Three concerns about the curriculum and assessment review
Too national, too secondary-focused, too unclear about so-called skills
Happy Autumn! As I stagger towards half term (it’s been a long one), below is a longer, baggier but hopefully meatier version of an article I've just written for Schoolsweek.
Let the curriculum games begin! The trumpets have blown for the gladiatorial combat of another curriculum and assessment review. We’ve had roughly one per decade since the introduction of the national curriculum back in 1988. Across the country, people and organisations are sharpening their pencils and elbows, usually bearing a common contradiction. Yes, the national curriculum is overloaded, but not quite overloaded enough for their particular passion to be excluded. I remember back in 1999, when I had just left teaching, a senior civil servant sharing submissions from the Campaign for Real Ale and the Anarchist Federation demanding 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 more mundane but usually more profound choices around pedagogy and task design that make the daily differences to children’s learning.
However, as I battle to understand then teach adverbials, or struggle to find genuine time for developing pupils as active citizens or artists, I, like so many, welcome the chance to refresh, reduce and repurpose our national curriculum. Twelve years on, it definitely needs a life laundry. What kind of laundry is the eternal education question. A school’s curriculum has always been a political animal. As a nation, and as institutions and individuals, it defines our values and reflects our hopes for future generations.
The guardrails for the current review are now set; the principles, preamble, questions and accompanying evidence paper creates and constrains the space in which this national conversation will happen. Total revolution is rightly ruled out, and there is a welcome prioritisation of social justice and equity. As Kevan Collins consistently argued, any policy change or programme which does not have equity as an explicit goal tends to achieve the opposite.
However, this review appears to have three serious flaws which, while not sufficient to justify disengagement, feel worth unearthing.
First, 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, these principles feel laughable now. Whether you are an academy or a maintained school, the national curriculum has for nearly forty years overwhelmed almost all schools, leaving almost no space for any other locally-determined content, aims or outcomes.
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 less lightly on schools’ lives.
As I argued in a recent article about the Friday ‘Explorer Curriculum’ I developed with primary schools in Tower Hamlets:
Governments should encourage and guarantee a 20 per cent space (about a day a week, or a week a half term) in all school curricula for ‘non-National Curriculum learning’, and ensure that accountability systems protect, inspect and monitor this space.
A significantly slimmed down curriculum is part of the answer; radical change to accountability frameworks is probably a more significant lever. Prescribed teaching hours per subject per year might be the only way to create space for hours with genuine school autonomy to determine. But unless this is carefully considered and implemented, this review will simply sustain the four-decade tyranny of a national curriculum that trumps almost every other aim, almost all of the time.
The second flaw is that although the word ‘skills’ is used on numerous occasions, the review offers no clear definition, further obfuscating this issue with occasional use of the term ‘attributes’ or ‘life skills.’ and offers no spaces within the 54 questions where this can be discussed explicitly.
Personally, I think it’s useful to distinguish between skills, which are about the application of knowledge (for instance through technical education as well as through particular subjects) and what I term ‘dispositions’ - habits of mind and character such as creativity and teamwork. Whether and how to include such dispositions in any national curriculum is a live debate, even though there is a parodying of extreme views that do not really exist. For instance, nobody really wants a knowledge-light or non-subject-based national curriculum, but there are genuine questions and philosophical differences about whether creating a national curriculum that is deliberately knowledge-rich and dispositions-rich - within, across and beyond subjects- is either desirable or realistic.
This is not an attempt to relegate the fundamental importance of subject-based learning. However, the review might, in its current format, miss an opportunity for a proper debate about dispositions - one that goes beyond lazy knowledge-skills dichotomies, whole scale dismissal of the Welsh and Scottish curricula (rather learning from the design and implementation mistakes these curricula have made), and the evidence-light assertions made so frequently on both sides. These come from so-called trads who claim that these dispositions can only be learnt within subjects and are never transferable across subjects; and from those on the other side of this divide, who are frequently guilty of wooly thinking and woolier long lists of ‘I can’ outcomes statements that might or might not be teachable.
My personal view is that these dispositions need explicit space for teaching but that these should not (this time round at least) be defined by the national curriculum. Rather than nail down specific dispositions that each school or subject should focus on, the government should create space, within and beyond subject-based learning, for rigorous experimentation around the development of these dispositions.
In time, this might lead to a clearer national framework, but we aren’t ready for this yet. The development of dispositions can be incentivised through a beefing up of the ‘personal development’ element of a future ofsted framework or report card - this currently has low leverage in terms of scrutinising schools or changing priorities.
Third, one of the review’s key principles is that it will ‘work backwards through young people's educational journey’ starting with Key Stage Five .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, as does the exclusion of any review of the early years foundation stage or profiles (although this might be welcomed by the early years sector as a source of stability).
These three flaws should not prevent anybody from engaging with the review in good spirit (and Tim Leunig’s recent ‘how to’ advice in Schoolsweek is spot-on). Personally, I’m hopeful that the renewal of arts learning will start well before the completion of the review with some possible good cheer on this in the forthcoming budget, following the Prime Minister’s powerful, emotional signaling of the importance of arts learning in his speech to the Labour Party conference. A systematic focus on oracy is much needed. Any reduction in prescribed content at primary school, especially for English and Maths, would be welcome. GCSEs will stay (although there is hopefully still space for the possibilities of English and Maths qualifications that are more like driving tests, or KS2 SATs in that almost everybody should be able to ‘pass’ them, ideally before the age of 18.
I have huge sympathy for the civil servants who will have to make head or tail of the probable tsunami of submissions as well as the off-stage whispers and whims of those in or closer to power. It would be refreshing if the review team could be open about the research methods it will use to analyse the submissions, even though it is of course an inexact science, inevitably muddied by politics. All reviews, like all curricula, are imperfect, but I am still optimistic that this one will move our national curriculum to a better place that all our children deserve.