions but offers no clear definition of the word, further obfuscating this issue with occasional use of the terms ‘attributes’ or ‘life skills’. Worryingly, none of its 54 consultation questions create space to discuss this explicitly.
How shall we distinguish, then, between skills as the application of knowledge (academic and technical know-how) and skills as dispositions (habits of mind and character)?
Whether and how to include the latter in any national curriculum is a live debate. There are genuine differences about whether creating a national curriculum that is both knowledge-rich and dispositions-rich (within, across and beyond subjects) is either desirable or realistic. Yet the review looks likely to miss the opportunity to have that debate sensibly.
Developing such dispositions is precisely where guaranteed school (not national) curriculum time might allow for genuine development.
Rather than nail down specific dispositions, the review could create space for rigorous experimentation, which could be incentivised by beefing up the presently low-leverage ‘personal development’ element of the Ofsted framework.
These three flaws should not prevent anyone from engaging with the review in good faith. (See Tim Leunig’s excellent ‘how to’ in FE Week to help you have your say.)
All reviews, like all curricula, are imperfect, but I am still optimistic that this one will move our national curriculum to the better place all our children deserve.
In the meantime, may the odds be ever in your favour.
There’s so much repetition within the curriculum because silo’d subjects and departments often teach much the same content, skills and concepts that overload is inevitable. If the uk took note of what’s happening in a few places in the UK , around the world and to some extent the IB then the answer is to take around 50% to 75% of curriculum time and use it for interdisciplinary integrated project based learning. The approach truly switches the system from the factory batch production teacher centred model to pupil centred learning. It eliminates wasteful repetition, is both more motivating and creates breathing space for development that has been squeezed out of the learning experience. The effect is to streamline the whole curriculum and because students have a greater senses of ownership and commitment makes learning far more fun. Combined with a far better use of ed tec and AI the education system could be brought into the 21st Century and delivere delivered individualised learning.
Teachers get to teach collaboratively and workload reduced because so much of the current burden is spent on admin and reporting that’s out of date before it’s published or fedback.
So, the Interim Report of the Francis Review. Summary: We keep on doing what we’re doing but neatening it up at the edges.
“Evolution, not revolution….a balanced and cautious approach…”
To repeat what I’ve said before, the school curriculum has had many ‘cautious’ nudges and tinkers over the years – not unlike this. But there has not been an attempted modernisation of curriculum or an attempt at substantial reform of curriculum since 1988 – before Email and before Smartphones, long before AI, before Garage music, and, as it happens, 6 or 7 years before the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service was established. And yet, here we are – still stuck in a pre-algorithmic world, supporting a National Curriculum, ‘high-stakes’ educational testing which has been questioned time and again , behavioural learning and ‘Mastery Learning’, both of which have been largely debunked in the educational research literature , and the politicisation of curriculum with the use of punitive (Ofsted) inspection. The Interim Report claims to be for “curriculum reform”. Saying so is far from being so. There is little or no ‘reform’ on these horizons. Curriculum development? Not so much.
The Report talks in the tired vocabulary of ‘core subjects’, ‘sequencing’, a ‘balanced’ curriculum, and ‘breadth versus depth’ – topics which have been worried at time and again for almost the past century . Time on task? How many subjects should be taught? What level and amount of content should each subject embrace? Which subjects should be assessed and which not? Yet again, we hear that the curriculum does not well serve ‘disadvantaged’ and SEND students – really?? There is barely a nod towards the equally tired old arguments that the curriculum is overly ‘academic’, though this has always been the conclusion of those who have dared to challenge the universities for imposing subject disciplines that they alone recognise as valid. Universities have no substantive interest in SEND students.
There is no mention of student enquiry as a curriculum element, and no acknowledgement of classrooms as places of knowledge-generation, places where students join with teachers in gaining insight. There is no mention of classroom action research as a well-recognised process for improving classroom interactions and curriculum, embraced by many teachers. The complexities of pedagogical interaction and student learning which were expressed (repeated, actually) by the largest-ever funded educational enquiry, the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (£30m) do not even get a mention. In fact, the core assumption saturating this report is the antediluvian, thoroughly invalidated idea that what is taught is what is learned – a hopeless fiction – and that what is to be learned is that which is planned to be taught – another impossible simplification. In fact, other than a brief recognition that students need to be taught to use AI, the curriculum as represented here could be mapped with ease onto a school curriculum in the 1950s.
