Why do we have a ‘National Curriculum’…
…and does it need to change?
As a teacher who joined the profession in 1995, I never questioned the fact that schools followed a national curriculum. I was aware that more experienced members of staff were disgruntled with workload, and that curriculum planning was dominated by huge, lever-arch folders published by the government. The Dearing Report (1993) had proposed the slimming down of the curriculum but the state of morale in schools was at such a low ebb that teachers continued to slavishly adhere to the original curriculum. Ofsted had been formed in 1992 and, in order to cover their backs, subject teams generated formidable volumes of paperwork and pupil evidence to convince themselves they were doing the right thing. As a new entrant, however, I may have questioned the content and format of the national curriculum, but I never questioned its existence.
English education in the post-war era had been dominated by the Butler education act of 1944. This is best known for introducing the tri-partite system of grammar, secondary modern and secondary technical schools. However, it barely mentioned the curriculum, leaving this to the discretion of head teachers and governing bodies. This curriculum status quo remained in place for the next 30 years with each school planning their own curricula and assessment processes.
A speech by the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, in 1976 is commonly credited with starting the prolonged gestation of the first national curriculum. In this speech, Callaghan stressed the importance of reading, writing and arithmetic and talked about the lack of adequate skills in the teaching profession which meant that the virtues of good manners and hard work were not being instilled. He aimed to stimulate a national debate including employers, trades unions and parents to decide the purpose of education in the UK.
Researchers trace the The Education Reform Bill of 1988 back to this speech. It was this legislation that introduced ‘The National Curriculum’ with three main aims: to provide opportunities for all pupils to learn and to achieve; to confirm that pupils across the country were entitled to the same broad curriculum; and to ensure that the curriculum should aim to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and prepare all pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life (DES 1988). It has undergone many reviews and revisions since then but the idea of a national curriculum remains unchallenged to the present day.
A national curriculum represents the consensus on the desirable norms of society that we must teach our children. Callaghan defined these norms as ‘to equip children to the best of their ability for a lively, constructive, place in society, and also to fit them to do a job of work’. There is a tendency for debate around curriculum to be reduced to dry wrangling over the relative merits of the constituent subjects, but the national curriculum matters much more than that.
Let me illustrate its importance by asking three questions:
1. Why were both Socrates and Jesus killed?
2. Why was it dangerous to play the piano in China in 1966?
3. Why was Edward Colston’s statue thrown into Bristol Docks in 2020?
I offer the following as partial answers:
1. Socrates and Jesus were both killed because they did not fit the national curriculum (agreed social norms) of their time – they refused to stop asking difficult questions that undermined the dominant powers of their day.
2. It was dangerous to play piano in China in 1966 because it didn’t fit the national curriculum (agreed social norms) of the day during the cultural revolution – piano was classified as a ‘bourgeois’ instrument and Red Guards could beat you with impunity if you played.
3. Edward Colston’s statue was thrown into Bristol Docks because a man who fitted the national curriculum (agreed social norms) of his day and who was celebrated as being ‘virtuous and wise’ in his own time is now considered barbarous and cruel by a significant group of people
National curricula exist even when they are not written down. People have been prepared to kill and die in order to defend them. Whilst it is difficult to imagine anyone feeling this passionate about our National Curriculum it nevertheless underpins the structures and norms of our society – which is why it’s so important and is also why it must change over time as society changes.
The published National Curriculum is the intended curriculum but it is only one stage of a process in teaching our national priorities, knowledge and skills to our children and young people. How this is interpreted and delivered by teachers in schools is the implemented curriculum and is equally important – but the subject of a blog for a different day.
There are four aims of the intended National Curriculum:
‘Personal empowerment’ – helping people to think critically about and change the world.
‘Cultural transmission’ – ‘to pass on the best that has been thought and known in the world’
‘Preparation for democratic citizenship’, and
‘Preparation for work’
These four aims can and often do conflict with each other. For example, producing people who want to change the world and know how to do it, could be at odds with preparing people for work where the acquisition of skills may be the over-riding consideration.
Also, the idea of passing on what is best from the past depends on who is selecting what is best. Black Lives Matter protests have stimulated debate about the National Curriculum and whether it places a proper emphasis on BAME, women’s and working class issues, achievements and characters as well as whether it tells a truthful story of the strengths and failings of the British Empire.
Another term to introduce here is the Hidden Curriculum which consists of the unintended messages that students pick up through attending school which can be very negative for groups excluded from the story told by the National Curriculum. It must be ensured that more is done to better reflect our multi-cultural society and provide a positive reflection of the contributions made by members of the BAME and working class community and other disadvantaged groups.
The National Curriculum has many strengths. It is broad and balanced, covering many different subjects, and well-integrated vertically to provide sequenced learning that develops cumulative knowledge and skills for future learning. It is is not the fault of the National Curriculum that some schools choose to narrow this breadth in its implementation to gain a perceived advantage in accountability measures.
I am a fan of the structure of the National Curriculum, but there is no such thing as a perfect curriculum. The National Curriculum does have weaknesses in meeting the needs of today’s children and young people and preparing them for successful futures. There is too much of a gap between the intended and implemented curriculum. This is particularly apparent in the teaching of 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving. These are supposed to be delivered within each subject but in practice are neglected or delivered haphazardly across the curriculum.
When I asked a friend who runs his own company what the weaknesses of school leavers were he replied:
“Young people need better problem solving skills. To think for themselves and be able to apply their knowledge to a given challenge. We tend to find that young people also lack drive, grit, determination to push through (but often kids from disadvantaged backgrounds have buckets of this!). Whilst their skills are often good in one area, they tend to lack context or proportion. This is because education is in vertical silos and not horizontal. With digitisation, skills need to adapt many times during a person’s career and we need to also teach young people the skill of life-long learning”
This is damning of the National Curriculum: the abandonment of Mick Water’s ‘Big Curriculum Picture’ 10 years ago, with its introduction of well-defined Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills, was a missed opportunity. Expecting these skills to be delivered across the curriculum makes it the job of all and the responsibility of none. To begin to remedy this, the skills needed by students in the 21st century should be defined and explicitly added to the National Curriculum in each of the subject areas.
It feels as if we are living at a time of pivotal change for society. In my opinion, the current health emergency masks a more long-term and fundamental issue we face in the progressive destruction of our natural environment. This damage has become widely recognised across society in the past 5 to 10 years and will shape the future of all our young people and yet it is referenced only in passing within the National Curriculum. Explicit references to environmental sustainability also need to be entered into all subject descriptions to provide a wholistic and consistent approach to environmental protection.
In summary:
A formalised National Curriculum is fundamental to a cohesive and equitable society. The intended National Curriculum has many strengths, however, some of these are undermined in its implementation. Finally, all curricula must change over time:
1. My first change would be to introduce content that better reflects our multi-cultural and diverse society.
2. My second change would be to formalise the skills that students need to be successful in the 21st century and add these explicitly to the National Curriculum
3. My final change would be to introduce explicit reference to environmental sustainability into all subject descriptions within the National Curriculum.
What do you think?
