Mr.
Gibb: Clause 10 introduces the new primary curriculum as
recommended by the Rose review. It will replace section 84 of the
Education Act 2002 with proposed new section 83A. The new section will
replace the requirement to study mathematics, which was set out in
section 84(2)(a), with “mathematical understanding”. The
clause will also replace “English”
with “understanding
English, communication and
languages” and
“science” with “scientific and technological
understanding”. It will take out “history” and
“geography”, which are separately itemised in the 2002
Act, and replace them with “historical, geographical and social
understanding”. It replaces separately itemised “art and
design” and “music” with “understanding the
arts”, and “physical education”
with “understanding
physical development, health and well
being.” Other
than the last one, which looks like replacing running and jumping in
the gym or playing field with sitting at a desk studying human anatomy,
the others appear to be the same as before, but with the word
“understanding” plopped in front. If that is all it is,
why worry? However, if that is all it is, why bother changing the
legislation and have two reports—the interim and the final Rose
reports—on the primary curriculum?
When I asked
Jim Rose what the difference was between “mathematics”,
as currently written in the legislation, and “mathematical
understanding” in clause 10, his response
was “I
am not sure that it is anything different from what we have
now.”——[Official Report, Children,
Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2010; c. 82,
Q1.] It does
mean something different, or why else go to all the bother? Jim
Rose’s interim report was greeted with howls of derision and
criticism, because it revealed too openly the aim of moving from
discrete subjects to the cross-curricular teaching methods of the
1960s. That was odd because Jim Rose is one of the so-called three wise
men who, in 1992, conducted a government inquiry into low reading
standards. Their report explicitly criticised progressive teaching
methods: “Over
the last few decades the progress of primary pupils has been hampered
by the influence of highly questionable dogmas which have led to
excessively complex classroom practices and devalued the place of
subjects in the
curriculum”— Jim
Rose, Chris Woodhead and Professor Alexander said in 1992 that the
place of subjects in the curriculum had been
devalued. More
importantly, the clause takes primary education towards an
outcome-based education system—known as OBE for short, in the
jargon. The OBE approach has been defined by many educationists, pro
and anti, but it is best summed up in Kevin Donnelly’s
book—which cites the South Australian framework, which adopted
OBE—as “understandings,
dispositions and capabilities which are developed through the Learning
Areas and form an integral part of children’s and
students’ learning from birth to Year 12 and beyond... These
understandings, capabilities and dispositions are personal and
intellectual qualities, not bodies of
knowledge”— that
is the issue at
stake. That
approach to education originates in the 1920s at Teachers college,
Columbia, New York. Wherever and whenever it is tried, it fails. It
particularly fails those children who have no access to education
elsewhere,
other than school—they have no access at home or through a
personal tutor. Kevin Donnelly says in his book, “Dumbing
Down”: “Australia’s
adoption of OBE is the reason why our education system is consistently
at the centre of controversy. Since the development of the Keating
Government’s national statements and profiles in the early to
mid-1990s, all states and territories have adopted OBE to various
degrees. Internationally, only a handful of countries have attempted to
implement OBE and those educational systems that outperform Australia
in the TIMMS tests ignore OBE in favour of a more academic and
teacher-friendly
syllabus.” On
the issue of maths, the debate is best summarised by the US
mathematician David Ross, quoted in Kevin Donnelly’s
book: “The
reformers think that students should struggle with mathematical
problems on their own and that, from these struggles, methods of
solving the problems will emerge. Having devised these methods
themselves, students will understand the abstract conceptual structure
of the methods. Their opponents think that unless students are taught
the traditional algorithms, they will not be able to do
math.” Donnelly
goes on to quote from Rhonda Farkota who argues that successfully
mastering higher-order skills first requires being taught the basics in
a structured, systematic
way: “It
is generally accepted that a student-directed approach is more suitable
when it comes to the employment and cultivation of higher order skills
where reasoning and reflection are required. However, for the
acquisition of basic mathematical skills, the research clearly shows
that teacher-directed learning is better suited. Needless to say, these
basic skills must be firmly in place before students can approach
problem-solving questions with any degree of
competence.” In
essence, that is the debate to have plagued education in this country
for 50 years. It is all about what has been termed the constructivist
approach, which is defined as
“a theory of
learning that builds on the work of Piaget, Bruner and Vygotsky...
