NC27: Memorandum
submitted by Professor Dylan Wiliam,
Deputy Director, Institute of Education, University of London
SUMMARY
The main thrust of our response is that we strongly support
the idea of a National Curriculum, but that this curriculum needs to be less
prescriptive and more coherent than is the case currently. This will require
re-thinking the distribution of responsibilities at national, local and school
level, and this will mean radical revision of the nature of support that is
provided to schools and local authorities for the successful implementation of
the curriculum.
Consultation
issue 1: The principle of whether there should be a National Curriculum.
1.1 In principle,
there should be a national curriculum. There are several reasons for this,
but principally it is because there are a large number of stakeholders that
have legitimate interests in the aims of compulsory schooling. Some of these,
such as students and teachers, are able to exert a direct influence, on what
happens in school, while parents might be able to exert indirect influence
through exercise of school choice. However, education is consumed by the
whole of society. While employers are often the most vociferous of these, it
is important to bear in mind that the costs of the failures of our education
system are borne by all members of society (e.g., through higher contents
insurance premiums necessitated by criminal activity caused, in no small
part, due to low educational achievement). The only practicable way to allow
all stakeholders to have a say therefore is through the democratic process,
and that is why we believe that 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.
Empirically, the evidence is that without a clear statutory
entitlement, it is the least advantaged and the least able that are denied
access to the broad and balanced learning experiences which provide the basis
for future active citizenship.
1.2 It is also worth pointing out the current global context is
very different from that in place two decades ago, when the idea of a
national curriculum was first given legal force. At that time, the idea of a
"national" curriculum combined two distinct meanings of the word; one was the
idea of a curriculum available to every student within a nation state, and
the other was the idea that the curriculum content should prioritise specific
national issues (witness, for example, the debate in 1990 over the definition
of the national curriculum for history). Given the rapid increase in
globalization over the intervening period, we think it is important to review
the automatic conflation of these issues, and consider how the curriculum
might address issues that are likely to be important for the current
generation of school students (such as, for example, poverty, famine and
environment change).
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Consultation issue 2: How the fitness-for-purpose of the National
Curriculum might be improved.
2.1 The National
Curriculum has moved in the right direction since its initial introduction,
when its fitness for purpose was certainly questionable. Successive reviews,
and particularly the more recent 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.
2.2 Early versions of
the National Curriculum lacked clear aims and purpose and, even more
importantly, articulated too much detail. In effect, the 1988/1991 and 1994
national curricula 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). 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.
2.3 More work needs to
be done on ensuring that the curriculum appropriately emphasises creative
problem-solving and collaborative work. A modern curriculum should be
responsive to rapidly changing social, economic and environmental issues, but
should also equip children with the skills to deal with (often) unpredictable
problems when they arise, working together to solve major problems, and
should help children understand that their actions and knowledge can also
shape the future.
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Consultation issue 3: The
management of the National Curriculum and its articulation with other policies
and strategies with which schools must work.
3.1
Research carried out at the Institute, and commissioned by the DfES (Moore
and Klenowski 2002), suggests that NC articulation with other policies and
strategies has been poor. Many
secondary Maths teachers have ignored the National Curriculum in favour of
the KS3 strategy, suggesting that the two do not articulate well with each
other.
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Specific issues
Principle
and content of the National Curriculum and its fitness-for-purpose:
Consultation issue 4: Principle and content:
arguments for and against having a National Curriculum
4.1 The case for a national
curriculum may be thought of as combining three strands, as follows:
· Only the best is good
enough for everyone (assuming we have some sense
of a high quality general curriculum, broad in scope and extending to the
threshold of adulthood - the kind of general curriculum we would want for our
own children - then we should want this curriculum to be offered to all
children). To aspire to this is an
ethical obligation, a matter, simply, of recognizing the equal value of all
young humans;
· To guard against the
divisions that might threaten a society's stability and cohesion, the educational and curriculum experience of its young people
should be to some considerable degree a shared experience;
· To maximise the economic
benefits of educational investment, contemporary
societies need to pay special attention to the general, or average, levels of
educational attainment.
4.2 As Denis Lawton
and others argued at the time of comprehensivisation, there is little point
in having comprehensive education without a common core curriculum. But,
issues remain about the size and nature of that core - and whether the core
should, effectively, be the 'all' or merely the part of the curriculum.
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Consultation issue 5: Principle and content: what the purpose of a
National Curriculum should be (for example, whether it should set out broad
principles or detailed aims and objectives).
5.1 While we accept the need for a national curriculum, we do not
believe that these needs are served by the current approach to the design of
the national curriculum. Denis Lawton defined the curriculum as a "selection
from culture" and we believe that it is essential that we are explicit about
the principles for selection. Successive national curricula have lacked
coherent design principles, and therefore have tended to be little more than
incoherent collections of the favoured topics of those responsible for their
design.
