Last Friday the BBC reported on a leaked government paper about the revisions to the curriculum in England. The BBC begins ...
A draft copy of the new secondary curriculum for England, leaked to the Times Educational Supplement (TES), has drawn criticism from subject experts. The draft document, also seen by BBC News, is just 30 pages long. The leaked draft appears to confirm ministers' plans to give teachers more freedom over what they teach, providing them with only short lists of topics.
This has provoked criticism from all sides as the TES and BBC note.
I was particularly struck by what Mary James had to say. Here's the TES ...
Professor Mary James, who was part of the government's national curriculum expert panel, was broadly supportive of the slimmed-down curriculum, saying that she hoped teachers would "rise to the challenge" to develop relevant lessons. But she described the decision to copy its aims from those set out in the draft primary curriculum published before the summer as a "mistake". "The fact that, in this draft, the primary aims are simply borrowed suggests that insufficient thought has been given to these," Professor James said. "They should not be mere decoration. Any choice of curriculum content should be driven by a clear view of what purposes (educational, cultural, social, economic) the curriculum is expected to serve."
Well, quite – a point that I, and countless others, have made endlessly. My last comment on aims was this:
Deciding what to teach implies choosing – but who is to choose, and how, and what is to guide choice? Curriculum is concerned with how we think about the social purposes of education, and always involves a selecting from culture (Lawton) – and hence is political, contested and labile. Methodology is to method as curriculum is to what is taught – a conceptual frame that guides (and restricts) choice.
High-level aim statements can provide such a conceptual frame – and the 5 aims set out by the expert panel are examples of this. Having aims such as the expert panel’s 5th one: to promote understanding of sustainability in the stewardship of resources locally, nationally and globally, confers three possible benefits:
- for those who are already convinced, they serve as extra validation;
- for the uncertain, they provide permission; and
- for the unaware, they are an alert
It remains to be seen what Mr Gove and his advisors make of all this.
Well, now we know: not very much. This looks like an end to the end of promoting understanding of sustainability in the stewardship of resources locally, nationally and globally. This is not merely disappointing. It looks like a crass failure to recognise the century we are living in, and the problems our children's children will inherit. Not so much a shame, as shameful.
But is this really a lack of vision and understanding on Gove's part? Or is it something much more prosaic? Is it a desire to avoid the primary legislation and scrutiny that a set of Aims would need? Heaven forfend that Parliament should be troubled by such frivolity.
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