In England, the national curriculum has been in the news after the Shadow Education minister, Bridget Phillipson, reminded everyone that a future Labour government plans to review it.
I have written a lot about the curriculum and I think it’s an important part of education. But I also think that the national curriculum in England – and many other countries – is not as important as is sometimes assumed. This is not just because some schools in England are exempt from following the national curriculum. Even if it were compulsory for every school, it would still not be a significant lever for change. Four other parts of the education system make a bigger difference to what students learn.
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- Lesson resources
When most non-educationalists think about “the curriculum”, I think they have something like this in mind: the curriculum basically tells teachers what to teach each lesson. That is a reasonable assumption, but in England it is not the case. The national curriculum provides nothing like this level of detail, even our current 2014 version which is more specific and detailed than its predecessors. The entire primary and secondary curriculum for every subject is about 300 pages long. A huge amount of work has to be done to turn what you see in this curriculum document into actual living and breathing lessons.
Who does this work? Individual teachers, textbook writers, digital resource creators, central teams at multi-academy trusts…it varies.