Adoption of a constructivist approach in the classroom involves a shift
from predominantly teacher-directed methods to student-centred, active
discovery learning and immersion approaches via cooperative group work,
discussion focused on investigations and problem
solving.” As
Kevin Donnelly states that when applied to maths, it means that
memorising times tables, mental arithmetic, learning by rote and
mastering basic algorithms, such as long division, give way to using
calculators, co-operative hands-on learning and relating maths to real
world
applications. I
remember meeting a primary school teacher who said, “You
don’t teach children to multiply by 10 by adding a zero, or to
multiply by 100 by adding two zeros. That is just mechanical and
doesn’t teach them an understanding of maths.” That view
is widely held, and probably explains an incident that happened to
me a few years ago when I spoke to a year 6 group in a primary
school in my constituency about the campaign to ensure that every child
in sub-Saharan Africa had a teacher. I asked them how much we could
raise if we asked every taxpayer, of which there are about
30 million, to pay 10p. Almost immediately, a teacher burst
in and said, “They can’t answer that question.”
They were the brightest year 6 children in the school, who were
co-ordinating the campaign. Members will probably remember receiving
letters in which we were invited to go to the school and receive a
model of a teacher that they wanted to have in every sub-Saharan
country.
The fact is the
teacher told me that those children could not do that kind of
calculation; they had not been taught how to multiply large numbers.
The obsession with not teaching algorithms means that children cannot
do problem solving, because they do not have the tools to do it. Jim
Rose let it slip that the constructivist approach is behind the reforms
recommended in his report. He
said: “In
the recent past, Ofsted commented on maths and said that children are
taught sums, but often do not know what sums to do or how to apply that
knowledge when it comes to a practical situation. Given that sort of
evidence, which has come forward fairly consistently, I think that the
way in which we are suggesting things should be structured is very
sensible.”——[Official Report, Children,
Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2010; c. 82,
Q1.] Clause
10 covers the new primary curriculum. The 76 prescriptive
objectives in the maths programme of learning and the 84 prescriptive
objectives in the English programme of learning are clearly crafted in
a way that takes the curriculum in a constructivist direction and an
outcomes-based approach. If I am wrong, as Jim Rose says, there is
nothing different from what we have now. In either case, we should not
be amending the national curriculum as set out in clause 10.
I want to come
to the English curriculum when we debate the next set of amendments and
the programmes of study. Amendments 54, 52 and 53 would replace the
phrase “areas of learning” with “subjects”,
which is the term used in the Education Act
2002.
Annette
Brooke: I seek some clarification. Given that hon.
Gentleman thinks that head teachers should have more freedom in
implementing the curriculum—that is certainly my party’s
view—should there not be the opportunity for one school to
choose a cross-curriculum route and another to choose a subject-based
route, because that would give parents a choice, and I believe in that
sort of
choice.
Mr.
Gibb: I agree with the hon. Lady: a very prescriptive
curriculum that insists on a certain philosophy of education is
proposed, and we should be giving the discretion to head teachers to
use the philosophy that they think will deliver the highest standards.
As a quid pro quo, parents should be able to choose the school that
they think will be best for their own children. In my judgment, schools
should have to publish on their website the educational philosophy, the
approach and the curriculum in their schools, so that parents can make
an informed choice. What we have at the moment is wrong. It is a
centralised approach, the levers of which have been used to promulgate
a particular ideology of
education—
Mr.
Coaker: That is not
yours.
Mr.
