The EBacc response is likely to be the spring/summer 2017: it is taking more time because of the high number of responses received by the Department for Education (DfE).
Among the flurry of new year news, it was easy to miss this important story from TES reporter Eleanor Busby. I was working with a group of school leaders in the south of England when the news broke, and it was about as welcome as a short notice inspection phone call.
The issues caused for schools and more importantly for students by a mandatory 90 per cent EBacc participation, and indeed by the delay to a response from the government on this (it’s been 18 months of waiting) have been well rehearsed by many others and I won’t go over them again here.
I do want to reflect on a wider point this raises though.
It’s nearly a year since Lucy Powell, then shadow education secretary, made a speech at the Education Foundation suggesting that individual ministers at different government departments had been involved in signing off elements of the national curriculum, in terms of its implications for defence, home affairs, and the environment.
This resonated with concerns that the education secretary at the time, Michael Gove, was personally involved in deciding which kings and queens of England should be taught, and the removal of American novels from the GCSE literature curriculum.
The thing is, schools cannot change the curriculum every time there’s a change of minister or policy. It drives workload, causes confusion to teachers, parents, students and employers, and leads to year on year comparability issues.
Even the DfE cannot seem to keep up - the reason for the delay to the EBacc consultation being given as the high number of responses.
Why have a national curriculum?
There are of course very important questions at stake here, and we should not pretend they are easy to answer as they preoccupy most countries around the world:
Why have a national curriculum, and how big should it be?
What should be national and what should be local?
How do we keep a curriculum relevant but limit the pace of change?
How can we help schools, awarding organisations and publishers respond to changes more easily when they become necessary?
Is knowledge absolute, or subject to a particular time, place and culture?
How do we balance the development of core knowledge with the development of skills and behaviours for future employment and society?
How do we do the best for individual students while holding schools intelligently to account?
We all have our opinions of course, but I will admit that my main conclusion when faced with these questions is, I do not personally know, and if I were an education minister I would be very wary of thinking that my opinion was the one that mattered most.
Instead, I would suggest we need the curriculum to be developed by genuine experts (yes, I do believe in them) representing a broad spectrum of well-informed, research-led understanding.
Such expertise must be found from teachers and school leaders with an understanding of day to day delivery, as well as academic experts.
They will, of course, disagree with each other on many points, and the approach to chairing, resolving and concluding from such a committee is a work of art in itself.
‘A school-led, self-improving approach’
Just as important as the content that emerges from this, is the manner of implementation.“Decisions taken by government affect what happens in schools, from curriculum change to what is inspected by Ofsted” to quote the DfE’s own words.
The group’s recommendations must be therefore implemented with a long-term approach in mind, carefully considering the pace of implementation and how it fits with the rhythm of the school year, where planning needs to take place a long time in advance.
This is far from being a new suggestion. The 2013 Fellowship Commission made some very thoughtful recommendations on exactly this topic. As do ASCL, NAHT and many others. Why is this advice so hard to take on board?
The brutal rhythm of the political cycle is one answer of course. The government are judged by the public every five years, but individual ministers are scrutinised much more frequently, and need to have practical answers.
In my experience, ministers and civil servants want education to succeed as much as anyone working in the system.
But just as the road to hell is paved with good intention, the road to bad policies is paved with officials saying “yes I know we said we’d do things properly, but this plan just has to be implemented right now”, and each of these one-off exceptions to good policy quickly becomes the main way of doing things.
This is inevitable, I fear, as long as ministers take a hands-on approach to detailed and day to day matters of curriculum and assessment.
If I could wish for a particular action of far-sighted political courage in respect of the curriculum, it would be for Justine Greening to put in place the school-led, self-improving approach that so many governments have said they want, but which seems so hard to enact.
She would find a profession willing and able to rise to the challenge.
Chris Kirk is an experienced education leader. He tweets at @chrisjameskirk
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