The National Curriculum: what’s the point of it all?

 Michael J Reiss and John White

After Michael Gove’s announcement last week that English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBCs) have been abandoned and that GCSEs will carry on, some might assume that the debate about the school curriculum has, temporarily at least, gone away. This is not the case. On the same day that the Secretary of State announced his “climb down”, the DFE published its draft National Curriculum.

There is much one could say about these documents. Here, though, we focus on just one issue – the dismal lack of attention paid to the aims of the National Curriculum. In the 221 page document on the draft programmes of study for KS1-3 (PDF), each subject has its own specific aims but here is all that is said about the overarching aims of the National Curriculum:

3.1 The National Curriculum provides pupils with an introduction to the core knowledge that they need to be educated citizens. It introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.

3.2 The National Curriculum is just one element in the education of every child. There is time and space in the school day and in each week, term and year to range beyond the National Curriculum specifications. The National Curriculum provides an outline of core knowledge around which teachers can develop exciting and stimulating lessons.

“The best that has been thought and said” is a phrase from Matthew Arnold’s 1869 book Culture and Anarchy and Arnold would have recognised much that is in the new draft curriculum. The division into a litany of separate subjects – most of which were familiar to Arnold – shows how subjects remain the starting point for curriculum development, with the overarching aims tagged on as an afterthought.

But there is another way. After all, why should one start with subjects? Isn’t it not only more logical but also more sensible to start with the aims of schooling and from them derive a curriculum?

This is the approach the two of us have taken with our new book An Aims-based Curriculum – The Significance of Human Flourishing for Schools, published this week. We begin with overarching aims that will equip each learner to lead a personally fulfilling life and help others do so too. From these, we derive more specific aims covering the personal qualities, skills and understanding needed for a life of personal, civic and vocational well-being. The second half of the book, on political realities of implementation, takes this process of deriving aims further. Some of its detailed aims, but by no means all, overlap with conventional curriculum objectives. We also look at the role of the state in curriculum decisions, as well as the implications of the book’s central argument that aims should be the starting point for student choice, school ethos, assessment, inspection and teacher education.

Some might think that there is no need to bother with such considerations. Teachers can just get on and teach their subjects. In our view this is a deeply mistaken view. Thankfully, many 5-16 year-olds enjoy their schooling and learn well. But many don’t – not least because much of what they are presented with seems pointless; it doesn’t connect with them as they trudge from one subject class to another. We argue that by starting with aims, schools can have a curriculum that will inspire learning and provide a stronger basis for future life than is typically provided by a subject-based curriculum.

An Aims-based Curriculum – The Significance of Human Flourishing for Schools, is published by IOE Press on 15 February 2013. If you would like an invitation to a seminar at the IOE on 30 April at which the book’s argument will be debated, please e-mail abc@ioe.ac.uk.

Do we need any exams at 16?

John White 

The EBacc controversy sparks a further question. Do we need any public exams at 16? With the school leaving age due to rise to 18 in 2015, why don’t we just have a graduation certificate at that age for everyone?

I can think of several related reasons for an EBacc at 16, but they are all problematic. It gives the curriculum leading up to this age a massive steer in a traditionally academic direction. It is an early identification of students likely to be of university potential. As such, it is attractive to families anxious to secure a professional future for their children. EBacc looks for all the world like a vehicle of selection, a poorly disguised descendant of the 11-plus.

Another dodgy reason for a 16-plus exam has to do with accountability. Results can be classified in league tables, so that we can see how well different schools are faring. But if the latter is our aim, it does not follow that the best means is public testing of students on a mass scale. A good inspection régime, based partly on school self-evaluation, might be part of the answer. In addition, how well a school is doing is a matter of how far it is meeting general educational aims – and these take us far beyond the limited objectives pertaining to testing a few subjects.

Perhaps what we want, though, is a nation-wide picture of how well schools are doing in teaching maths, say, or English. Here again, we would need a good argument for testing individuals en masse, rather than, for instance, revisiting and improving on the sampling techniques used by the Assessment of Performance Unit in the 1970s and 1980s.

Removing 16-plus hurdles would leave secondary schools space to create a more worthwhile experience for all their students. This would mean paying more attention to what their aims should be, then sculpting curricula that better reflected them, rather than making do just with traditional ready-mades.

If getting rid of 16-plus exams were still to leave exam pressures at 18, there would at least be less wasted time, less anxiety, less instrumentalism in learning. It would also turn the spotlight back to what a graduation certificate should look like. The 2004 Tomlinson Report was our last source of illumination on this. Its suggestion of a single diploma to replace GCSE, A levels and vocational qualifications is still our best practical guide ahead.

This will still leave, if not exacerbate, the scramble for university places at 18. This can cause great personal distress, as well as restricting schools’ curricular horizons. Here, too, we need a rethink. The idea that students should ideally go straight on to full-time university studies after leaving school may have made good sense two centuries ago, when many people died young. But with perhaps seventy or more years ahead of them, why the pressure to make them think it’s now or never? Do we need to promote incentives for later, not least part-time, studies?

For more on all this, see my 2010 commentary in The TES 

EBacc to the past

John White

EBacc is a throwback. It has been compared to O level, but its lineage is older. Its closer cousins are O level’s pre-1951 predecessors, the School Certificate and Matriculation. Unlike O levels, the School Certificate required passes in a range of subjects ­– drawn from the broad areas of English studies, languages, and mathematics/science. For Matriculation, which was a condition of university entrance, a higher level of pass was necessary across a range of School Certificate subjects, including Latin. My own School Certificate plus Matric, awarded in 1949, was based on good marks in English Language, English Literature, Mathematics, History, Geography, Latin, French and German. The absence of science apart, this was EBacc before its time.

The latter’s ancestry goes back to 1838, when London University set its first Matriculation exam. The 1858 revised regulations show an amazing similarity to EBacc’s. As we know, this requires good passes at GCSE (or whatever exam replaces it) in English, mathematics, history or geography, two sciences and an ancient or modern foreign language. The 1858 Matriculation requirements were almost identical, except that both history and geography were compulsory.

The original rationale for the London Matriculation exam was simple. London University (later UCL) was founded in 1826 as a radical alternative to Oxford and Cambridge, providing an intensive, general, four-year, lecture-based course covering nearly every branch of academic knowledge. The authorities had to ensure that acceptable candidates for the University and its affiliates came well-equipped in the rudiments of Latin, Greek, mathematics, natural philosophy and other subjects that they would be studying as undergraduates.

So EBacc’s ancestor had a well-founded rationale. Can the same be said of EBacc itself? I have not come across any. Michael Gove is keen on “a properly rounded academic education” as the basis for becoming author of one’s own life story. But that is a poor argument. The end may well be excellent, but the means are wanting. One needs all sorts of equipment for the autonomous life – personal qualities and practical skills, as well as forms of understanding that go far broader than a traditional academic diet. Why then single out just the latter?

In their recommendations for a framework for a new national curriculum, Gove’s Expert Panel came up with EBacc-favourable recommendations, which I have criticised before. Using the flakiest of epistemological arguments, it demoted Citizenship and Design and Technology as curriculum subjects, and shored up EBacc staples like history, geography and MFL. (Many of its best recommendations were rejected by ministers).

These are the only two arguments for the EBacc curriculum that I know – and pretty feeble they are, too. Have I missed anything?

In this piece, I haven’t tangled with wider objections to EBacc – that we don’t need an exam at 16, for instance, or that it is socially divisive. My focus has been only on its curriculum content.