Take on the curriculum

This is my take on the proposed National Curriculum for England and the manner in which it has been revised. I should first outline my views on the purpose and best conditions for education, since these are the basis on which any curriculum is built.

I believe that the purpose of education is to nurture gentle healthy people with great capacities for learning so that they can contribute to global wellbeing at a time of immense crisis. I do not believe that education’s purpose is to turn out model employees to serve unsustainable industries so that our nation can compete in the ‘global race’. I believe that knowledge cannot be administered like medicine: it can only be formed by willing learners through their own practice and reflection, and the knowledge is transformed by learners through that process. Because of this, I challenge the premise of most debate about ‘what should be on the curriculum’ and ‘what should be taught’ because it assumes that knowledge can be delivered.

Based on a good deal of reflection and experience, I believe that the schools which best achieve this purpose of nurturing whole people support self-managed education or progress towards taking greater responsibility for learning over time. I’ve seen that young people have a strong instinct for what kinds of activities, questions and environments are most likely to help them learn and thrive. Self-managed learners tend to choose:

• open-ended exploration (often outdoors)
• interdisciplinarity
• hands-on making and creativity
• multimodality (not just text but visual, aural, sensory and mixed modes of communication especially those made possible with digital tools)
• emotional expressiveness and practicing social skills
• vigorous exercise combined with rest when it’s needed
• stories and word play 
• contemporary topics relevant to their lives and communities
• learning through enquiries that go beyond just simple questions, testing and stretching through practical and creative research
• finding shortcuts to get timely information, and constructing knowledge by reflection and practical application over a long time
• learning from peers or adults with whom they feel most relaxed
• immersion to master particular skills, especially those perceived to meet strong personal or local needs 

All of these choices serve them very well if they are also well supported by adults and peers who have more mastery than themselves, are exposed to diverse perspectives and have good access to resources. An example of successful self-managed learning is the Hellerup school in Denmark where students set their own projects each week and are free to use resources inside and beyond the school.

Many teachers even in traditional schools in England endorse some of the factors of effective learning listed above, although it has become increasingly difficult to give adequate time to them. However, the reforms in England are going in the opposite direction to this model.

You might say I’m not a valid commentator on a National Curriculum if I don’t strongly believe in nationalistic purposes for education and if I believe that learners should design their own learning. Given that even the validity of senior educationalists is being questioned, I may as well say my own piece. I do still believe in the state-funding of comprehensive schools. I think that schools across a nation or region benefit from a deliberatively constructed statement across about what constitutes an optimum education. You might not call that a National Curriculum but perhaps that’s what we should ask it to be.

Gove’s proposed curriculum has not been arrived at deliberatively.

I’m arguing it should be deliberated with learners but he hasn’t even consulted teachers. He has only listened to the most conservative voices. Gove with his attack dogs has answered criticisms of the new Curriculum by:
a) saying ‘look, some of the good things we’re influenced by are from lefties like you (so don’t say we haven’t listened or given you what you want) and also justifying his policies as being inclusive of all children in the great push for an ‘aspiration nation’ and, on the other hand,
b) homogenising and demonising the entire diverse education profession as Marxists.

A deliberative revision of any National Curriculum should first gain agreement on the ultimate purpose of education in relation to emerging needs, by considering what an educated person might need to be capable of, and then on the values and core competencies required. (This might seem self evident but according to the panel on The Moral Maze discussion about the History curriculum, starting from this point is bizarre and ‘chilling’.) This should lead to open-minded review of the subjects to be included, how they relate to each other and how learning can best be enabled. One or two subjects have been dropped or their names changed but it’s largely unaltered in its illogical bundling of traditional subjects.

The process of revision has been lazy and rushed, only slowed by delays caused by inadequate consultation from the start. There are a number of ‘outrages’ in it: the exclusion of climate change from most of the Geography curriculum (until a small mention in KS3) and the removal of ecological literacy and caring for the environment from Science and Citizenship. (Compared to the Scottish curriculum sustainability is near invisible.) Another outrage is the exclusion of drama, film, media and inadequate mention of dance in the Arts subject statements. It would take me days to outline my problems with all the statements in detail, and there are better places you can read the informed and consensual criticism by subject experts.

