Opinion: Curriculum review

Three concerns about the curriculum and assessment review

Flaws in the review’s terms of reference mean a(nother) opportunity to deal with the perennial issue of curriculum overload could go begging

Flaws in the review’s terms of reference mean a(nother) opportunity to deal with the perennial issue of curriculum overload could go begging

21 Oct 2024, 5:00

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.

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One comment

  1. 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.