Clear thinking about the curriculum at national, local authority and
school levels is a pre-requisite for successful curriculum design and
implementation. The role of
government should be to map out the larger contours of a national curriculum
- its overall aims and broad framework of requirements. At national level, we
believe that the national curriculum for each subject should identify a
relatively small number (typically around five and no more than ten) "big
ideas" for each subject. For example, in science, we might choose the idea of
"equilibrium". This would mean that the curriculum might include units on
population equilibrium in ecology, chemical equilibrium, and dynamic
equilibrium in physics. Such an approach would mean that the curriculum would
be much slimmer than is the case currently, but it would of course, be up to
schools and local authorities about what to add to this curriculum to best
meet the needs of their pupils.
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Consultation issue 6:
Principle and content: how best to balance central prescription
and flexibility at school/classroom level.
6.1 This is an abiding tension that has not
been wholly recognised or addressed.
The revised curriculum gives schools flexibility in one sense, but not
the space in which to exercise that flexibility i.e. it acknowledges and
validates the principle but does little to make the curriculum itself more
flexible or less detailed.
6.2 There is little
scope for schools to do what is required i.e. to take account of 'individual
needs and local priorities, within the national framework'. The bottom line
is that, as argued above, the statutory curriculum needs further slimming
down and needs to be less prescriptive, giving schools and teachers more
opportunities for school-based curriculum development within the parameters
of national aims and standards.
6.3 Any National
Curriculum needs to balance two competing managerial principles:
i) 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
(on the other hand) there is too much choice, individual curricula will tend
to lack balance, expectations are likely to fall and some areas of the
curriculum will be neglected.
ii) The balance between subject-based and
cross-curricular work. Again, if the curriculum does not permit
interdisciplinary collaborations, then some cross-cutting problems (e.g.
global warming, community cohesion) will be excluded from the curriculum, but
if there is too little emphasis on subject building blocks, there will be
inadequate attention to issues of progression, intellectual coherence and
challenge.
6.4 In some cases, difficulties which arise
from one of these broad principles (e.g. entitlement/choice) are seen as a
consequence of the other principle. So, curriculum disaffection which arises
from over-prescription and lack of choice is actually blamed on curriculum
structure (e.g. a consequence of a subject-based curriculum). We need,
then, to be quite clear about what is mandated centrally, what should be
locally determined and what is a matter of learner choice.
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On
the management of the National Curriculum:
Consultation issue 7: Management:
the extent to which the National Strategies are effective in supporting the
National Curriculum
7.1 One significant
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 not been effective in supporting the National
Curriculum; they have distorted it. They have reinforced curriculum
hierarchies and narrowed the curriculum.
The National Strategies have over-emphasised 'pedagogical fixes' and
taken teachers' attention away from broader, longer-term 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).
The national Strategies remain over-centralised and heavy handed, despite
the rhetoric of 'local ownership' since the award of the Strategies contract
to Capita in 2005.
7.2
In a 2002 study carried out by the Institute of Education for the DfES, many
headteachers and heads of department felt that the National Strategies limited
opportunities for cross-curricular work, impacted negatively on the time
available for subjects other than Science, English and Maths - and in
particular the practical and creative subjects - and did not articulate
particularly well with the National Curriculum Orders.
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Consultation issue 8: Management: the
impact of the current testing and assessment regime on the delivery and scope
of the National Curriculum
8.1 Whilst we would
readily accept the importance of attainment in literacy and numeracy to pupils'
long-term life chances, we would argue both that sustained attainment in
literacy and numeracy needs a whole-curriculum approach. E.D. Hirsch Jr. has
shown that once students get beyond the basics of decoding and word
recognition, increasing competence in reading requires background knowledge
of what one is reading. Pupils learn to marshal complex arguments about
difficult questions in Geography and History and they practice precision in
the use of language in writing in a range of non-core subjects. A key
function of schooling is to prepare pupils not only for employment but for
the wider responsibilities of adult life:
we expect pupils to learn to read and write, but we also expect them
to learn to become adults in a participatory democracy, to understand
something of the world they are growing into, to take healthy exercise and so
on. It is also worth noting that there is currently no evidence that focusing
education on short-term economic needs has any impact on the relationship
between education, employability, and national competitiveness. Indeed, most
of the analyses of the impact of education on employment find that it is
education in general that makes the
difference, and an unduly narrow approach to education might, in fact, reduce
the impact on economic well-being.
These wider questions
about curriculum cannot be assessed through current (or indeed any) testing
and assessment arrangements. The
priority given to assessment arrangements over curriculum provision has
seriously distorted the management and delivery of curriculum.
8.2 A
recent ESRC-funded study carried out at the Institute under the leadership of
Dr Tamara Bibby pointed up the negative effects of the current testing regime
on primary pupils (in terms of raised stress levels producing less good
learning) and on their teachers (in terms of less 'adventurous' teaching and
perceived increased workload). While this was only a single study, its
results were entirely consistent with the UNICEF report on child wellbeing in
developed countries published in February 2007.
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Consultation issue 9: Management: the
likely impact of the single level tests currently being piloted
9.1 The rationale for single level tests is
that they offer more encouragement to make progress through the national curriculum
levels. This is because pupils will be able to take them in December and June
in any Year, rather than having to wait for the end of key stage tests. They
have been presented as similar to graded tests and music grade examinations.
They also meet the spirit of the personalisation agenda.
