I sometimes wonder if the teaching profession isn’t a little like a teenager. We can be a contrary bunch, and it seems that our opinions can very easily be swayed by who we might be agreeing with at any point.
For years, teachers complained about government dictating assessment - yet as soon as we are left to our own devices, we just as quickly complain about the lack of support and direction.
Last week, Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, became the latest victim of the anti-authority stance that teachers sometimes seem to take. Having bemoaned the narrowing of the curriculum for as long as I can remember, it seems that it isn’t an acceptable argument to make if you also happen to be the head of Ofsted. Now, perhaps there is some truth in the claim that Ofsted has itself been to blame in part of the same narrowing. But could we not take this new inquiry as an indication that the inspectorate wants to change its ways?
It is, perhaps, telling that Ms Spielman raised her concerns through the lens of secondary and further education, pointing out that we ought not to let the curriculum be dictated by the demands of GCSEs and A levels. I’ve long wondered whether the narrowness of selecting just three or four A levels, in particular, isn’t an odd approach to take at what is still a relatively young age.
An ‘upside-down’ curriculum
In fact, I’d argue that we’ve got the whole curriculum system upside down. If there is to be any narrowness at all, shouldn’t it be at the other end of the scale? Surely it’s madness that we specify the detail of a curriculum in 10 subjects for five-year-olds, but then offer little more than a flimsy outline for them 10 years later?
Hear me out on this, because I don’t think it will be universally popular: what if we were to ditch all but the statutory English and maths curriculum in key stage 1? At the moment, we seem to maintain the presence of all the other subjects to a greater or lesser degree, all the while knowing that it’s English and maths that will count when it comes to Year 2 results.
Why not be more honest? We should set out that the absolute priority of the first key stage is to provide the building blocks of literacy and numeracy.
That’s not to say that children wouldn’t find out about pirates, or Mary Seacole, or the Great Fire of London; it’s just that we wouldn’t need to dictate it in anything like that level of detail. Removing the statutory requirements wouldn’t mean removing the subjects completely, just refocusing the attention on what really matters.
If nearly every child leaves KS1 as a confident and competent reader, familiar with the basics of arithmetic, then the time which follows in the subsequent key stages will be so much better used.
Of course, teachers might still choose to plant seeds and measure the height of their products, or use the story of a local historical figure to practice writing non-fiction, but the emphasis would clearly be on ensuring the very essentials of knowledge.
If that happened, we might not feel so forced to narrow the curriculum through the later years of schooling. Often the biggest challenge for teaching the foundation subjects with older children is not the subject content, but the challenges of literacy within a class. Let’s give infant teachers the freedom to get that right, and take away as many of the other demands as we can.
Michael Tidd is deputy head at Edgewood Primary School in Nottinghamshire. He tweets @MichaelT1979
