Where is the curriculum going?
Bridget Phillipson’s phrase regarding the curriculum review, ‘evolution, not revolution’, is ripe for unpicking. What is the profession ‘overthrowing’, or in this case, not overthrowing? Evolution suggests small, incremental steps. But it begs the question: what is the curriculum evolving from, and what is it evolving towards?
The National Curriculum has undergone several reviews. Before the existence of the National Curriculum, the decentralised nature of schools meant that schools were left to decide for themselves what constituted valuable knowledge. In a society with a growing multi-cultural population, post-World War Two, this variability meant little effort was made to acknowledge the histories and perspectives of those deemed ‘Other’ to Britishness.
As a result of a predominantly Eurocentric curriculum, schools – and therefore teachers – were ill-equipped to develop a curriculum that celebrated the contributions of the global majority. Schools were assimilationist in their approach to what was taught in the curriculum, expecting adaptation to British norms and values.
In the early 1980s, The Rampton Report[1] and the Swann Report[2] specifically stressed the need for multicultural education and a diverse curriculum to meet the needs of a growing diverse society. This was well before the inception of the National Curriculum.
Much later, in the 1999 Macpherson Report, we saw indications that institutional racism was rife within schools; the report called for greater focus on ‘anti-racism’, Black British history and cultural diversity.[3] Whilst schools heeded the advice on a surface level, the curriculum itself remained unaltered in a systematic or structured way.