ePolitix.com Stakeholders comment on the Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee's report on the national curriculum.
On publication of the report, committee chairman Barry Sheerman said: "Simplicity is the main message from our inquiry into the national curriculum. We need a simpler, more coherent curriculum. Poor transitions from one key stage to the next create disruptions which damage the educational experience of pupils. It is vital that this is tackled.
"We need to trust schools and teachers more and empower teachers to do what they do best.
"There is a regrettable tendency for governments to make continual changes to the structure and framework of the curriculum. Ministerial meddling must stop and we require the government to establish the QCDA with full independence, reporting to Parliament through the children, schools and families select committee."
Stakeholder Response: Design & Technology Association
A spokesperson from the Design and Technology Association told ePolitix.com:
Primary Education:
The Design and Technology Association supports the principle of a national curriculum that safeguards pupils' entitlement to design and technology as part of a broad and balanced curriculum. Overcrowding in the curriculum is not simply a consequence of the content prescribed in the national curriculum. Many schools successfully innovate and develop practice that meets local needs within the parameters of the statutory requirements. We believe that the national strategies, centrally provided non-statutory guidance and initiatives, and the impact of testing and inspection can also contribute to the level of prescription, overload and narrowing of the curriculum perceived by schools.
Through its support and resources for members and the wider design and technology community, the Design and Technology Association actively aims to empower teachers to deliver the national curriculum in such a way that it meets their local needs and circumstances. We believe that effective professional decision-making at a local level depends upon teachers developing an in-depth knowledge of all the subjects they teach. In this respect, the Design and Technology Association believes that more time should be allocated to developing a broad range of subject expertise through ITT courses and comprehensive CPD opportunities made available to primary teachers to keep them up-to-date with all the subjects they teach when entering the profession.
Secondary Education:
It is indeed the case that some secondary teachers, particularly those who have qualified within the last 10 years have become used to being told both what to teach (content) and also how to teach it (pedagogy). This has been a direct consequence of both imposed national curriculum and related strategies. But there has also been the tendency for schools to more thoroughly document what they do.
Schemes of work, written by schools to illustrate how they are delivering the national curriculum subjects and additional content have at times become ridged, stale, and if difficult to change, endanger the teacher's creativity and freedom in adapting planned delivery to suit individual and developing circumstances. Assessment methodology and the requirement often placed by senior management to produce performance statistics in terms of pupil national curriculum levels have also had a similar effect. Having said this, one of the emphases of the new secondary curriculum is on 'localising' the curriculum. QCA have been encouraging schools to experiment and take risks with the curriculum acknowledging that not everything will work first time. For instance, one school has removed English as a timetabled lesson in Y7 with its teaching being scheduled across the curriculum.
The Design and Technology Association welcomes the move toward schools defining their own curriculum within the framework of the national curriculum. In terms of the key stage 3 programme of study for design and technology, these have been well received by teachers of the subject who do not see it as imposing constraints or restricting what they do. What it does is provide in broad terms aspects of the subject that must be incorporated. These include designing and making with food, electronics and a variety of constructional materials as well teaching about the effects and implications of using design and technology in society. However, to meet the challenges presented by the new curriculum, it is paramount that time and resources are made available for teachers to update the skills, knowledge and understanding of both their subject knowledge and related pedagogy. The tendency to develop teachers through 'generic' CPD activity has left many teachers ill equipped to meet the requirements of delivering a curriculum increasingly dependent on use of modern materials, processes and technology. This holds true for other subject areas too. Working together with other agencies including the TDA, subject associations are ideally placed to organise the meeting of this need.
Stakeholder Response: The Institute of Education
Professor Chris Husbands, dean of the Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy, Institute of Education, University of London said:
1. In principle there should be a national curriculum. It is appropriate that government should take a view on the curricular entitlement for all pupils as potential citizens of a complex modern democratic society. Without a statutory entitlement, it is the least advantaged and the least able who are denied access to broad and balanced learning.
2. The national curriculum has moved in the right direction since its introduction, at which time it was not fit for purpose; successive reviews have opened up the curriculum to greater flexibility and the deployment of teacher professional expertise, including the flexibility to adapt curriculum structure to individual circumstance. A national curriculum is best conceived as a broad enabling framework, working to broad educational principles; in a democratic society, these principles need to be articulated, open and defensible.
3. Early versions of the national curriculum lacked clear aims and purpose and, even more importantly, articulated too much detail. Early versions set out to do the local curriculum design job that is better done by teachers in schools (essentially, selecting and arranging the content of what is to be taught).
4. Any national curriculum needs to balance two competing dilemmas:
a. The balance between entitlement and choice: if the entitlement is too tightly defined, the curriculum will become rigid, will not meet the needs of all learners and will lead to boredom, disengagement and dissatisfaction; if there is too much choice, curricula will lack balance, expectations are likely to fall and some areas of the curriculum will be neglected.
b. The balance between subject-based and cross-curricular work. If the curriculum does not permit interdisciplinary collaboration, cross-cutting problems (e.g. global warming, community cohesion) will be excluded, but if there is too little emphasis on subject building blocks, there will be inadequate attention to issues of progression, intellectual coherence and challenge.
