What would curriculum plan mean for schools?

The Tories’ curriculum plans could include a bigger role for Ofsted and funding high-profile institutions to create course materials
2nd June 2017, 12:00am
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What would curriculum plan mean for schools?

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The Conservatives’ commitment to “ensure all children have access to an academic, knowledge-rich curriculum” could have significant implications for teachers and the wider school system.

A key element of the massive expansion of academies under Michael Gove and his successors has been to give thousands of schools the freedom not to follow the national curriculum. But the new Tory manifesto pledge could re-open the debate about the tension between school autonomy and the desire of politicians to influence what children learn.

Becky Francis, director of the UCL Institute of Education, highlights the “sketchy speculativeness” of the pledge, and adds: “I think this dilemma between autonomy and, frankly, direction is a genuine dilemma in policy terms.”

Some see the pledge through the lens of another manifesto commitment to create more grammar schools. John Blake, head of education and social reform at the right-leaning Policy Exchange thinktank, says: “A concern raised about the proposed reintroduction of selection as an option in the English schools system is the consequences this will have for neighbouring non-selective schools. The commitment to a knowledge-rich curriculum for all students is reassuring, since one of the worst faults of the old-style secondary moderns was that they taught an entirely different curriculum and thereby closed down access to academic knowledge for those students.”

Bigger Ofsted role

Sources close to Downing Street say it is unlikely that the national curriculum itself will be overhauled or imposed upon all schools.

However, a manifesto promise to ensure that “assessments at the end of primary school draw from a rich knowledge base” suggests a re-elected Conservative government could instead use the assessment system to incentivise schools to teach what ministers consider to be important.

The same paragraph suggests an additional role for Ofsted, saying a Tory government would consider how the inspectorate “can give parents more information on what their children are being taught”.

No further details have been given, but Conservative sources say this is unlikely to involve inspectors paying annual visits to all schools. Instead, it could mean changes to how Ofsted reports are written, or the use of the watchdog’s website to give parents information about what all school teach.

The Conservatives don’t just want to encourage checks on what schools are teaching. They also want to offer them help to take what they consider to be the correct approach through “a curriculum fund to encourage Britain’s leading cultural and scientific institutions, like the British Museum and others, to help develop knowledge-rich materials for our schools”.

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