“Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.” Albert Camus
There’s already been some pretty scathing reactions to the master plan to introduce a common curriculum and assessment system into UK schools Dame Sally Coates lays out in Schools Week. Carl Hendrick describes her ideas as a dystopian nightmare and Pedro De Bruyckere sees it as a surefire way to turn education into the caricature that Ken Robinson paints it.
But is there any merit in her ideas? Some gold we can pan for? Well, maybe. Coates says she wants to liberate teachers “from the pressures of curriculum planning” so they “could focus on perfecting delivery in the classroom”. And let’s face it, the current hodgepodge of schools doing whatever the hell they want (whether they want to or not) is hardly a way of ensuring the best education for our children. As Dame Sally says, “I find it incredible that schools are grappling with their own solutions to recent curriculum and assessment reform. What I see is a patchwork of alternatives, some of which are inferior versions of the previous system.” Anyone who’s seen some of the more outlandish ideas being implemented by some schools will share these concerns.
Most of the critique is focussing on the idea that in schools across the land children will be following exactly the same lessons at exactly the same time from a centrally dictated curriculum organised by a panel of experts. I’m not sure how much of this is what she actually thinks and how much is the product of over-excited reportage. It certainly appears to be true that she wants a new National Curriculum to mandate content but how could that ever result in children learning in identical ways? Even if we did decide to do all she urges the only way we could ever have teachers teaching exactly the same lesson at exactly the same time is if we didn’t give a toss about whether children were learning. It seems unlikely that even the most draconian , the most doctrinaire of policy wonks could ever make such a blunder… Doesn’t it?
But what of her plan for a logical, sequential curriculum where children “would study the same content and their success in grasping this content would be tracked. It would set out the exact content that students would cover in each subject and the exact order in which they would cover it.” This seems more sensible and workable. But why? What are the reasons beyond the ability to track progress?
Coates’ reasons appear to be these:
- Social mobility would be improved
- Teacher workload would be reduced
- Uniformity would unleash creativity
The first is by far the most persuasive. The national agenda for school improvement is currently all about ‘closing the gap’ caused by social and economic disadvantage. The least advantaged children need to be given the opportunities and experiences of the most advantaged and, hey presto, the gap will close. All children will achieve the same high results and all will go on to careers in law, medicine, engineering and museum curation. Except there are a few problems with this narrative, aren’t there? First, if social mobility leads to some people rising through the social strata, others will have to make way as there isn’t an unlimited supply of or demand for top grades, university places or jobs. Some children will have to be downwardly mobile. But which children? Will the sharp-elbowed middle-classes ever allow that we create a meritocracy in which their kids risk being at the bottom of the heap? And, unless we drastically change our views about economic migrants, we will have engineered a utopia with no plumbers, retail assistants, window cleaners or bus drivers. These things have value; we need them. But if everyone is educated into sneering at such worthy work as beneath them, then what? The other unacknowledged problem with the closing the gap narrative, is that there will always be a normal distribution of ability. We can work on moving the bell curve to the right, but we can’t defy it utterly. As long as intelligence and every other human characteristic is normally distributed in a population we have to accept that there will always be a gap. And the unfashionable, inconvenient truth is that these differences are caused as much by genetic heritability as they are by environmental shaping. By having an identical curriculum for all, maybe we could seek to hold back the advantaged and create a system in which merit is recognised, but it won’t be the shiny, comforting Happyland it’s often painted.
Reducing teacher workload is a small, meaner aim in comparison, but all the more achievable for that. If there’s a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention then workload must be tackled – there’s no point sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, “La la la long summer holidays! I can’t hear you!” This is not an issue that’s going to go away. The expectation that teachers ought to sacrifice every evening and weekend in order to be competent at their job is immoral. I’ve argued before that the role of school leadership is to strip out every extraneous demand on teachers except that they teach as well as they can. The question is, is the demand for planning extraneous? I see lesson planning as a straightjacket leading to more mediocre teaching – understanding how to design sequences of lessons – to have insight into planning a curriculum – is liberating. Yes, it’s hard work, but so is much that is valuable. The may be areas of the curriculum which lend themselves to centrally organised structures: maybe subjects like science, maths and grammar could benefit from being sequenced logically by boffins, but to do the same thing to humanities curricula will never be uncontroversial. The narrowing of choice enforced by examination boards already dictates that only some history and some literature is studied in schools and the pressures of accountability reduce this choice further to the content considered easiest rather than best. If I were in charge, say, of determining which literary texts must be studied I would, of course, be a thoroughly benign dictator. Sadly though, few are as clear-sighted and altruistic as I.
