Memorandum submitted by Futurelab
SUMMARY
— There should be a National Curriculum;
but strategies and practices for its delivery must evolve and
adapt.
— Heavily centralised prescription
and assessment has negatively affected the attitudes of teachers
and children towards the National Curriculum.
— An evolving and adaptable National
Curriculum should be devised as a set of broad principles within
which teachers and schools are permitted to devise appropriate
objectives and aims.
— Any future National Curriculum should
encourage schools to respond to local social and economic contexts,
and to be reactive to children's practical needs and cultural
experiences.
NOTE ON
CONTRIBUTORS
Futurelab is a not-for-profit charitable organisation
which explores educational change through a range of research
and development projects. The contributors of this submission
are researchers on a three year project, Enquiring Minds, a partnership
between schools and researchers intended to develop and pilot
an innovative approach to involving teachers and students in the
design of a new curriculum. It commenced in 2005. A final report,
including research analysis and conclusions, will be available
in August 2008. See www.enquiringminds.org.uk.
SUBMISSION
1. A National Curriculum is necessary and
important for children, teachers, and families. As a broad set
of entitlements and principles, the National Curriculum provides
children with a set of perspectives for understanding the world
around them, and for developing a range of skills and attitudes
appropriate to distinct knowledge domains. Whilst much of this
sounds eminently sensible, it is important to note that the purposes
of the National Curriculum should be the result of consultation
and informed discussion.
2. Many teachers perceive that the National
Curriculum is a relatively fixed body of knowledge and skills.
They doubt the relevance of this curriculum to the lives of the
children they teach and its ability to meet their needs. However,
they also feel excluded from the conversation about what the curriculum
should look like. This amounts to a significant loss in teachers'
ability to contribute to professional debates about education.
3. As it is currently arranged, the National
Curriculum insulates subjects from one another, imposing barriers
between disciplines and diminishing students' and teachers' capacities
for joining ideas and knowledge together from mutually compatible
areas. There should be more scope for imaginative and principled
interdisciplinary collaborations in curriculum design; for example,
linking aspects of science and geography, or history and English.
Additionally, the "universality" of the National Curriculum
acts as a barrier to schools and teachers feeling able to engage
at an intellectual level with the specific nature of their local
contexts (eg local histories and geographies, dialects etc). This
means that many students, irrespective of ability, find it difficult
to engage with the content of the curriculum. A National Curriculum
that is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as highly prescriptive
has led to teachers increasingly having to "deliver"
content and knowledge, and for students to experience it passively.
This means that students are not able to develop the skills and
attitudes of active and participative learning—rather, they
are learning how to internalise enough content to pass tests.
4. The current testing and assessment regime
is restrictive. Despite (or perhaps because of) year-on-year improvements
in SAT and GCSE passes, schools are too narrowly focused on tests
and examinations. This prevents teachers from developing activities
and focusing on areas of content and knowledge which fall outside
of what is to be tested. Assessment is of course essential to
gauging children's progress. It needs to be performed sensitively
and in ways which provide children with clear routes to improvement,
and intellectual and social development, rather than to be restricted
to the assessment of knowledge acquisition. There should be a
re-emphasis on the role of schools and teachers in developing
their own criteria for evaluation where possible.
5. The National Curriculum should evolve
to allow more local flexibility at school and classroom level.
While it is obvious that all students require familiarity with
the conventions of distinct disciplines, this does not militate
against the idea that schools may then take responsibility for
defining aspects of the content and knowledge which their students
will investigate. In line with this, the National Curriculum should
set out a broad set of entitlements for all children, with responsibility
for defining the content, processes and outcomes deferred to teachers
and schools. In this way, the National Curriculum would be prevented
from being regarded as a fixed body of content to which children
are able to gain different levels of access; instead, teachers
and children would be involved in studying diverse forms and sets
of knowledge while using and developing their skills of enquiry
and analysis.
6. Knowledge and skills must be seen in
tandem, not as separate entities to be treated independently of
each other. In the best teaching, the development of knowledge
and skills are integrated. The experience of dealing with a range
of knowledge types, from across the subjects, and through imaginative
teaching, requires students to use and refine their skills; tutoring
students in these skills separately is nonsensical.
7. A personalised approach to the National
Curriculum is to be welcomed. It is necessary, though, to be cautious
about the extent to which personalisation is understood and conceptualised.
The approach to seeing students as customers in a marketplace
of learning opportunities should be resisted. Instead, a truly
personalised approach to the curriculum would regard children
as taking some of the responsibility for defining what and how
they learn through constructive conversations with teachers. The
"subjects" of the curriculum may be seen as perspectives
that can be used by teachers to respond to children's needs, interests,
and experiences. Through the Enquiring Minds project, Futurelab
has empirical evidence that demonstrates the value that students
and teachers attach to this sort of flexible and adaptable approach
to curriculum development. Over 100 schools have attended workshops
in March 2008 to ascertain how Enquiring Minds might impact on
their own practices. This suggests strongly that many teachers
are willing to take more responsibility for working out the content
of the curriculum and for devising strategies and practices to
ensure the engagement and progress of students.
8. Teachers are central to the development
and design of the curriculum at the school and classroom level.
However, the skills of curriculum design and deliberation have
been marginalised in recent years, so that the fundamental question
about what to teach has been out of their hands. Rescuing these
qualities will require increased training and professional development
for teachers in developing their own curriculum design expertise,
as well as support to modify their existing classroom practices.
The proposed Masters programme for all teachers has the potential
to support this. However, the initiative must be focused on the
development of teachers' capacities as curriculum designers and
not just curriculum deliverers. It is also important to stress
the value that children and young people can bring to conversations
about the curriculum, and the increased engagement and motivation
which can be brought about by involving students in decisions
that affect their own prospects as learners.
NOTE
We have included a copy of a recent document
we have produced for the Enquiring Minds project.[1]
This document was sent, in print form, to every secondary school
in England in January 2008. Consequently, we have run workshops
with staff and leaders from around 100 schools during March 2008.
An additional document, reporting interim research findings, is
available at:
http://www.enquiringminds.org.uk/our_research/reports_and_papers/year2_research_report/
March 2008
1 Not printed. Back
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