The DfE’s vision for education post 2014 is not what’s best for children, so teachers must take the battle for 21st century learning underground, says Jonathan Lear...
To be fair to Mr Gove, planning a new curriculum is a tough job. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that he turned to the American academic E.D. Hirsch for a bit of help. If you’ve not come across Hirsch before, he’s famous for something called the Core Knowledge Foundation and has published a series of books that contain the essential information that should be taught in each school year group. To save you the trouble of looking it up, you need only look to our very own National Curriculum, which shares aspects of Hirsch’s philosophy and a healthy amount of his content, to see how this works in practice.
If there were some means of plotting levels of anxiety in primary schools across the country, there would have been a noticeable spike in June 2012 when the draft NC document was released. As the person responsible for curriculum development in my school, I was eager to get my hands on it as soon as possible to see exactly what a 21st century curriculum would look like. As I pored through the 221 pages containing the reams of knowledge we would need to impart to our eager children, I couldn’t help but think there’d been some mistake. The document seemed to belong to a bygone era.
Following the draft proposal (high anxiety) and consultation period (continued high anxiety, tinged with optimism), the cycle of emotion was completed with the publication of the finished document in September (high anxiety coupled with despair). As a school in the process of conversion to voluntary academy status, there was the slight hope that we could at least develop our own curriculum, on the proviso that it be both ‘broad and balanced’. However, even for schools in this position, if we were to go completely our own way, whatever we produced would need to compare favourably with the new national document in terms of rigour and content.
In lots of ways, it felt like we were being taken back to square one – a curriculum centred on the teacher as the font of all knowledge, and the children as empty vessels. It seemed a crushing blow to the sophisticated and nuanced blend of teaching and learning that lots of primary schools have developed. Depressingly, the new curriculum seems to typify the state of the education system in this country, a system that continues to address today’s problems with yesterday’s thinking.
Arise, Sir Ken
As I was wallowing in my desperate and anxious state, I came across a clip of Sir Ken Robinson that revealed a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. He was talking about what response you’d get if you asked a child what the education system was. He suggested that he or she would say that it was his or her teachers and school. This is such a simple thought, but also incredibly empowering. If we’re the education system (and young children are nearly always right), then we’re the ones that hold the power, and if we don’t like what we’re given, then it’s up to us to bend, twist, and shape it into something we do.
It may be a sad reflection on the way things are, but if we truly want an education system fit for the 21st century, we’ll have to go guerrilla – take the fight underground, and continue to do the best for our children in spite of constraints from above.
In the not too distant past, I seem to remember stumbling across an old DfE memo that was circulated to policy makers. It suggested that the key to a really good educational document was the inclusion of phases. Apparently, the content of these phases was largely irrelevant, as teachers wouldn’t have time to read the small print, but what was essential was that we knew what phase we were in. Now whilst I wouldn’t claim to possess the combined intellect of an entire think tank, it would seem foolish to ignore this well thought out advice. So, in keeping with tradition, here goes…
It would be unhelpful to criticise the National Curriculum for not meeting the needs of 21st century learners if we didn’t have a clear idea about we want for our children. This is the key question in any form of curriculum development and, to help frame the responses, our staff thought in terms of the Knowledge, Skills and Attributes we’d want our children to have. This is a brilliant activity to do with the whole staff which, perhaps predictably, throws up quite a range of ideas across the three areas. Common responses include wanting children who are: literate and numerate, good communicators, respectful, honest, resilient, creative, curious, and empathetic. The overriding message, however, is that all three are essential if we are to develop a truly
balanced curriculum.
In moving from a discussion around these areas to something more concrete, we used the Personal Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS) as a starting point (tinyurl.com/m8bc5nj). This skills framework was initially part of the KS3/4 curriculum, and contained six areas:
Whilst identifying core and key skills is relatively easy, organising these into a coherent curriculum can be a real headache. In the past, we’ve manage to shoehorn curriculum units into our crowded timetables by alternating between certain subjects each half term. History might be autumn 1, followed by geography in autumn 2, then back to history and so on. The QCA helpfully provided units that fitted this model, ensuring that there were at least three units for any given subject across each year group. If we’re honest, I don’t think any school or teacher would say this model worked well. Spreading ourselves thinly is never going to lead to consistently high quality learning outcomes, so rather than attempting to fit everything in, perhaps our aim should be to cut things down.
Although this could be considered a risk, if I was offered three rushed history units with little depth, or one immersive history unit that genuinely deepened the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding, I know which one I’d go for.
The realisation that less really is more led to the division of the year into three broad themes: Discover, Explore and Create.
Discover is the theme for the autumn term, and is the history focus for the year (the only term in which history is taught). Explore is the theme for the spring term, and is geography focused, and Create is the theme for the summer term, and is arts focused.
With the core skills at the heart of the curriculum, the remaining key skills were then mapped across the year. With each theme, teachers would focus on developing learning opportunities that are designed to explicitly develop the key skills alongside the subject content. This is deliberately slimmed down, and whilst you could argue that all of the skills are relevant all of the time, from a planning perspective, again, less is more. Here is how the skills are divided:
Discover
Plan and research
Analyse and evaluate
Show empathy
Show a commitment to justice
Explore issues, events and problems from different perspectives
Support conclusions using reasoned arguments and evidence
Communicate their learning in relevant ways
Explore
Recognise that they can impact their environment and community
Show a commitment to justice
Recognise their roles as global citizens
Communicate their learning in relevant ways
Show empathy
Create
Show flexibility
Organise time and resources
Communicate their learning in relevant ways
Work towards a goal
Adapt ideas as circumstances change
With core and key skills organised, it was time to take a look at the curriculum content. In deciding how the different elements of the curriculum would fit together, I settled on a topic-based approach. Using bold, generative titles, I set about creating topic names that would allow teachers the flexibility to interpret them in different ways.
In year 5, we moved away from the Tudors and named the Discover topic ‘Rich and Poor’. As a result, if you desperately want to stick to the strict historical chronology of the National Curriculum, you can. If not, there’s no reason why you can’t teach a broad chronology within one topic.
Instead of focusing on the Tudors, we could investigate inequality across a range of periods in history. One of the big questions that could be explored in this topic could be around when the concept of rich and poor began. This could then be traced through two or three different time periods within the same unit, giving the children a wider appreciation of the impact of inequality on different groups of people.
Other topics were given the same broad treatment, and when the outlines for Discover, Explore and Create were complete, science and the foundation subjects were then added to the framework in order to make the most of links and connections across the curriculum. Science was a common thread through all the terms, and was planned as either a linked or discrete unit. Other subjects were then placed into the term where they would be explicitly taught.
The result of the less is more approach means that most subjects will only be taught in one term throughout the year. In planning the topics, however, there are obvious opportunities that present themselves to include elements of these subjects as enhancements. In Y1, for example, the only dedicated art unit is on sculpture during the Create term, but a range of other art skills could easily be used and developed as enhancements during their history work in Discover, or when exploring different communities in Explore.
Next time…
In the next issue, we’ll take a look at using the BRAVE planning tool to develop the topics for Discover, Explore and Create. We’ll also look at the development of subject skills progression grids to complement the content of the National Curriculum.
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