The covert curriculum

Hywel Roberts discusses the art of uncovering the covert curriculum...

I once did a twilight inset evening where the head introduced me and promptly left the room. I felt pretty vulnerable because my remit was to deliver an hour on creativity and that very word alone is enough to send some colleagues over the edge. In this session, a gentleman sitting right in front of me threw his pen onto the table and proclaimed, ‘Another buzzword!’

The pen hit the deck and ricocheted back up into the air and in my general direction. I dodged it in slow-motion-bullettime- Matrix-style, and went to pick it up as the 50 or so staff watched in embarrassed silence. I wanted to berate the colleague with, ‘Creativity is an essential part of the human condition and without it we are furniture, empty and wooden and devoid of humanity. Furniture shouldn’t be teaching children!’

Unfortunately I didn’t have the courage. I put the pen back on his table and resumed my talk, now with a rattled edge. Fortunately I’ve learned a lot since then. The thing is this: creativity is part of our teacher repertoire; it’s sitting there in our teacher kitbag, waiting to be applied appropriately and when needed. It’s also what Ofsted wants to see in good and outstanding lessons. When we talk about creativity, I understand the pen-thrower’s response, because the default is to start thinking in the realms of drama, dance and music and so on. We know that these artistic areas are absolutely the bread and butter of some colleagues – but for others, they are intimidating and to be avoided. What we need to do is

unlearn this view of subjects as discrete entities and see them more with blurred edges melting into one another; or even better, find the curriculum within the work we are already doing. Try these for size. Where is the curriculum (literacy, numeracy and all the rest) in the following ideas?

• Travel
• International rescue
• Snow
• The sea
• Time machine

As you read this little list, your professional repertoire kicks in and you get rummaging in your kitbag. Guess what? That’s you being creative. If the Secretary of State for Education announced tomorrow that all the EYFS, KS1 and KS2 curriculum had to be delivered through the lens of ‘travel’, after the initial handwringing, we’d buckle down and find that, actually, it would be dead easy to do. We’d tip our hats to the great bubble of expectation we operate within (Government, Ofsted, Parents, Governance, Leadership) and navigate our way through the new focus, placing our children at the centre of our planning, thinking about our classrooms, our displays and the potential learning adventures our children could enjoy. We’d also make sure we covered the curriculum as set out by the Government because that’s what we’re paid to do.

How we do that is up to us. Think about where in the following situations you see the potential curriculum for the children you work with every day. Get a brew, and stretch your professionally creative muscles:

• If we are going to build a spacecraft to travel beyond our solar system, what’s the first thing we should do?
• How can we, as a class, sitting in a classroom, in the middle of our town, help those in other countries who are suffering famine?
• What shall we say to the old man who needs to be moved from his house as it has become unsafe?
• What rules do we need if we are going to rescue a beached whale?
• What do we need to say to the Mayor to encourage him to pay the Pied Piper?

There are no single answers to the task I’ve set you, so long as you’ve uncovered the curriculum you need to cover. This is where creativity and coverage collide. As primary colleagues, we need to ensure there is balance between these two entities and that the integrity of great learning never loses out to shallow, unchallenging task-work lazily labelled as creative.

So please dance in science, sing in literacy, role-play in numeracy, nod at the bubble of expectation, stay true to the integrity of the learning, soundtrack the beach, paint the planet, cover the coverage and give way to the covert curriculum that your children reveal to you.