I want to focus for now on History and Geography, given that they are so problematic and most relevant to my work in cultural and environmental heritage learning. Practitioners in this sector have evolved a viewpoint of curriculum learning that is very integrated. We facilitate learning that arises from children’s responses to experience – of objects, places and people. We help children construct their learning by drawing out from and comparing with what they already know. This doesn’t mean restricting what they learn  only to what is familiar and local but extending their knowledge out to global human cultures and human interactions with nature over time.

Geography is an absolutely vital subject because it is the grounding for human history. We need to understand the changing geophysical, climatic and botanical conditions for the human story. Differences between cultures are not innate (or racial) but they evolve within bioregions and when groups have to migrate to other regions, or when they impact so much on the environment they must adapt to abrupt changes. These are complex concepts for young children but they are vitally important for an ethical education. The proposed History curriculum is so devoid of any reference to the environment that it doesn’t even mention the Agricultural Revolution.

We can begin to introduce these ideas early with positive appreciation of biodiversity and cultural diversity, and gentle introduction of more complex and worrying ideas about change. The Geography curriculum as it is written is perhaps open enough for some teachers to implement this if they are inclined. However, it emphasises particular local scenarios (e.g. polluted rivers) perhaps too much without introducing enough cultural geography or global ecology. I’m also concerned that Geography has a low status and inadequate time allowed for it. If History becomes so arduous that it takes up too much time, this will be even more so.

It might be acceptable to focus on local and national topics in the History curriculum if there was more time created for cultural histories (e.g. trade, migrations, agricultural practices) within Geography and Science. The overarching message of the new Curriculum is that concepts in Science and the Humanities should be learned as agreed facts, without enquiry or debate. The argument is that if you move on beyond core concepts too early you will only swim superficially around in contemporary issues and become confused.

It’s ironic then that the History curriculum pushes ‘too much too young’ the intricate deliberations and dynamics of particular ruling classes and figures. If schools do start teaching about the heptarchy, and other difficult but supposedly foundational concepts, they will have less time for ways of learning that children choose for themselves: exploring nature, inventing stories, asking why and why again, using art as a tool and so on. Because the History curriculum has been conceived as an ideological instruction manual, there is no understanding of ways that foundational concepts for early years are like seeds out of which complexity arises.

I hold out for museums, arts and environmental heritage sites as supporters of this kind of learner-led investigative learning: where Geography and History entwine, where Place and Time are seen in complex intersection, where you can see layers of history unfolding in a particular place. This helps children think diachronically and synchronically so that they can both understand the ‘sweeping chronology’ of history and see that this is always a cultural construction. By exploring the world through art and stories they learn to distinguish between myth and reality, and learn where it is difficult to disentangle them. In these ways, children learn about change and can perhaps better cope with changes yet to come.

Coding the curriculum

By Brian McKenzie

It’s taken me some time to respond to this issue because I wasn’t sure what I thought. The issue in question is the valuable campaign to increase the prevalence of computer science and coding in the UK (or English?) curriculum, and in general to drag ICT into this century already 12 years old. This movement  emerged from long years of rumblings by savvy teachers and technologists, then in August 2011 a high profile complaint about British education by Google’s Eric Schmidt, then a Coding for Kids campaign by Emma Mulqueeney (who runs Young Rewired State), the Next Gen Skills campaign by the UKIE and industry partners, then the Royal Society report on The Way Forward for Computing in UK Schools and the Guardian’s Digital Literacy campaign. Michael Gove scored his only popularity hit with more progressive educators when he agreed in January 2012, after all this powerful lobbying, to scrap ‘boring’ outdated ICT and ensure computer science plays a strong role in the revised National Curriculum.