And finally, does uniformity reduce creativity? This is very much an examined assertion within the context of Dame Sally’s think piece, so let’s have a look at it. Superficially, uniformity is the opposite of creativity, but Sally goes on to say, “A common curriculum would encourage teachers, school groups and publishers to generate supplementary resources and expertise, safe in the knowledge that all schools would be following the new curriculum for years to come.” Does she mean that safety unleashes creativity? Or perhaps that comfort and ease unleash creativity? I’m pretty sure they don’t. Our history most often appears to one of innovation through threat which necessity being the mother of invention. We’re driven to create new systems because the old ones aren’t up to snuff. Maybe instead she’s talking about the idea I’ve written about here that creativity is forced through constraints? If you give someone, anyone, a constraint, they are driven to overcome it and fight a way through. Possibly there’s an anarchic heart at the centre of this plan which secretly intends uniformity to be a constraint which teachers will seek to overthrow and subvert? I’d like to believe this, but being the sceptic I am, I doubt that’s the hope.
I completely understand the worries and concerns Dame Sally articulates about the freedoms schools have been given. Freedom always has consequences and some of these can be brutal. When Lincoln emancipated black American slaves many starved and suffered, but no one would now seriously argue that this means slavery was a good thing or that freedom is a curse.Coates says that she takes “the view that government should only do for schools those things that schools can’t do better for themselves, and nothing passes this rule better than the design of curriculum and assessment.” Does it though? We can rail against the bumbling incompetence of the way in which National Curriculum levels were abolished but we must remember that this centrally imposed, common assessment framework was abolished because it had been misused and perverted. Mandating a centrally imposed curriculum still has to run the gauntlet of interpretation and bias which every single teacher in every single school will bring to bear.
Freedom may not turn out to be nearly as much fun as we might want or have expected, but it’s good for us. As Dylan Wiliam has written,
Developing an assessment system will be challenging, to be sure, but … schools now have an opportunity to develop assessment systems that fit their curriculums, rather than trying to shoehorn their curriculum to fit a predetermined assessment system. And because every school’s curriculum is different, the best assessment system for one school may be useless for another. Ultimately, each school will need to find an assessment system that meets its needs.
Teaching will only ever be a mature profession when we stop trying to dumb down the task expected of teachers. Less paperwork and data analysis, more curriculum and assessment design would be a healthy start. The trick, is there is a trick to it, is intelligent accountability: give schools freedom to make whatever decisions they feel fit and then hold them to account for the consequences of those decisions.
Another argument against “the social mobility argument” is that it is essentially neo Thatcherite in other words it collapses society and culture. As Bernstein said and is oft quoted what we learn in school probably has little correlation with what happens in society. The ability of the middle classes to buy houses near good schools, pay for tuition and leverage contacts would render any argument for standardised curriculum meaningless. A standardised curriculum would just reflect existing unfairness.
Secondly if you take your argument of the natural distribution of intelligence, which I don’t necessarily totally agree with, but anyway, and apply it to teachers then you would almost certainly not be able to offer standardised teaching because teachers have different abilities even if you have a standardised curriculum. Teachers have different abilities to bring that learning into being (if you will).
The consequence of it would be that teaching would become ever more standardised and would, I suggest put people off the profession. It would also naturally select a certain type of person who wants to do it even more than it is already. In fact the consequence of the diminished discourse of teaching facilitates this kind of argument and the Dame Sally persona in education
The rest I agree with. It would lead to bored teachers and a layer of bureaucracy that would diminish innovation and creativity.