5. One pressure on the national curriculum since 1998 has been the national strategies. Whereas the national curriculum provides the curricular framework, the national strategies seek to provide an underpinning pedagogy. In practice, the strategies have distorted the curriculum. They have reinforced curriculum hierarchies and narrowed the curriculum. They have over-emphasised 'pedagogical fixes' and taken teachers' attention away from educational purposes. A classic example of this has been the secondary national strategy encouragement to schools to experiment with a two year Key Stage 3, chiefly on the grounds on acceleration of learning in core subjects. In practice, a two year key stage 3 weakens curriculum entitlement by reducing the access to foundation subjects (less time is available) and poses serious questions about maturation (the ability of some 12 year olds to access curriculum content which was designed for 13 year olds).
6. A lot of curriculum debate is based on unhelpful dichotomies, such as between 'skills' and 'knowledge': a 'skills-based' curriculum is assumed to be more 'relevant' than a knowledge based curriculum. This is lazy thinking: individuals acquire higher level skills by being asked to test their skills in the face of more challenging knowledge. The software engineer is highly skilled, but also knows a great deal of electronics; the musician is highly skilled, but also knows a great deal about the nature of music – and so on.
7. The select committee is right that the role of teachers in the development of the curriculum is crucial. Teachers need to be trusted far more and provided with support so that intellectually they are in a better position to take (back) responsibility for the curriculum. This will mean a revolution in the way we think about teacher preparation and in-service development: teachers need knowledge as well as skills, a strong basis in curricular understandings; a grasp of the principles and practice of secure curriculum design and – above all – the trust of politicians to get on with the job.
Stakeholder Response: NASUWT
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: "There is a general consensus that the curriculum is overcrowded and so in that regard there is nothing new about this finding. The real challenge is what would be removed.
"The national curriculum is, however, an important national entitlement for children and young people regardless of where they happen to live or go to school. The committee's proposals could, if implemented, introduce such a degree of unnecessary variation between schools that this important principle would be undermined.
"The NASUWT strongly supports the view that teachers need to be able to exercise their professional judgment. More 'freedom' from central control, advocated by the select committee, does not automatically lead to more scope to use professional judgement and expertise where it matters most - by teachers in the classroom.
"The way that many schools and local authorities are organised currently means that central direction would simply be replaced by new restrictions on teachers imposed by schools and local authorities.
"The last thing we need is the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) being subject to the same inadequate accountability arrangements that apply to Ofsted and Ofqual.
"As the work of the QCA has a serious impact on the working lives of teachers and headteachers and the learning experiences of pupils, it is right that it is held to democratic account by ministers. It is questionable whether ministers could have taken the swift action necessary following last summer's SATs debacle if the lines of accountability for the QCA were along the lines proposed by the committee.
"The report seems to simply dismiss Sir Jim Rose's proposals, which have been subject to more detailed scrutiny by the profession.
"The correct response would be for all those with a stake and legitimate interest in the education of primary age pupils to reflect on the final proposals and evaluate carefully the extent to which they offer the prospect of supporting the ability of teachers to raise standards."
Stakeholder Response: National Union of Teachers
Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The select committee's report on the national curriculum cuts through the government's timidity about restoring teachers' professional judgement. Its clear recommendations about returning decision making to teachers on the national curriculum, represents a major challenge to the government's impulse to prescribe and dictate.
"The select committee is absolutely right to dispel the illusion that the government can somehow tell schools what to teach, as it has done over the years with the numeracy and literacy strategies. And there is no argument for the current curricular freedoms enjoyed by academies not to be enjoyed by all schools.
"Once again, the select committee has hammered a nail into the coffin of the government's approach to testing. The government's proposed single level tests, linked to targets, will be as damaging as the current tests.
"Perhaps more profound for the government is the select committee's conclusion that micro-managing what is taught is counterproductive and that the roll-out model of change has had its day.
"I would have wished, however, that the committee had said the obvious about the competing Rose and Alexander reviews of the primary curriculum - which is that the government must bring in Robin Alexander from the cold and place his insights on the future of the curriculum at the centre of their own primary review."
Stakeholder Response: Voice, the union for education professionals
General secretary Philip Parkin said: "The report is a breath of fresh air. It backs what we, teachers and educationalists have been saying for a long time – that the government interferes too much and its obsessive micro-managing views teachers as cogs in a machine producing an end product rather than as valued and consulted professionals.
"A more consistent and coherent approach to reform by the government and its agencies would also be welcome instead of the current chopping and changing, back-of-an-envelope, knee-jerk reaction approach.
"Voice would welcome a slimmed-down curriculum, a later start to formal education and greater professional freedom for teachers to use their judgement about what and how to teach.
"I was delighted to read the chairman's comments that 'We need to trust schools and teachers more and empower teachers to do what they do best'."
