Last week, the Department for Education published its long-delayed response to the consultation on the EBacc, a consultation that closed back in the days when David Cameron was prime minister, and Nicky Morgan his secretary of state.

The only surprise about the response is that it’s come out at all. Otherwise, it’s a case of plus c’est la même chose. 

“The government has spent time considering responses,” says the document, rather lamely, but the result of all this deliberation is a slender and evasive document that offers just a slightly modified form of the government’s original intentions. EBacc entry and attainment scores will be headline measures of accountability; the proposal for 90 per cent entry to EBacc remains, even if only as an aspiration.

These are policies that have few friends, and many critics.

The attention of critics has understandably focused on the Department’s continuing refusal to recognise EBacc’s negative impact on arts. But there are broader issues that need addressing, too.

Of particular concern is the way in which the DfE is using discussion of EBacc, an accountability measure, as a substitute for the policy debate we really need on the shape and purpose of the secondary curriculum.

In this perspective, there is a striking contrast between English policy and that which is being developed next door, in Scotland and Wales.

Different routes

In England, curriculum design amounts to the setting out of a list of subjects, accompanied by a batch of aspirations for the rest of the curriculum - from sex and relationships education to citizenship and sport - that is haphazardly planned and systematically under-resourced.

Policymakers in Cardiff and Edinburgh have committed themselves to a different route.

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence is based on principles of curriculum breadth and insists that issues of progression, student choice and relevance should be central to curriculum design.

In Wales, the Donaldson Review, Successful Futures, takes a similarly holistic view: the curriculum’s purposes are to develop capable learners, “creative contributors”, ethically-informed citizens and healthy individuals.

These transformative intentions are hard to achieve, and English secretaries of state have enjoyed themselves exploiting the difficulties of transition.

From Michael Gove to Justine Greening, they have made a habit of castigating their neighbours’ record and boasting about England’s higher standing in the OECD’s Pisa tables.

They would do better to read what the OECD says about the pathways of curriculum reform along which Scotland and Wales are travelling: it notes difficulties of curriculum overload and teacher education but encourages policymakers to maintain their direction of travel. It is vital, says Pisa chief Andreas Schleicher, that Wales consolidates rather than retreats from its reforming project.

The prize of a broad-based and engaging curriculum is worth a long effort that engages with and convinces teachers as well as system leaders.

EBacc-driven system

It is not an effort that ministers in England seem inclined to make. Their response to consultation seeks to lock schools into an EBacc-driven system until at least the middle of the next decade.

The horizons of their ambitions are set dismally low and amount to little more than the selective deployment of statistics in an effort to justify the status quo. They devote much of their energies to making the statistical claim that EBacc entry does not decrease the take-up of arts subjects.

They do not address the wider realities that teachers, their unions and subject associations are pointing out to them: teacher numbers in arts subjects are dropping; the share of the curriculum taken up by these subjects is in decline; new GCSEs are lowering the engagement and motivation of many students.

Outside the confines of the DfE, there is an appetite for wider discussion.

If we go to the websites like those of the Cultural Learning Alliance, the Creative Industries Federation or the Royal Society of Arts, we find a different, braver world, where questions of creativity are central, and where awareness of the backwards nature of our present design for the curriculum is acute.

These ideas are part of the new common sense of secondary education, a common sense that badly needs political support and articulation.

With the Conservatives firmly committed to policies that depress quality and inhibit innovation, there is an opportunity for Labour to renew its thinking, engage with educators and lay the basis for a new curriculum. Proposals for a National Education Service need no less. 

Ken Jones is the senior policy officer, curriculum and assessment, at the NUT. 

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