In fact, the definition of curriculum for this Review (insofar as one is given) is the most blinkered and ill-informed of anything I have read in the past 30 years. It covers little more than content. It is, in fact, a syllabus. Go all the way back to 1985 and the landmark report of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, The Curriculum from 5-16 . Here is their take on what makes for a curriculum to be reviewed:
A school’s curriculum consists of all those activities designed or encouraged within its organisational framework to promote the intellectual personal, social and physical development of its pupils. It includes not only the formal programme of lessons, but also the ‘informal’ programme of so-called extracurricular activities as well as all those features which produce the school’s ‘ethos’, such as the quality of relationships, the concern for equality of opportunity, the values exemplified in the way the school sets about its task and the way in which it is organised and managed. Teaching and learning styles strongly influence the curriculum and in practice they cannot be separated from it. Since pupils learn from all these things, it needs to be ensured that all are consistent in supporting the school’s intentions.
But this Review is stuck with 30 young people dutifully making notes as the teacher speaks almost in spoken cuneiform of ‘escarpments’, ‘’declining’ and declinations’ and ‘reproductive organs’, of empires and monarchs past, of this year’s permitted poets. There is barely a hint of recognition of the learning that has emerged out of educational and curriculum research: that there are multiple ‘literacies’; that Phonics is but one tool in the pedagogical toolbox – and that many children teach themselves to read; that what is taught enters into an already excited cognitive system through which it is mediated; that knowledge ‘facts’ are subservient to personal values; that knowledge crammed into a schedule for passing tests and exams has a short half-life; and that tests and exams – apart from being culturally and class biased – could only assess a student’s capacity to take a test, and rarely indicate substantive learning (see Footnote 1). Where has this Review panel been all these years?
Frankly, this is an embarrassment. Is this truly the best we can do? Is this group of reviewers the best the UK has to offer in terms of curriculum ‘expertise’ and understanding? That is, to some extent, a rhetorical question since curriculum ceased long ago to be a subject to be deliberated in university departments of education. It barely exists, since the National Curriculum displaced all need to think of curriculum. After all, what this Review thinks is the ‘curriculum’ now comes through the post in a brown envelope. Though this, too, escapes the attention of the Francis Review – that curriculum should be, in the end, dependent on a community of educational stakeholders: universities, community organisations; employers; teacher associations; test-setters and others . There is no recognition of curriculum development – only of a stipulated, proscribed syllabus within which teachers are encouraged to find novel ways for students to learn what is required of them.
This review – once it is completed – will ensure that there is no further review of the curriculum in this parliament, so we are stuck with antedeluvianism at least until the 40th anniversary of the National Curriculum. Meanwhile, the crisis of student engagement intensifies, as does the radical threat of AI to all forms and expressions of knowledge. Where, indeed, is there even a flagging of the knowledge (curriculum) revolution already tsunami-washing into educational institutions? This Review sits like an island of calm amid the raging waters of the AI society, of the crisis of student engagement, of financial and political threats to all academic institutions, and of the psychological trauma inflicted on young people by daily images of genocide, the horrors of war, the in-your-face-attrition of climate change and the resurgence of proto-Fascism. Do we need a more ‘balanced’ curriculum? I’m sorry? – what!
In 1969 Joseph Schwab famously declared (in the USA) “curriculum is moribund”, by which he meant that there was no informed deliberation taking place, outside of abstract theory and habitual practice, over the meaning and quality of a modern school curriculum in a contemporary context. In response to abstract proposals, he developed what he called a ‘practical language’ for thinking about, developing and governing school curriculum. It stands today as a solid basis for addressing our own situation in which the curriculum is equally moribund. He set out a process which is systemic, inclusive, educational, political and professional in equal measure, for “deliberations” over curriculum. It did not include a hastily constructed group of second-tier observers (and people with conflicts of interest) moderating thousands of comments in secret and against concealed criteria – imposing a “cautious” approach on those of us feeling little less than extreme urgency.
But let me go back even further than Schwab, to a proposal that, surely, meets the demands of today. In 1915 the city of Cleveland, Ohio commissioned a ‘School Survey’ as part of its general efforts to modernise the city in competition with a burgeoning New York and Chicago . What does a modern curriculum look like, equipped to meet immediate demands of employers, universities and families. About 20 projects were commissioned looking at every aspect of schooling – from classrooms to finance, from architecture to teacher preparation. The reports were moderated by committees of experts in each field and then published (at cost). A hotel room was rented for each Monday lunchtime for a year, inviting citizens to enter and discuss, argue over, whichever draft report was on the table that week. Finally, reports were amended and completed and formed the basis of curriculum and school development.
Now look at the bare threads of this ‘Curriculum’ review in comparison. How on earth did we get here?