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 (eg, 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).
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 1988-91 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.
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.
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.
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 10) "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.
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 ie 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 ie 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 (eg 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 (eg 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 (eg 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
March 2008
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