Despite Ofsted’s repeatedly telling us that curriculum intent statements aren’t necessary, it’s not hard to find a primary-school website with one gracing its pages. Indeed, it may be harder to find one that doesn’t contain such a thing.
Increasingly, one statement is not enough: schools are sending subject leaders off to write statements that justify the place of their subject, and to try to explain in a few paragraphs what it looks like in their school.
Aside from the fact that such statements are invariably going to be vague and rather general, they do highlight a near-ubiquitous tendency to refer to treating children like miniature career professionals.
Miniature career professionals
History curriculum intent statements describe how a school intends to teach its children to be historians. Geography statements create mini-geographers. Design and technology statements explain how children will solve real-life problems with innovative technical solutions.
That seems rather unlikely to me. We may have moved on from the days of designing a single slipper in D&T lessons, but I rather suspect we’re a long way off producing a national cohort of Benjamin Franklins. Or of Simon Schamas for that matter. (You’ll have to forgive me for not being able to name a notable geographer.)
When you think about it seriously, the idea is preposterous. The skills required to be an academic historian, or an employed designer - or musician, artist or computer programmer - are all far beyond the capacity of most 11-year-olds. We cannot possibly expect to recreate them in our classrooms.
What we usually mean by these aspirational statements is that we intend to give our pupils opportunities to behave like these professionals.
Huge wealth of understanding
The problem with that aspiration is that the true skills of these professionals require a whole range of background knowledge.
Historians drawing inferences and evaluating sources do so on the basis of a huge wealth of understanding of the wider context of the time and place.
Scientists making predictions draw on their deep understanding of chemical properties and behaviours, or their experience of examining hundreds of other similar viruses - they don’t just hypothesise on the basis of a single lesson’s knowledge.
In reality, most primary teachers lack the real depth of knowledge or understanding of any of those subjects to be able to call themselves a historian or programmer.
That’s not intended to evoke the time-worn adage, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” This is simply not what we expect or want from our primary teachers.
Not about finished products
Nor should “being a historian” or “being a mathematician” be what we want from our pupils. Primary education isn’t about finished products, but about beginning journeys and opening doors.
I have often said to children in my classes that education is about choices.
You don’t always get the choices in school (particularly not before GCSE options), but getting a good broad education at primary should prepare you well for what comes next. It should allow you to become whatever you later want to be, whether that’s a geographer, scientist or professional YouTuber.
When you think of primary school as laying the foundations for later learning, then it makes sense that we prioritise a good baseline of knowledge.
Of course, as part of the process, we’ll introduce children to higher-level ideas like reliability of sources, or working to a design brief. But, in truth, we know that this is merely playing at the game of being an expert.
The best way to become experts themselves is for children to experience and learn about all the marvellous things that experts in the field have already discovered over hundreds or thousands of years.
Once they’ve got that under their belts, then they can go and change the world.
Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979