The problem with these linked campaigns is not that they’re wrong.  You’d be a dinosaur if you argued that digital education shouldn’t be updated, deepened with more science and giving learners more creativity. The problem is that it worked by pressure from employers rather than teachers and in a highly fluid context where educational change is too controlled by Gove. There are at least three factors that diminish the potency of Gove’s decision, despite it heading in the right direction:

- Cuts to education in general and in particular to tech support by local authorities (e.g. by the closures of City Learning Centres), will decelerate a decade-long push to integrate technology across schools.

- The shiny reviewed National Curriculum will be toothless because it won’t be required in academies and free schools, yet the Government is luring and forcing both secondaries and primaries to become academies or free schools.

- Vocational learning, including engineering, has just been massively downgraded and discouraged by the exclusion of the majority of such qualifications from League Tables.

Let’s assume, though, that a National Curriculum still has some validity. The problem is that it makes no sense to overhaul specific subjects, or for Gove to agree to major changes to particular subjects outside a holistic and systematic review of the whole curriculum. Such a review should include interrogating the whole notion of ‘subject’. When Gove conceded to the digital skills campaigns he also said the ICT curriculum should be crowdsourced. I’m aware of numerous platforms where educationalists share and generate strategies and resources, and also the subject associations have contributed to curriculum design. So, let’s assume Gove wasn’t suggesting reinventing those wheels. I’d like to think the best of his intentions, that he was inviting us to  recode the whole curriculum.

The success of the coding campaign can be seen as an opening, positive but only of chink size, that can pave the way for an open recreation of the curriculum. Coding can be seen not just as a narrow branch of computer science but more metaphorically as working with data, identifying patterns and crafting solutions, with a whole range of languages and materials. A curriculum based on ‘delivery’ of skills and knowledge that really is relevant for the future is almost impossible to craft, as we can’t predict how the future will unfold. What we can do is focus our efforts on supporting children to be creative, resilient, co-operative and driven to make a better world, with ‘bigger than self’ values. We’re unlikely to achieve these outcomes if computer science is added to a delivery-based Govean mix alongside Dryden, the King James Bible, the English kings and the periodic table. The curriculum needs to be restructured predominantly around creative enquiries whereby students are interpreting and manipulating code, numbers, materials, images, forms, ideas, emotions, actions, words and perhaps most importantly, the elements of the biosphere, in ways that generate meaning and value. Coding with data needs to interact with all these other languages or systems to explore their generative potential.

Ken Robinson has written inspiringly about the importance for learners of ‘finding their element’. I think we need to deconstruct this more. I wonder if there are three dimensions to it:

- The self (identity with others and distinctiveness from others, fear and desire, motivation, talent etc)

- The context (a locality, a diaspora, an ecosystem etc)

- A syntax or system of practice (maths, aesthetics, manufacture/craft, ecology, social wellbeing, literature etc)

We need to deconstruct this more comprehensively and more responsively to the world’s future problems. At present, the argument swings between whether education should be driven by the needs of industry or by the interests of the child. The question we may soon be asking is how education can be driven by the needs of the future generations and the planet.

Gove and his MFLs

Michael Gove has announced at the Conservative Party conference (2011) that Primary Schools should teach Modern Foreign Languages to children from 5 years old, and that he is prepared to ‘pull all the levers’ to make this work, including extending the school day by one hour. Alongside this are other announcements, including more secondary-style subject-specialists teaching in primary schools. Stunningly, this seems to be a very popular proposal, with very little dissent across the political spectrum. Where it’s reported in the papers (online) you’ll see hundreds of comments of the likes of ‘though I hate to agree with Gove, I agree with him on this’.

