Response to the Curriculum Assessment Review Final Report
The politics of reviews
When the National Curriculum removed control from teachers and the education establishment and centralised it under the control of the state, we entered an inevitable never-ending cycle of curriculum reviews. A centralised curriculum reveals the truth that the curriculum, the blueprint of the future society we want to educate our young people for, is a selection of knowledge and skills and so is an inherently political construct. Curriculum reviews tend to happen early in the life of new governments and usually reflect the concerns and ideologies of that government i.e. the neo-liberal functionalism of New Labour and the neo-conservative nostalgia of the Conservative government with its insistence on traditional knowledge. The present government is mainly known for its tepid cautiousness and unwillingness to offend any powerful vested interest groups. This is mirrored in the curriculum review it commissioned which abounds with terms such as ‘evolution not revolution’, ‘refresh’ and ‘light touch attention’.
Welcome recommendations but…….
Although the review finds that the overall structure and provision of the National Curriculum are working well, it identifies a wide range of specific areas for improvement. These will be welcomed by most in the education sector and will improve the effectiveness of provision. Ending the EBacc has long been called for, as it represented a limited view of the curriculum. The emphasis on oracy will be welcomed as well as the replacement of the Spelling and Grammar test in order to assess composition and application better. The use of diagnostic assessments in Y8 will focus attention on KS3 progress which has been a concern. Rationalising content across curriculum subjects should be welcomed by all and the recommendation to reduce GCSE exam time by 10% will go some way towards alleviating the indefensibly large amount of time spent on exam assessment at KS4. Making Citizenship statutory in primary schools and including Religious Education will help to establish equality of provision. Few would dissent from the call for greater diversity in the curriculum and for more effective support in making progress and in assessment for SEND pupils.
So this is a review whose intentions and recommendations are very welcome. However, it may be prudent to raise some concerns about how easy it will be to achieve some of them. How easy will it really be to achieve consensus amongst the fractious and diverse group of RE stakeholders in producing an RE curriculum for all schools? How realistic is it to expect historians to agree on what should be the statutory content of history and what should not? Is it possible to reform the content-burdened history GCSE, and the implications of this for learning, with just minor adjustments and not a full-scale far-reaching review? How can we expect non-specialist teachers to teach about subject-specific skills in history and geography without significant support?
What the review doesn’t do
The real concern with the review is not just how achievable its recommendations are but its limited scope and ambition. This is a missed opportunity and will have real and negative implications for the way in which the curriculum is taught and how the debate about how the curriculum develops.
By adopting what it sees as a gradualist, minimalist and non-controversial approach to curriculum change, which offends as few people as possible, the review seeks to accept and absorb previous policies. Additional principles and policies are simply added to those originating under other governments with different perspectives and priorities resulting in
inevitable contradictions. The report’s curriculum principles, for example, retain the commitment to a knowledge-rich approach and to ‘powerful knowledge’. This endorsement of the primacy of disciplinary knowledge produced by communities of academics seems to stand in contradiction with other curriculum principles, such as teacher autonomy to develop the curriculum and reflect students’ lives and experiences. The review highlights the need to prepare learners for a changing world by listing five key areas which should be covered by the curriculum. These should be part of cross-curricular provision but it is hard to see how this can be achieved if, as the subject recommendations make clear, the Programmes of Study should be minimalist and specific to the concepts of that subject. How can a curriculum for the changing contemporary and future world be achieved within the structure of the traditional disciplines?
The previous administration had a clear vision for the curriculum, that of the traditional grammar or public school. For them it was self-evident that the ‘knowledge of the powerful’ should be the basis of the curriculum for all. By not explicitly addressing this and providing an alternative, but instead embedding some of these perspectives into the curriculum and its principles, the review paves the way for them to be the basis for future curriculum design and development. We are condemned to an endless debate with ‘the curriculum of the dead’.
The review does not focus on the ‘big questions’ fundamental to a discussion about the curriculum, such as what a curriculum is for, what are the key values which a curriculum should transmit and to what extent should disciplines dominate the curriculum. How do they sit alongside those values and concerns which schools and society consider essential? How can vertical cohesion of the curriculum be achieved and what are the range of effective models for curriculum organisation, what is assessment for and what does it actually tell us? If a curriculum review does not anchor itself in a response to big questions it becomes a collection of mainly small-scale atomised well-intentioned reforms. Some will be acted on; others will be sidelined in the service of expediency.
Finally it needs to be said that the review is posited on the assertion that the curriculum, despite some shortcomings, is basically sound and not in need of radical surgery. To support this we are directed towards some rather minor areas of progress in pupil achievement. What the review does not discuss are the record levels of absenteeism, the increasing number of students being educated at home and the high levels of pupil discontent with schooling. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that schooling in England has never been so unpopular. This is not acceptable for education nor for a democracy. It demands the sort of radical thinking and actions which the review has put outside of its scope. It demands more of the urgency of revolution than the slow uneven progress of evolution.