The Curriculum Conversation

What a national curriculum can and cannot do

Looking back over 35 years of the national curriculum, here’s what the Francis review can do to achieve where previous reform attempts have failed

Looking back over 35 years of the national curriculum, here’s what the Francis review can do to achieve where previous reform attempts have failed

18 Oct 2024, 5:00

I do wish England’s National Curriculum (NC) had never been called a curriculum. Since its inception in 1990, the NC has only ever been a high-level framework. It’s down at the chalkface where curriculum-making happens, where beauty is woven and damage is done.  

While some lay troubles at the door of the current NC, others see deeper causes. But when we take the long view of 35 years of successive NCs, we see patterns we can never unsee.

Part of the problem is that no NC can work alone. Even if it’s enforced (doing so is still a relative novelty since Ofsted’s ‘about turn’ of 2019) problems remain that neither exemplary wording nor optimal content can prevent. This is because of the nature of high-level frameworks themselves. 

Concision and consequences

The first issue is their necessary concision. Take the term ‘physical features’ in the current Key Stage 1 geography. Its intention is obvious, one would have thought: namely to have children enthralled by valley, mountain, desert and coast.

No one – I promise you, no one – ever intended 6-year-olds to recite definitions of ‘physical feature’, yet sometimes I have observed exactly that.  

Bizarre unintended consequences proceed both from high-level summaries such as ‘physical features’ and even from admirable goals, such as ‘convincing and compelling language’ in English.

This is more of a problem in humanities, arts and English than in science or maths, for in these subjects, abstract ideas can only be taught through rich, anarchic particulars. If schools try to use rubric terms in the same way across subjects, distortion occurs.

Limits of linearity

The second is their necessary linearity. Subject curricula need enactment as warp and weft.  Teaching written or musical composition involves elements which, while they can be listed, discussed and taught separately, are ultimately inseparable.

A curriculum’s efficacy leans on such elements – style, content, form, technique – dancing together.

False flight-paths

Third is the unavoidable tension between inputs and outputs.  Any NC must describe minimum inputs, but inputs aren’t enticing on their own. So it must also set gold standards of performance. 

The trouble with describing strong final performance is that its very expression incentivises reverse engineering into broad steps or stages. 

We might wish pupils to write in ways that are elegant or interesting, generous or peaceable, but the moment teachers slice performance goals into interim objectives, they create false progression journeys.

Time and again, summative assessments (level descriptions or GCSE mark-schemes) have been mistakenly used as curricula.

No NC can prevent this. Prevention will require transformation of professional development. It requires, in senior leaders especially, a proper grasp of subject distinctiveness, the workings of curricula and the nature of knowledge itself.

Best bets

But a curriculum and assessment review can achieve valuable shifts and, with firm eyes on 35 years of such reviews, avoid predictable disasters. 

Here are my four best bets for doing so.

Cease verb-driven attainment goals

Seductive hierarchies of generic, skill-based descriptors (‘describe’, ‘compare’, ‘analyse’, ‘evaluate’) must go – once and for all. Curriculum and assessment rubrics can’t stop teachers doing this, but they could avoid encouraging it.  

The past 35 years have taught us that far from fostering valuable skills, such ‘command verbs’ promote formulaic procedure.

Instead, just describe inputs, or, in those non-hierarchical subjects where content elements are interchangeable, describe an array of typical or indicative inputs – the specific repertoire that will change the student over time.

Set an ambitious entitlement around breadth

I mean this both in terms of overall range of subjects and, within subjects, securing coherence through cumulative thoroughness, not tokenism.

Resist common headings across subjects

Over 35 years, we’ve had ‘Key elements’, ‘KSUs’ (knowledge, skills, understanding), ‘Concepts and processes’.  Don’t. Just don’t. 

Such apparent tidiness breeds laughable false equivalence on the ground, fostering meaningless management conversation about curriculum.

Avoid duplication across primary and secondary

Keep inputs precise, different, complementary.  What primary schools achieve with a coherent, rigorous curriculum is astonishing.

A curriculum is a set of promises to future teachers. Specify that primary ambition and, finally, the NC might achieve what it never has in 35 years: confidence in what Year 7 bring with them.

This article is the first in a new series of sector-led, experience-informed recommendations for the Francis review of curriculum and assessment. Read them all here

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