Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and
College Leaders, will today [Saturday 12 March] call for a
“curriculum for childhood,” in his speech to the
association’s annual conference in Birmingham.
His call echoes ASCL’s Blueprint for a
Fairer Education System, published last September, which sets
out a vision of a slimmed down national curriculum which 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.
In his speech to more than 1,000 delegates at Birmingham’s
International Convention Centre, 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.
“We need those young people to understand our past – the stories
of who we are and of who we have become, of why our past matters
in shaping our future.”
ASCL’s Blueprint for a Fairer Education System says the current
national curriculum is crowded, with equal weight given to
aspects of learning which are crucial to success, and those which
are more peripheral.
This – together with the impact of assessment and accountability
requirements on schools – can lead to an overfocus on “curriculum
coverage” to the detriment of deep learning.
And it adds that the current curriculum lacks coherence between
early years, primary and secondary, which limits progress pupils
make, and can lead to a lack of engagement.
