In the early 1980s at Garrett’s Green College in Birmingham, we had a young engineering lecturer called Jim McCann. Jim became so excited about “curriculum” that he talked it all the time. Colleagues wrote a song about him and recorded it, complete with backing singers - Jim McCann, Curriculum Man. Never made the charts, but it was big around Garretts.
Teachers did get excited about curriculum in the 1980s. There were major projects, like “curriculum-led institutional development”, supported by the old further education unit. We had real professional engagement in the design and delivery of programmes for distinct student groups. We took it seriously because teachers had a sense of ownership.
We need to get back to some of that because it is how education works best. Curriculum is not just syllabus, course content and subjects. Nor is it the qualification or the assessment process. We have lost our focus on what it should be because we have created a system in which all is now driven by assessment and qualifications and by external agencies. It is too controlled, centralised and narrowly defined. People do not learn in whole qualifications, but that is all that has been measured.
It is time to change and we need a big bang. Tinkering, to which we have been subject for the last 30 years, does not work. The number of new initiatives is legion and they all fail. Even the good ones, like TVEI and CPVE, are judged as failures because they have not been sufficiently transformational, when all that has happened is that they have run into the buffers of our class-based and elitist structures.
The 14-19 initiative will fail because some schools will send their worst students to colleges, thus fulfilling their own prophecies. AVCE will never achieve the attention and status needed to succeed, because it carries the second-best label. It is all doomed, because we are unwilling to tackle the underlying and fatal flaws in the system.
I cannot be alone in finding a degree of satisfaction in this year’s A-level meltdown, regrettable though it was. It is, of course, by no means the first dismal failure of the examinations system: it is just the most public. And most of the other recent ones affected only FE students, and so did not cause much stir. But A-levels and university entrance problems hit the public schools and cause a mighty uproar.
The truth is that the gold standard is fool’s gold. It has been seriously tarnished for many years but not many of us were prepared to say so. The three-highway system that Dearing sought to formalise was never going to work when one route was the M1 and the other two were farm tracks. And it was conceptually wrong anyway.
Our difficulty lies not in knowing what needs to be done, but in doing it. We know the present systems fail too many people: we know we have a smaller percentage of 17-year-olds in full-time education and training than Poland and the Czech Republic, and indeed than all but two of the OECD countries.
We know we have appallingly high levels of functional illiteracy among the working population. We know we do not produce enough skilled and qualified workers for a 21st-century economy. And we go on tinkering round the edges.
We have to understand what widening participation really means. It is great to have a target of 50 per cent of those under 30 benefiting from higher education but what about the other 50 per cent? And all of those over 30?
We need a structure that is flexible, responsive to individuals, cumulative, progressive and success-based. Our systems need to recognise achievement and encourage higher aspiration, and remove the hierarchies between academic and vocational.
Most access programmes in FE are designed around these criteria. They are credit-based, and offer locally-responsive curricula and quality assurance arrangements, operating within national quality frameworks. Students love them (though drop-out rates are high due to lack of financial support). Teachers love them because their professionalism is recognised and because they devise the curriculum.
It works and it is time we paid much more attention to the organisations that enable them, the Open College Networks. OCN is one of the unsung successes of FE. It operates at both local and national levels. The networks focus on curriculum and its development, as well as qualifications. They encourage and support professional development and engagement, because they would not exist without them. We would do well to plan our future curriculum strategies and qualification ambitions on such a model. That’s the way to a learning society, in which inclusivity and productivity are equally achieved. It would make Jim and me happy, too.
Colin Flint retires next month as principal of Solihull college
