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10Jan2012
New year musings on the new National Curriculum

Posted by Abigail Moss

In Blackheath, where I live, there is a rather lovely Christmas Eve custom that sees the one-way system closed off and vehicles halted to allow a candlelit procession through the village. There’s something rather wonderful about the roads being closed to make way for hundreds of children (and parents and other grown-ups... and a donkey too as it happens).

Maybe we should think of the Government’s decision to delay the implementation of a new National Curriculum by a year as something similar. An opportunity to close the roads for the sake of the children. Or as shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg suggested, an opportunity to enter a period of cross-party discussion on the best way forward.

Luckily, to aid collaborative discussion, the Government has published a considered, intelligent and thought-provoking paper by the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum Review. If you haven’t already, do read it here. There’s some excellent fodder for debate, including a recommendation to split the ‘juniors’ into lower (years 3 and 4) and upper (years 5 and 6) Key Stage 2 and to extend the number of GCSE years. It also suggests getting rid of the current system of subscribing levels, instead ensuring that children don’t fall behind by maximising the numbers who are ‘ready to progress’. If you work in education and would like to debate what all this means for literacy with staff in other schools or elsewhere, I hope you will join our network. If you are a parent, employer or other interested person tell us what you think below.

One thing perhaps everyone is agreed on – and which the expert panel has been wonderfully unapologetic about emphasising – is that teaching and learning in schools must increase the quality of all children’s oral language from 5 to 18 years (as well as during the earlier years) and across all subjects. This is because good language skills close attainment gaps between top and bottom and between rich and poor. They improve achievement across the board, underpin reading and, crucially for our children and for the economy, improve children’s writing.

The role of schools in helping parents to support their children doesn’t get much air-time in the report, and like personal, social and health education (PSHE) may have been outside its remit. This is unfortunate in both cases as both parental engagement and PSHE are inextricably linked to improvements in literacy because they have a huge impact on the attitudes, behaviours and values that determine skill levels.

Finally, just in case you missed it, have a look at Annex 2 of the report, Examples of curricula aims and objectives of high-performing jurisdictions. In Hong Kong apparently students are provided with seven learning goals: responsibility, national identity, habit of reading, language skills, learning skills, breadth of knowledge and healthy lifestyle. I’m a bit luke-warm on the second one, but I wouldn’t mind if my kids left school with the rest and maybe a few others to boot.