The National Curriculum

It seems impossible to believe but until the late 1980s there was no legal requirement to teach anything except Religious Knowledge in UK schools. It changed when the National Curriculum for England and Wales was created in 1989 and for the first time in history a body of knowledge was written down and enshrined in law as an entitlement for every child. 

The National Curriculum is basically a good thing.
It means that every child in every school receives a broad and balanced education. It consists of three "Core Subjects" (English, Maths and Science), the remainder being "Foundation Subjects". There have been changes and additions since its creation but it has remained essentially unchanged.

There is good and bad in the curriculum itself and in the way it is tested and monitored and this page will tell you everything you need to know.

Read on below or go to next page previous page or see a film.

espite its importance, the National Curriculum website is amazingly difficult to find - it's not even in the first fifty results on Google! However, I've tracked it down and you can find it at http://www.nc.uk.net/. Select a Subject and a Key Stage or, if you want to know more, try the official description of the National Curriculum. 

Every subject, including ICT, has two parts:

  • Programme of Study
    This is a description of everything that must be taught
  • Attainment Targets
    These are a set of descriptions (called level descriptors) which describe what a child should be able to do at each level. The idea is that you read the descriptions and decide which one is the best fit for any given child. This is their level of attainment.

There are also support materials, guidance and links to resources.

For each subject you'll find the left hand pane contains the programme of study and the right hand pane varies depending on which tab you have selected at the top - either notes, the attainment target or suitable resources.

A balanced curriculum?
An obvious danger inherent in the structure of the National Curriculum was that the foundation subjects would become marginalised as attention focused on the core subjects and this has happened to some extent, especially since the proposed testing of every child in every subject was quickly realised to be impossible so only the core subjects are tested.

League tables
Secondly, the decision to publish test results in league tables put schools under immense - and some would say unfair - competition. Schools in leafy suburbs unsurprisingly get better results than schools in deprived inner city areas. This would be fine if the results just guided future funding and support but publishing them causes people to simply abandon schools that appear lower in the tables. Social mobility favours the rich and ao the gap between rich and poor grows. This is not a fault of the curriculum but of the decision to publish league tables.

Is the curriculum right for the 21st century?
Any curriculum is only good if its contents are relevant to the modern world. We feel comfortable with the National Curriculum because it's basically the same set of subjects that we followed at school. But there are those who argue that this set of discrete subjects is not the best curriculum for life in the 21st century. It was, after all, designed by the Victorians for the industrial age and there is some argument about its relevance. 

It is also a very academic curriculum. SATs and GCSEs largely measure whether you can remember things and reproduce them under examination conditions and it's open to question whether this is the best measure of a rounded education. Is the child who doesn't score highly in exams less of a human being than one who does? The present system certainly gives them that impression and may be part of the cause of much of the social unrest we see among young people today.

Raising standards
One of the problems of having a national curriculum and national tests is that it gives the government something to count and publish (tests) and a measure of accountability (league tables) so it forces schools to "teach to the test" or risk dropping in the tables. "Level 4 at Key Stage 2" or "5 good passes at GCSE" become the goals of education even though they don't suit every child.

The quest for improved standards tends to make the results more important than the children. So we see primary schools almost abandoning the curriculum to focus on the core subjects in the Spring term each year and anomalies such as an ICT course that is "worth" several GCSE passes. As a result, the rules change slightly each year so it's difficult to measure past results against present with any real accuracy - except to be sure that the government will do all it can to make sure the numbers move in what it considers to be the right direction.

Evolution of the National Curriculum
There were many teething troubles with the new curriculum. Science, for example, had seventeen attainment targets and each one contained dozens of topics to be taught and assessed. "Death by a million tick-boxes" became a common phrase as teachers struggled to implement an unwieldy curriculum. Lord Dearing was brought in to slim it down as teachers drew near to striking and the resultant slimmed down national curriculum was more realistic and remains in use, with a few tweaks, today.

Next page: Find out about ICT in the National Curriculum
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