I’m not against children learning foreign languages, just as I’m not against them learning anything else, except the techniques for violence of any kind. In fact, I’m very much in favour of learning about foreign and heritage languages and cultures, which can be done effectively through acquiring a language. However, I need to point out a few reasons why we can’t unthinkingly accept this proposal. This is an ideological proposal without due consideration of either the intrinsic motivations children might have or of any extrinsic rationale for increasing multilingualism by English children. Gove is mainly pushing the subsidiary argument here, that second language acquisition has neurological benefits transferable to other learning, but in comparing English schools to those in other countries, he is also suggesting that multiple languages are a requisite for national competitiveness.

Neither of these two arguments is proven or even sound. I’ve only just read the news reports and have not had time to research the issue to refresh my memory in detail, but I recall that the claim of neurological benefits of bilingualism have been proven to be unclear. Bilingualism only develops skills that are transferable to linguistic skills, not to other domains of learning. In other words, knowing two languages doesn’t make you deficient in either language (although there may be some reduced ability to pronounce naturally in one or the other).

More importantly, if we’re talking about schools, any neurological benefits could only apply to learning that is so effective that the results are equivalent to natural bilingualism. Such results require immersion, where other subjects are learned through the foreign language and where the context (e.g. migration) helps the children feel that their language learning is essential.

Curriculum structures in England don’t allow for foreign language acquisition to fluency, even with weekly lessons over 5 or 6 years. If children don’t progress relatively quickly to competence, and have little contextual motivation, many will lose interest.  If Gove’s goal is that children should acquire a second language to competence, so that their languages can become economically useful at maturity, there would need to be major alterations across the full timetable, staff profile and teaching methodology in primary schools. As it is impossible to imagine that the majority of schools would teach wholly or partly through a foreign language, significant time would need to be taken from other areas, and this is likely to be to the detriment of physical, outdoor and creative activities. If Gove wants to extend the primary school day by one hour, formal learning will cut into after school arts and sports. If we imagine that 95 hours a year is extended from 5 or 6 years to 10 or 11 years of schooling, and then account for the factor of teaching yet more languages, this would take up approximately 1300 hours of schooling and still not achieve fluency except in a minority of children.

There is an additional concern about how this works through Secondary School transition. Again, if fluency is the goal, a particular language will dry up if it is not continued throughout Secondary school. However, it is difficult to see how there can be continuity of one key language for the same child through both the Primary and Secondary phases. In England, we don’t have the advantage of other countries worldwide who have English as the prime choice for a second language. We have no prime choice.

There is a common argument for the ‘critical period hypothesis’; the notion that the cut-off period for language acquisition is at age 12. This must be driving Gove’s push to introduce foreign language at age 5. It is indeed true that young children, because they have a pronounced capacity to absorb, repeat and imitate sounds, can pick up languages quickly. However, this doesn’t mean that adults are unable to acquire a language to fluency. New techniques have recently been developed to retune the mature brain to notice and recall what seem like alien sounds. Also, it may be misguided to attempt to teach a foreign language outside an immersive bilingual setting to young children. To learn an unfamiliar language without immersion, you need some maturity as a language learner and an ability to grasp the metacognitive dimension of language. (You need to understand that a word is a symbol, that a thing can be represented by more than one word, that meanings differ with context and so on.) In this formal setting, the younger you start the more likely it is to put a child off from language learning when they are ready and can actually see the need.

The particular flavour of this ideological push for multilingualism fails to acknowledge that an increasing number of children in England are already bilingual at age 5, yet their schooling encourages them to stop using their first language (Sylheti, Arabic, Polish, Urdu, Hindu, Mandarin etc etc) in favour of English. Some of these languages might be economically relevant for the UK but somehow these children, when resident as first to third generation immigrants, don’t fit the image of English native child representing the nation abroad.

When we assume that foreign language acquisition is an undeniable good, we are failing to consider the effort, and even pain, that children can experience in trying to learn. We’re also assuming economic benefits that are completely unpredictable if we are projecting 15-25 years into the future when these  primary children reach maturity. In that time, technology will very likely bring instant translation devices (as we are almost at that point now with instant translation of text online and vocal translation apps) and, in turn, we will see a greater homogenisation with English as a dominant language. Also, the impacts of climate change in and beyond that period will see forced migrations to more benign places such as the UK. The purpose of foreign languages in that context will be for peace-keeping and extracting knowledge for co-operative adaptation and conservation of heritage, in the absence of available translation technology.