Agree totally with your last point that a restless conversation about “curriculum and assessment design” is what is required. As you allude this is all about assessment and accountability and nothing about teaching and learning. Classic weighing the pig and not fattening it.
I’m fascinated that you ‘don’t necessarily” agree with the existence of a noraml distribution of intelligence. Can you explain your grounds?
I’m a bit cautious about appearing to agree with some of the associated arguments particularly about IQ and heritable intelligence etc.
You’ve written an important blog it would be a shame to undermine the comments with an argument about that.
My concern is that Dame Sally’s views are shared by a legion of SLT that prospered under the old OFSTED, are less interested in teaching and learning and more interested in bureaucracy and data.
As a primary school teacher I find this a rather strange concept. How far do we go with the model? IMHO, teaching the same thing at the same time has nothing to do with creativity being stifled, it just means that real needs are ignored in favour of marching on. “And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Unless of course I have the complete wrong end of the stick! It’s been known to happen when I venture into KS3/4 territory:-)
Sorry – I can’t tell if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with the points I raise. Just to be clear, I see “marching on” in the face of unmet needs as a bad idea.
I agree with you. Your final point in the blog says it all. It’s not one size fits all.
The problem is that the three areas Dame Coates proposes to improve with the Common Core (coming from America) woll not be improved as they are neighbouring issues:
1.While private schools continue to teach separately; the gap will not only remain but widen. While we have selection social mobility will fail – it’s the wrong solution to the problem.
2. Teachers do not complain about preparing their own resources; in fact this is the bit they enjoy. Teachers complain of the admin required to prove they are doing the job properly and that there is not enough non contact time – it’s not just the wrong solution it’s the wrong problem.
3. Uniformity unleashes creativity – well that’s just an ideological argument for the knowledge base curriculum. I have seen no evidence of that in an education system yet….
What terrifies me is that point 3 could lead to a system which sought to provide a uniformly anti-knowledge curriculum. It’s not like that hasn’t been tried before, and pretty recently too. (See Mick Water’s 2007 NC)
Uniform anything tends to be led by personal preference/ideology – this is why standardising a whole country via micro management should be resisted.
I think we can agree on that.
[…] 3. Should-we-learn-to-love-our-shackles […]
I think the problem with this debate is the words we use – particularly “curriculum”.
The real debate centres on the difference between *what* we should teach (this is how I would use the word “curriculum”) and *how* we should teach it (pedagogy). But most people seem to use “curriculum” to refer in a rather unspecific way to “what schools do”.
If you use “curriculum” to refer to an aggregation of learning objectives, then *why* is (in Dylan Wiliam’s words) “every school’s curriculum different”? And the idea that schools shoehorn their curricula to fit a particular assessment system ignores the fact that any assessment already assumes a particular learning objective – otherwise, what is being assessed?
What is happening in the situation Dylan Wiliam describes is that an assessment designed for one set of learning objectives is being “shoehorned” into assessing a different set of learning objectives. One response is to say that schools should do everything (curriculum, assessment and teaching) – but how do you then hold schools to account for doing things well, when everyone is doing different things?
If you assume that “curriculum” means vaguely “what schools do”, then of course schools should “shoehorn” what they do to the assessment, which encapsulates the learning objective.
The merit of Dame Sally’s intervention, in my view, is that it addresses this confusion of language which muddles up all sorts of different functions. The demerit is that it proposes centralised, bureaucratic controls. So in overall tone, I agree with you – its good in parts.
My response is at http://edtechnow.net/2015/09/12/setting-the-curriculum/. Thanks.
Really interesting post, thanks.
One of my main objections with the idea of a uniform curriculum is that (A) like you say, it potentially dumbs down teaching, and (B) would seem to hinder the ability for schools to provide an education system that is tailored to the economic and cultural nature of their community? The teachers I have worked with, have wanted to be engaged in the educational enterprise as a whole, not just delivery vehicles for subject knowledge. I’m sure all teachers would be happy to do less work, but by removing engagement from the curriculum – other than teaching – away from the profession? What next? The standardisation of the supplementary resources? Essay questions? Homework assignments? Google Education marking everything online? Wouldn’t a better way to reduce teachers’ workload be to cut contact hours and unnecessary admin?
