Examination of Witnesses (Questions 355-359)
PROFESSOR DEREK
BELL, CLIVE
BUSH, DR
RITA GARDNER
AND PROFESSOR
GORDON STOBART
3 NOVEMBER 2008
Q355 Chairman: It is a pleasure
to have such a talented group of witnesses with us today. This
inquiry into the national curriculum should be set in context.
Our Committee has been looking at what we think are the three
pillars of the educational reform that took place 20 years ago,
in 1988. We have looked at testing and assessment; we are in now
in the middle of our review of the national curriculum, and we
will be going on to look at inspection. All three are important
to our theme. We are midway through our national curriculum inquiry.
Although we no longer have David Lloyd with us, we have a new
Clerk with us. This is his first session, so we are being very
kind to him. He is Kenneth Fox. For those of you on the Committee
who have not met him yet, he is the gentleman on my left. We will
get started. We are looking at the national curriculum, and we
have learned a bit. We have been to Ontario in Canada to look
at some of the interesting innovations that have been introduced
in its curriculum. There is a big question that we want to ask
you all. First, I hope that it is all right that we use first
names, rather than calling you "Doctor" or "Professor".
Is that all right?
Professor Bell: Absolutely.
Q356 Chairman: It is a bit difficult
when someone has only just received their knighthood or damehood.
Let us get started. First, where are we with the secondary national
curriculum? Is it really the case, post-September 2008, that everything
in the garden is rosy and there is nothing more to be done, Clive?
Clive Bush: Is it all right to
call you "Barry"?
Chairman: No, you call me "Chairman".
[Interruption.] Absolutely not—even Ministers do
not get away with that.
Clive Bush: Would you like us
to give you a very brief résumé of who we are and
what we do, or do you want us to launch straight in?
Chairman: We do have your CVs, so do
not repeat them. We know that you are leading lights in this area;
we know who you are. Go for the question.
Clive Bush: I would simply like
to say that I am the national director of secondary strategy.
That is after 18 years of secondary headship at three comprehensive
schools, and being an English teacher and subject leader in English,
and so on. That is the context that I come from.
Chairman: That type of detail is absolutely
all right to give.
Clive Bush: Your question was
where are we with the new national curriculum. I think that we
are in a very good place. The national curriculum, in its new
form, is a very exciting vehicle for the delivery of secondary
education in this country. I say that, having had a recent headship,
and having worked and planned for the delivery of that new curriculum
in the year 2007-08. I have therefore spent the year building
towards it and looking at how we would deliver it in a large 11
to 18-year-old comprehensive school. The view of my teacher colleagues
about the new curriculum was really optimistic, almost to a man
and woman. There were very few concerns or objections to it. Essentially,
it was seen as a curriculum that provides a degree of liberation
and the opportunity to be innovative and a little more creative
in the thinking about how it would be delivered. We see that if
we look across the country, in the way that some schools are taking
a very creative and innovative view of curriculum design. That
is extremely encouraging. The short answer, therefore, is that
we are in a positive and good place in terms of how we take things
forward from this point.
Chairman: Thank you for that, Clive.
Professor Bell: I think we are
moving in the right direction. I think that it is starting to
release teachers, in particular, to do some of the things that
Clive just referred to. It is about the creativity that is there
and renewing professionalism in teachers so that the curriculum
is not done to them but is something that they develop for the
students whom they are teaching. We are moving in the right direction.
It is not all rosy, because there are some major challenges out
there for everybody. In a way, the curriculum is not what is written
on paper but what you do with it and what you mean by it. The
national curriculum is the statutory bit, but the curriculum itself
is much, much wider than that. It is about the whole ethos of
the school and, to a certain extent, the ethos of society as to
how we move forward. I think that we are moving in the right direction.
Chairman: That is very thoughtful.
Dr Gardner: I agree with Derek
that we are moving in the right direction, but as somebody who
is from one of the foundation subjects, I have a number of concerns
about the implementation of the new curriculum. We approve of,
and very much like, the idea that subject teaching is based on
concepts and that there is greater flexibility for teachers to
develop their own curriculum within that context. However, we
worry about some of the messages that are being sent to head teachers
and others about less content and greater flexibility. We have
limited evidence that that might have resulted in a reduction
in teaching time for some of the foundation subjects. We therefore
worry about the maintenance of a broad and balanced curriculum
as we go forward, and as increasing pressures continue to be placed
on it. Some pressures are statutory, but some are non-statutory,
such as the five hours of cultural learning. We are not against
that, but we worry about having in place the correct monitoring
procedures to ensure that young people have a broad and balanced
curriculum, at the heart of which is subject-based learning, taught
by professional subject specialists, whether as single subjects
in a traditional way or as integrated or theme-based learning.