Gibb: No, it is not the one in which I believe. I shall
finish my point, and the Minister can jump
in. Such
a system has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. It is not
new. It has been tried many times in this country, and whenever it is
tried, it results in a poorer outcome of education for children. Let us
consider, for example, the phase when children did not know their
multiplication tables. Such periods do enormous damage to young
people’s confidence in learning maths and taking it to a further
stage. Even though it is now in
the national curriculum that children should learn their tables to 10
times 10 by the time that they are nine-years-old, that still does not
happen in many schools. I agree with the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and
North Poole. She is absolutely right. It should be a matter for the
professionalism of teachers, but that is not the system that we have at
the moment, and what we have is moving in the wrong
direction. 4.45
pm
Mr.
Coaker: I apologise for jumping in. The hon. Gentleman
accuses us of pursuing an ideology, but what is he
pursuing?
Mr.
Gibb: I am happy to have a debate about approaches to
education. For too long, such issues have been debated among
educationists behind closed doors. Those who are affected by it are
excluded from the debate. I feel strongly as a Member of Parliament and
as a shadow Education Minister that we should be debating such matters
in public and I take every opportunity to do so. I believe strongly in
phonics and learning multiplication tables by rote, so that the child
has an automaticity and is not busy floundering, working out seven
times six in a long division
sum.
Tim
Loughton: What is the
answer?
Mr.
Gibb: Forty-two, incidentally. That system is the best
approach to teaching maths and to teaching children to read. Children
should be taught general knowledge, history and the geography of this
country and of the world. However, as I said to the hon. Member for
Mid-Dorset and North Poole, such matters should ultimately be for
schools, but that does not mean to say that Members of Parliament and
shadow Ministers should not take part in such debates and let the
public contribute to
them. One
organisation that takes part in the debate is the Campaign for Real
Education. It has commented on the clause. It said:
“Sir
Jim Rose recommended that primary schools should do away with the
subject-based curriculum and subsume the subjects into 5 ‘areas
of learning.’”
It went on to
say:
“This
goes completely against the advice of good teachers who emphasise that
the subjects provide structure for essential knowledge and
content.” The
documentation and Jim Rose’s report are defensive about the
accusation of subsuming subjects, and the final report goes to great
lengths to deny that, particularly following the outcry that greeted
the interim report. However, the wording of the six areas did not
change between the interim report and the final report, and it is that
wording that will last if we implement clause 10 when Jim Rose is long
forgotten. The
wording of the clause changes “subject” to “areas
of learning”, but we believe that subjects matter. The
constructivist approach is that learning how to learn is more important
than subject content. It asserts that generic learning skills can be
taught and then applied to subjects later—I am not sure when,
but later. But the only genuine cross-curricular skill is literacy. How
to
read and write can be improved as we write a history essay or write up a
geography field trip or a chemistry experiment, but learning French is
different from learning maths or physics. The mind is
developed by learning and understanding more and more concepts, by
remembering more and more pieces of information and by developing
knowledge, not by being told how and what to
think. As
Kevin Donnelly writes,
“An
essential aspect of what it means to be educated is to be taught
traditional subjects like mathematics, history, science, literature and
music. Such subjects have evolved over hundreds of years and each is
unique in the way it defines how we experience and understand the world
and our place in
it.” Another
influential book is “The Schools We Need: And Why We
Don’t Have Them” by E. D. Hirsch. He is critical of the
objectives approach to the curriculum. He said that, in that
approach,
“One
first defines a few highly general ‘objectives,’ and one
then carries them through several
grades”— he
is an American academic; he is referring to years. As his objectives
are quite general, they are then repeated each year—the theory
being that they are taught in increasing depth. Hirsch argues that that
leads to repetition and boredom as children learn the same issue over
and over again in increasing depth. It also leads to gaps in
children’s knowledge as the broad objectives result in some
subject content being taught over and over again while correspondingly,
other important areas are missed out altogether.
Amendment 238
would undo clause 10 and return to what is in the 2002 Act, with the
exception that languages would be put in as a core subject for key
stage 2, together with English, maths and science. It emphasises that
music should be a separate foundation subject, rather than being
subsumed into “understanding the arts”. Finally,
amendment 50 would take out the Henry VIII clause that gives
the Secretary of State the power under secondary legislation to
amendment the curriculum which has, until now, been amended only by
primary legislation.
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