If the aim is to promote equality of opportunity, I’m not sure how standardising lessons going to redress the fact that (A) schools have wildly different budgets, resources, and links to education and society beyond the school gates, and (B) that opportunity to engage in the different levels of education is largely determined by family income and geographical location? Is there also perhaps a danger or reducing equality in the way that a less flexible system, may disadvantage less able children?
The whole idea around creativity seems quite difficult to unpick. Specifically, how would this actually translate to fostering children’s creativity? Perhaps constraints would promote creativity in teaching, but at the same time, I would have thought that the lack of flexibility for a teacher to use their own experience and knowledge, would go some way in reducing teaching creativity? Or is that where the creativity would come in? The whole idea of more creative teaching sounds great, but at the expense of a uniform / less creative curriculum?
I’d be up for a proper national curriculum; one that is designed and sequenced by boffins, with all the planning laid out and national textbooks to be followed. God I spend so much time planning (and submitting detailed planning) for god-knows-how-many different subjects (I keep trying to count). It just seems to ridiculously inefficient. The taxpayer is really getting fleeced here.
Perhaps under this proposed system teachers could apply to overwrite planning for certain subjects, if they were experts (proper experts, not BEds) in certain subjects and could justify that they could provide a richer experience for children. I would apply for music, for example, but all those primary teachers who seriously think that all mathematical knowledge should be ‘discovered’ would be told to jog on.
As I have said before, this kind of system would benefit from national, yearly, computerised tests. In upper KS2 you despair that you have so many children who are developmentally behind and you’re forced to differentiate all the way down to reception curriculum in some cases. You might as well teach the whole bloody school. I really think it would be more efficient for a child who is a year behind to remain in a lower year group, rather than have the class teacher spend all her time trying to create bespoke worksheets and also spending most of the classroom time sat with said child helping them with their work.
If we can trust that said boffins were immune to ideological values then we’d be laughing. History suggests this is unlikely. What if discovery exponents were not told to jog on but encouraged in their enthusiasms?
I was thinking the same thing when I wrote the comment!
Gosh, how awful would it be for a traditional teacher such as myself to have to not-teach maths, or to be forbidden from teaching children any knowledge whatsoever via a hollowed-out, skills-based topic. Many primary schools do use highly prescriptive curricula that enforces group-work, lots of talk….anything but some contemplative writing really. I myself have surreptitiously declined to ‘tell children that ‘frog method’ (counting on) is a far better method to use than column subtraction’ (example of maths script).
I also have a niggling worry now that Corbyn will end up as prime minister and then he will somehow wreck havoc in my classroom by dumbing-down the curriculum and forcing me to use progressive methods.
David,
This post is quite pertinent to me at a time that I am being shackled by my employer over choice of exam board, content (they want to ban ‘Blood Brothers’ because it’s too ‘corrupting’ for Year 9 students, for example, and wanted to discipline me for putting out an article that contained the word ‘F**k’ (complete with asterisks)) and the amount of planning expected.
I have moved from a KS3 role where I was given free rein to develop teacher-workload-friendly marking policies, innovative schemes of work that allowed teachers freedom to express and cross-curricular links to a HoD post where I have to write detailed 24-lesson mid-term plans, complete with scheduled assessments, scheduled marking (in addition to the requirement that EVERYTHING is marked in detail, with at least three sentences to explain the marking) and clearly defined subject matter to avoid the aforementioned corruption.
I’m just over two terms into the role and I already want to leave, but I know I can’t as I need some results behind me before I go.
Shackles are making good teachers hate their job, and I wish employers knew that.
I feel your pain. You appear to have found yourself in a very poorly run school and my advice would to leave as soon as possible and not wait for results. If you find a sensibly run school they will understand the pressures that have forced the move.
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