Chairman: Fine, thank you for that.
Professor Stobart: It is four
in a row for the right direction. My particular interest and background
is that I led the evaluation of the original Key Stage 3 strategy
when it was introduced in its pilot stage and into its first year.
I am interested in looking at something that we picked up then,
which was that you can have the right messages and the curriculum
can look right, but you must consider what actually happens in
the classroom, what changes in teaching and learning and whether
the kids even notice that there has been a change in strategy.
I represent the classroom in that sense, I think. As you know,
I am an assessment specialist rather than a curriculum specialist,
but I have been closely involved with assessment for learning,
which cuts across the curriculum and is part of national strategy.
I am also interested in the impact of testing on teaching and
learning. I do not know whether this fits in with the remit, but
trying to predict the impact of the abandonment of Key Stage 3
testing is part of what we should be doing.
Q357 Chairman: On something that
you mentioned, Rita, are there not enough hours in the school
week? Are we rather idle? We certainly have some of the idlest
undergraduates and university students in the world. There is
less application, and our students seem to work less. What about
schools? Should we just make children go to school for longer
so that you could have all the curriculum that you want, taught
properly?
Dr Gardner: No, I do not think
that that would be productive at all, although good use of extended
hours is extremely valuable. I think that we need a broad and
balanced curriculum. Of course we support literacy and numeracy,
and information and communications technology skills and learning.
It goes without saying that it is absolutely essential for young
people to have those basic skills. But over and above that, I
think that a recent survey showed that 50% of the hours in primary
education were given over to English and maths. That is fine,
but you have to remember the squeeze that that places on the other
eight subjects. In the secondary curriculum, we are delighted,
of course, that in the curriculum reviews we still have the breadth
of foundation subjects, but it is a matter not of extending hours—we
cannot do that—but of keeping an overview of breadth and
balance in the curriculum. I might be interested to hear your
views on how to use some of the time, now that standard assessment
tests are no longer taking place in year 9, which was used for
training young people and teaching towards that, might be used
and better spread across other areas of the curriculum. I realise
that that is a decision for schools and teachers, but we need
some important messages to continue to come across about the value
of the foundation subjects.
Q358 Chairman: Derek, what about
science? Whenever people in the education sector meet, the teaching
of science seems to come up rapidly. There seems to have been
a change of heart by the Government in recent years. We went over
to a system of delivering a broad science curriculum, rather than
individual science subjects. Will you take us through that initiative,
experiment or whatever it was, which seems to have been almost
universally recognised as a mistake? We now seem to be rowing
back. Is that the best way of describing it?
Professor Bell: Certainly in some
quarters, people are doing so. It goes back to what Rita was saying
about a broad and balanced curriculum. That is what was attempted
when the national curriculum first came into being. The argument
was that if all students did three lots of science in secondary,
that was too much, so there was a compromise, which was that all
students would do double science, so that you reduce the amount
of time in the curriculum on science to ensure that students have
the opportunity to do, say, another humanities subject, music
or whatever. Overall, they had a broad and balanced curriculum
up to the age of 16. What then happened is that the construction
of that syllabus for the double science award was simply a decision
about what could be crammed in from the three traditional sciences
into two. You created a curriculum that was designed principally
for students who were more academic, if I can use that phrase,
rather than for students who could be quite good at science or
other areas of the curriculum, but would not learn well in that
area. That is what went wrong with the double science, if it went
wrong. What started to happen with the report, Beyond 2000:
Science Education for the Future, and all the thinking that
went into that, was a consideration of how to start to balance
the need to train students to become scientists, technologists,
engineers and so on for the future, with the need to meet the
needs of probably the majority of students for a science curriculum
and a science education that fits them to become citizens. That
is a challenge, and it is always a tension. What has happened
with the new curriculum is that we have started to move and to
recognise that you cannot do it all in one. A big change for Key
Stage 4, a couple of years ago, resulted not from the fact that
you had 21st-century science come in, but that schools were explicitly
given the flexibility to say triple science for some students,
if appropriate, and for a minority of students, perhaps only a
single science. That was the whole range, and the problem was
trying to meet that demand when you have at least two populations
within your cohort of students going up to the age of 16.
Q359 Chairman: But did most schools
give that option? They did not, did they? As I understand it,
most schools went for the shorter, more general science course,
and that led to many fewer people going on to specialise in science
later in their school careers.
Professor Bell: I am not sure
that you can make that direct causation.
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