I’m not projecting this future in order to be cynical or dismissive. I don’t want to be looking ahead to a future like this but my picture is based on the agreed projections that I believe we should acknowledge in planning future education. I’m projecting this way so that we can set language acquisition in a more appropriate frame.

I stress that I don’t want to be seen to be dismissing the learning of diverse languages out of hand. I would like to see children leaving primary school with much richer awareness of other countries, peoples, stories, words and meanings, but think this would be better achieved by greater emphasis on ‘global citizenship’, using technology to enable foreign exchange, and with more access to the music, poetry, art, ecological practices and ideas of global peoples. This should include helping children to greet others and use basic conversational vocabulary (‘my name is…’, ‘I live in…’ etc) in several languages. Aiming to attain fluency in a foreign language is another matter entirely and that should be a matter of family choice. If the child is already bilingual, they may prefer support to maintain their home language in school, rather than learning a third language, for example. Language learning, and schooling in general, should be personalised. Some children have strong aptitudes and motivations for developing language fluency, and local authorities should provide educational resources for this purpose, but the Government should not impose it as a requirement on every school for every child.

School and Transition

September is the ‘back to school’ month, a particularly pressured time for children making the transition from primary to secondary school. In the UK, this usually means coping with multiple changes all at once: from one teacher to many, from one classroom to many, from one learning group to many, from relatively integrated topics to many separate subjects, from simple rules to many complex rules. There is also the massive step towards seeing school as training in work skills and shaping attitudes in readiness for a life in working service for others. In my daughter’s case the transition is exacerbated because she is moving from a non-uniform primary school with a teacher committed to creative and culturally enriched learning, to an avowedly traditional school which is in the top 10 in the league table for state schools in England. Given that the intake for this school is in a disadvantaged inner-city area, these standards are the result of a pretty strong regime of discipline around completion of tasks.

Adding to this contrast, because of our particular home culture, my daughter is exceptionally geared towards freedom of action, non-conformity and open-ended thinking. I do think most children prefer a state of free open-minded play but in my 20 years of working with schools on creative and cultural learning I’ve seen so many children believe that playful thinking should be confined to playtime and that they should be weaned off it at secondary school. Our child has picked up the very opposite message because she is part of a family and network of friends who are always talking stories, games, fun projects, ‘let’s make’ and ‘what if?’

Due to this contrast between home and school, she is struggling greatly to settle in. She believes that her identity is being crushed by school and that she is trapped there as if in prison for the next 7 years. We are doing our best to encourage her to go to school but I empathise with her hugely. The situation is raising a lot of questions and memories for me, especially given that I’m writing a book chapter on what school could be.

One question is about the clear blue sea written between ‘School Phobia’ and ‘Truancy’. School Phobia (or School Refusal) is a condition of anxiety, is treated as a medical condition and does not incur such harsh or rapid prosecution of parents. Truancy is said to be a condition of anger and is treated as a behavioural or anti-social matter and incurs more rapid prosecution. I suspect that the only clear water between the two is social class. Children who struggle to settle in school are surely struggling to conform to school and its rules? Surely their anxiety is always, to some degree, mixed with anger? The difference between the phobic and the truant must be that the phobic has parents who effectively communicate their fear of social shame and prosecution. I think we should be a good deal more open to the possibility that School Phobia/Refusal is an angry rejection of what school represents as well as anxiety at being separated from an intimate or human-scale way of life.

