If you ask a headteacher this month about how much of next year’s budget is going to be invested in the new national curriculum Orders, you should anticipate a tetchy response. In a period of standstill (at best), they are keen to protect their pupil-teacher ratios and special needs staffing: supporting the new curriculum Orders is inevitably a lower priority.

When GCSE and TVEI were introduced, both central and local government recognised the importance of pump-priming, and results proved the wisdom of such priority funding. The children who will sit down next September to a national curriculum which, we are promised, will not be tampered with for five years, are not so fortunate. Not even to have had an additional day’s in-service training for teachers’ team planning seems short-sighted indeed on the part of the Department for Education, again when the experience of GCSE proved the value of such cost-effective training.

At key stage 1 there is an urgent need for improved support for the teaching of non-fiction across the curriculum. Published materials in the 5 to 7 age range are slowly being developed, but primary heads are uncertain whether they can afford the necessary mini-libraries in early-years classrooms.

At key stage 2, primary classrooms will need new materials for history, geography and science; “explorers out, Tudors in” as one Year 5 teacher ruefully observed.

Information technology, according to the new Orders, should be spread across the 5 to 11 range, yet it is in this domain that primary heads feel most vulnerable. One colleague commented that 80 per cent of his school’s IT hardware had been provided by parental donation and he still fell short in a recent OFSTED inspection. Without major central government initiatives, he asked, how will even the best resourced of primaries achieve the proper investment in integrated learning systems, CD-Rom libraries and mini-networks that heads now see as essential if level 4 pupils are to “use IT systems to control events in a predetermined manner, to sense physical data and to display it”?

The increased subject specialisation and accompanying ability grouping of children in Years 5 and 6 will also require new equipment, particularly for maths and English. Textbooks, photocopiable masters and class readers will all have to be bought.

In most secondary school subject departments, the investments in textbooks made in recent years will have to suffice. It is also a fair bet that photocopying bills will rise steeply in the short term as history and geography teachers (among others) adapt what they already have to meet the revisions. This does not make happy reading for publishers, but is an acknowledged fact as they seek to anticipate changing patterns in book-buying brought about by schools’ own vastly improved, often colour-reprographic facilities.

In modern languages, film and video are now recognised as vital ingredients in effective teaching, and languages faculties will need to make wise investments alongside their established coursebooks. In music, “making appropriate use of IT” has an inescapable financial ring to it. And in design technology, schools need good construction sets, milling machines and small power tools to promote simulation exercises and modelling - a cornucopia of equipment far beyond the scope of most budgets. Here too teachers will make do, and rely on the enterprise of governors and parents.

Despite a drawing-back - some would say muddled retreat - from a full technology course for all students to 16, there is the widespread feeling that the aesthetic and expressive dimensions of our schools have had to take a place in the shade. As heads and staff review time allocations to subjects in the coming months, the school which wishes to see the arts flourish will take a serious look at what the slimmer Orders can enable. Funds set aside for writers-in-residence, arts weeks and theatre-in-education projects will reap whole-curriculum benefits at relatively low cost.

A final thought to attract the chairman of Camelot and the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. With money raised from the national lottery, give every school - on an annual basis - vouchers to the sum of Pounds 1,500 with which they can secure the services of working artists and writers. The nation’s spirit would be transformed.

Roy Blatchford is head of Bicester Community College, Oxfordshire, and a council member of SCAA.