9.2 What has not been sufficiently recognised
is that these tests will form the basis of a new set of targets for schools: progress targets. Schools will be
given targets based on a historic baseline of the percentage of pupils moving
through two levels during a key stage. The Making Good Progress consultation proposed additional pupil
funding for every pupil who progresses through two levels in a key stage (5%
per subject).
This high-stakes use of the Single Level Tests
for narrow accountability purposes risks undermining the value of these
tests. Schools will need to get as many pupils through as possible and this
could encourage ever more teaching to the test, twice a year in every year. The financial incentives
would make this a classic example of 'payments by results' - and all the
distortions this brings with it.
9.3 There will be other consequences of this
use of the test results. Once pupils achieve a level they will keep that
level, even if they do not achieve it on the end of key stage test. It also
means that at key stage 3, where a minority of children go backwards in terms
of levels (since the curriculum is more demanding), they will be reported in
terms of the level achieved during key stage 2. This will inflate the
proportions achieving national curriculum levels and could be misunderstood
as signalling an improvement in national performance at key stage 3. Given
the tests are short (50 minutes for most), they will only be of limited
reliability and so repeated taking may generate unreliable results.
9.4
There are also some difficult technical issues surrounding the test:
i) a
key validity concern is the curriculum on which each test is based. In
English there will be no testing of Shakespeare as that is not part of the
key stage 2 curriculum, yet algebra will be included in level 5 maths and
above, even though this is not part of the key stage.
ii)
while these tests would be welcomed as a means of validating teacher
assessments of their pupils, their use as targets to drive progress is likely
to be counterproductive - leading to constant test preparation in every Year
from Year 3 through to Year 9, a reduced curriculum, and inflated achievement
of national levels.
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Consultation issue 10: Management: the
likely impact of the current 'root and branch' review of the primary curriculum
by Sir Jim Rose
10.1 The primary
review reporting this year is an important opportunity to consider the
primary curriculum. We hope to see a framework (or range of frameworks)
that will encourage disciplined innovation and high expectations in a
broad and responsive curriculum; we fear it may over-emphasise 'skills' at
the expense of knowledge and understanding and, by so doing, undermine the
acquisition of skills. The logic of
the argument here is a simple one: children will attain best when they are
engaged by a stimulating and varied curriculum well-taught.
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Consultation issue 11: Management:
the implications of personalised learning, including
the flexibility introduced by the new secondary curriculum (from September
2008).
11.1
Government is rightly concerned about personalisation and new local
curriculum flexibilities. Too often,
national policy and, indeed, schools' own curriculum practices have treated
pupils as groups rather than as individuals. Personalisation appears to have
shifted its meaning somewhat, away from child-centred pedagogy towards
greater differentiation and further setting of students according to notions
of ability.
11.2
The rhetoric of personalisation is too often accompanied by a further erosion
of the value we place on understanding and knowledge. Unhelpful oppositions are created between
"skills" and "knowledge" and a "skills-based" curriculum is assumed to be
more "relevant" than a knowledge-based curriculum. We know of no serious curriculum thinking which would sustain a
distinction between "skills" and "knowledge": 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.
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Consultation issue 12: Management: how well the National Curriculum
supports transition to and delivery of the 14-19 Diplomas
12.1
For the reasons above, we would argue that the best preparation for the 14-19
Diplomas is a broad and balanced exposure to subject disciplines, which in
different ways shape our understandings of the world in which we live.
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Consultation issue 13: Management: the role of the new style
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in relation to the National Curriculum
13.1 Policy
developments over the last decade have distorted the functioning of the
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
Increasingly, the key function of QCA is to act as the regulator for
examinations and assessment, though this function will now move to the new
Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator. Given the proposals to establish OQER,
there is a case for extending the scope of the "successor" agency to QCA
beyond that set out in para 3.17 of the DCSF/DIUS consultation Confidence in Standards. There is a case for a National Curriculum
Institute. The National Curriculum Institute would act as a research and
development centre for the curriculum and would articulate the relationships
between centrally-directed entitlement and local curriculum innovation and
experimentation. Currently, schools
are experimenting with curriculum innovation - both within and outside the
national curriculum with almost no overall framework for either evaluation or
the transfer of successful and effective practices.
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Consultation issue 14: Management: the role
of teachers in the future development of the National Curriculum.
14.1 The role of
teachers in the future development of the NC is crucial. Teachers need to be
trusted far more and provided with more time for structured collaboration
with their peers so that intellectually they are in a better position to take
(back) more responsibility for the curriculum. This chimes well with the
Prime Minister's ambition for an all Masters profession. Professional
networks of all kinds, including subject associations need support and
encouragement and teachers/schools need to be members. There are vibrant and successful subject
associations, though no obvious framework within which they can collaborate.
More critically, because of the dominance of the National Strategies and the
assessment regime, too little attention has been given to supporting
teachers' engagement with underlying and fundamental issues of
curriculum. One clear priority is for
government to ensure not only that the National Curriculum framework defines
a clear entitlement for learners but that there is sufficient informed
capacity through supported professional development in schools for successful
school-based curriculum design.
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March 2008
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