A second question is about how children perceive the future, and the purpose of school in respect to the future. It’s pretty obvious that my daughter picks up messages from adults that we are concerned about how we are treating the planet. I think most children pick up such messages from the news and peers, if not from their parents, and even if they are told not to worry about the future it’s known that children are increasingly anxious. My daughter feels very strongly that if the future is going to be worse than now we need to make the best of the comfortable time that we still have. For a start, she does not want to waste every day of seven years doing irrelevant subjects when she could be looking after bees, watering trees, making films, learning about animals and making things she can sell. But most importantly she wants to be with people she feels happiest with, who allow her to be creative and open-minded, so that she can be happy while it is still possible to be so. Her teachers have told us that secondary school exists to prepare children for a world of work, in which they will need to follow rules, work hard and wear uniform-style clothes. But these children at schools, the ones with excellent results and the ones with ordinary results, are not stupid. They can see the economic collapse unfolding on the news, they can see that climate change is impacting already, they’ve heard why teenagers protest about the removal of education grants and university funding, they see parents being made redundant. They are starting to question why they learn and what their future holds. Like never before, we have to help them with this bigger transition, not just from human-scale to industrial-scale schools, but from what has been a very stable world to what is now an extremely fragile one. Young people need to be involved in deciding what skills they need to adapt to change. If they decide the skills they need are peace-keeping, computer programming, food-growing, biomimicry and renewables engineering, bike-mending or influencing people in power, they would probably be quite right and we should help them develop those skills. There might be 100 other skills and 1000 areas of knowledge we can’t foresee but we educators need to listen and adapt to their learning needs, because they learn for the planet not just for themselves.

If you would like to help with my research on schooling for The Learning Planet, you could complete this short survey about your experience of secondary school.

An update on our family situation: We’ve decided to withdraw our daughter from the school to home educate. We will probably use an online school to provide some structure, outside tuition and peer learners. We’re combining this with an ‘unschooling’ approach where the child finds their ‘element’ and plans their own learning around to suit their passion.

Children as our teachers

Originally posted December 2009:

Frank Furedi in ‘Turning Children into Orwellian Eco-Spies’ warns that there are resonances of Stalinism in the new orthodoxy by which we use children to teach adults about climate change. I have concerns about the same phenomenon but I’m coming from very different perspectives on both education and the environment. I’ve also had qualms when meeting people who are convinced that the solution to climate change is to educate children. The reasons for my qualms are many: It’s too late to wait until children are running the world; they can’t vote until 18 so if we should focus on educating anyone it’s the late middle-aged and elderly, who make up the majority of voters;  it doesn’t seem fair to put the onus on children. The main reason I baulk is that The Government’s reductive and misguided response to every problem (the root cause of which is usually gross inequality or unchecked capitalism) is to add yet another subject to the curriculum. Firstly these expensive initiatives are based on a misconception, that children will learn by being taught a lesson, by teachers who have been told to deliver compulsory lessons. Secondly, every time a new lesson is added, the less time there is for learning that might help children adapt to a difficult future.

Furedi has written a book called ‘Wasted, Why Education isn’t Educating’ in which he decries the erosion of traditional disciplines by endless additions of trendy topics (for example in the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum). In the article he says that environmentalism is infecting every subject, such as geography and history (as if they’re not utterly relevant to those subjects). I’m not concerned so much about the death of traditional disciplines in schools, but more that those in power are so wedded to the idea of subjects per se, old or new, that they continually add more to the diet. I’m not so concerned that the environment is infecting every subject, than that ecological systems thinking has been and still is so absent from education. Furedi conflates environmental topics with ‘scare-mongering’, but, on the contrary, effective environmental education is not about frightening people. It is about empowering them, helping them develop adaptive coping strategies. The more that is understood about a frightening scenario, the more people are able to resist and cope.

I suspect that if we framed school learning differently, whereby children had more involvement in deciding what enquiries are relevant, they would decide pretty quickly that the environment is pretty relevant. If we made clear to them that learning is about preparing for the future, that to live well in the future they would need to learn how to solve problems, co-operate, access knowledge and design new solutions, they would gravitate towards the biggest problems. Furedi’s position is that our current education philosophies undermine the authority of adults. I believe that adults (in affluent societies) have eroded their own authority by becoming infantilised, yet we form myths around the gravity and arduousness of an adult working life. We underestimate the ability of children and young people to think because we have forgotten how to think ourselves. We have progressed into a state of mature denial, treating problems too abstractly, too much in isolation and too much as issues for agonistic debate.

