The government’s plans for a forthcoming schools White Paper appear to be “underwhelming” and could risk narrowing the primary school curriculum, a headteachers’ leader will say today.
Geoff Barton, the Association of School and College Leaders, will tell heads that the union is concerned the Department for Education’s plans “fall short of the ambitious leadership we’re calling for”.
Speaking at the ASCL annual conference today, he will say: “A White Paper gives a chance for a government to recalibrate its educational priorities, to say publicly: here’s where we’ve been and here’s where we’re going next. That is much needed. But what we know so far is underwhelming.”
Mr Barton will question the creation of a 90 per cent target for primary children achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths by 2030.
He will say: “Simply setting higher targets for literacy and numeracy, without a plan, a philosophy, without investment, will achieve little.
“Indeed, a fixation on literacy and numeracy - important as they are - could prove counterproductive, narrowing the primary curriculum at the very time when we should celebrate more children taking part in the arts, in sport, in making things, in learning early leadership skills.”
Mr Barton will also use his speech to call for a “curriculum for childhood”.
This follows ASCL’s Blueprint for a Fairer Education System, published last September, which sets out plans for a slimmed down national curriculum that would be focused on a relatively small number of carefully sequenced key concepts and would leave time and space for schools to develop their own local curricula.
‘The government has lost its definition of what education is for’
Mr Barton will say: “Sometimes it feels as if the government has lost its definition of what education is for.
”Those special early years, our rich and joyful primary education, a secondary key stage 3 that builds confident knowledge - none of this should be a long and tedious runway leading to distant exams.
“We need instead a curriculum for childhood, a sense of what our young people at various ages need to know, need to be able to do, need to have experienced, especially in such uncharted times.
“We need them to be genuinely prepared for a world in which they will increasingly interact with people who may not speak like them, may not look like them, may not have the same faith as them, but in which diversity and equality are the non-negotiable and liberating essentials of our age.”
Calls for league tables reforms to ensure schools can collaborate
The forthcoming White Paper is also expected to include a target for all schools to be based within multi-academy trusts by 2030.
Mr Barton will say: “There’s going to be a clear vision of schools in strong MATs. Not everybody is going to agree that a MAT is necessarily the right thing for their school. There are other models of collaboration available after all.”
He will also suggest that for schools to work collaboratively, there needs to be reforms of other areas of the education system.
Mr Barton will say that the government’s drive to ensure all schools are based in trusts is “recognition that no school or college is an island”.
He will add: “Too often it feels at the moment - through admissions, through exams, through performance tables - that for my institution to do well, yours has to do badly.
“Instinctively, ASCL believes that a genuinely collaborative system - with a focus on shared responsibility for the communities we serve - must be a better way forward than the idea that schools and colleges are part of a market system with winners and losers.
“But it will only work if there is an overhaul of the performance tables that create those competitive pressures.”
Yesterday, ASCL released new survey findings, which showed that more than eight in 10 school leaders polled do not believe that secondary school league tables should be published this year given the uneven disruption caused by Covid.