The Rose Review of the National Curriculum

Update note in 2011: It’s interesting to go through the process of deciding whether old posts have any current validity, or whether the fact that they are so out of date gives them a certain interest value. This one is interesting because, although the Rose Review was accepted by the last Government and the changes to the Primary Curriculum were about to be implemented in Autumn 2010, it was rejected by the current Government. We are now awaiting the results of Gove’s more comprehensive review of the English National Curriculum, which will be very different from the recommendations of Rose.

I originally posted this in December 2008:

Jim Rose’s interim report of the Review of the Primary Curriculum has been published. Comments are invited by the end of February to inform the final review. Before reading it, I read the Guardian piece which announced an end to history (though not in the Francis Fukuyama sense). This said that Rose proposed replacing subjects with broad areas of learning. I thought that sounded a little unlikely.

I also heard a crack-of-dawn Radio 4 story, in which Stephen Heppell was interviewed about the Rose Review. The interviewer asked Heppell something like ‘So surely primary-aged children can’t cope with research. They need to be taught subjects and given some facts first, don’t they?’ Heppell replied by describing some wonderful creative enquiry-based learning which showed how valid such an approach is. Children (and adults) learn so much more effectively by projects that are focused on solving a problem, working collaboratively, using a range of tools and skills, and crossing into different knowledge fields, as appropriate to the problem. I was heartened. If this is what Rose was promoting then, hallelulah!

In fact, the report doesn’t mention methods of organising learning, simply saying that pedagogy is up to teachers. It doesn’t refer at all to enquiry-based learning. It says that there are four main approaches to delivering the curriculum: By subject; by broad area of learning; by skills; and by themes. Whereas most countries tend to focus on one approach, most often choosing ‘areas of learning’, the report favours mixing them based on Rose’s observation of successful schools. It doesn’t advocate doing away with discrete subject teaching, as The Guardian reported, but combining this with cross-disciplinary teaching. Of course, that’s what happens in many schools. This is really about disseminating the practice seen in successful schools, where they don’t exhaust themselves trying to teach every subject separately and to the letter. As such it is a restatement of the 2004 DfES Excellence and Enjoyment report.

That said, the final report is likely to see a stronger presentation of a new curriculum structure. It suggests that more work is needed now to describe a new framework in which subject teaching would underpin the following six broad areas of learning: Understanding English, communication and languages; Mathematical understanding; Scientific and technological understanding; Human, social and environmental understanding; Understanding physical health and well-being; Understanding the arts and design. This structure would replace the current separation between Core subjects (English, Maths & Science) and the Foundation subjects, which makes sense, and means that in fact there could potentially be more history and geography, as Science would not be a Core subject and there would be less repetition of science learning at KS2 & KS3. One thing that may raise questions is the inclusion of ‘environmental’ in the Human & Social area of learning. Either ‘environmental’ is implicit in Scientific and Technological area of learning, or it is a separation, implying that science and technology is knowledge that overcomes and exploits the environment. Let’s hope that ecological thinking has a place across all the areas of learning, in the sense of understanding complex systems.

The new structure would place ‘core’ emphasis on Literacy, with Speaking & Listening acknowledged as crucial, a more multimodal approach to literacy and also ICT enhanced and integrated more into other learning. I find this is a really sensible approach. But, it needs to go further now.

To influence the next phase I would like to see an injection of some of Futurelab’s and Stephen Heppell’s thinking, evident in their Beyond Current Horizons research for DCSF. This is due out in Spring 2009 and will argue for an improved comprehension of ‘systems thinking’. The best way to achieve this, I believe, would be to ensure that a new curriculum structure is supported by investment in CPD and pedagogical action research which transforms learning into creative enquiry.