It’s Time For Bold Change In The Curriculum

I welcome the chance we have all been offered to review the curriculum and assessment in England. But it’s been a long time since we stopped to think about the purposes of school, and for such a review to be framed in terms of evolution rather than revolution is going to be a challenge. We should be doing this kind of thing in an iterative ongoing way rather than at the beck and call of incoming governments. Education is far too important to be the victim of five-year political cycles.

In the current call for evidence there’s a key sentence:

The curriculum and assessment system must ensure that young people leave education prepared for life and work, equipped with the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to thrive and become well-rounded citizens, who appreciate the diversity and pluralism of our society.

Curriculum and Assessment Review: Call for evidence

And so say all of us.

But from this expansive vision, the call for evidence document then unhelpfully only talks about ‘knowledge and skills’ rather than ‘knowledge, skills and attributes’. There’s another window into the ‘mind’ of the review process on the page of definitions where ‘curriculum’ is defined simply as ‘the content (both knowledge and skills) that pupils study during their education.’

Suddenly the horizons of this review have been inexorably narrowed, for curriculum is much more than content. It also has to include the informal and the co-curricular, as well as those elements which are formally taught.

The most concerning aspect of the review is its lack of ambition. It is, we are told, about evolution rather than revolution. While getting enough high-quality teachers back into schools is a pressing matter and while no sane person would want, at the same time, to destabilise a fragile ecosystem, when reviews happen so rarely we have to think big.

The curriculum should enrich and motivate learners and foster a lifelong love of learning in all pupils, according to its own invitation to respond. Currently, it is failing to enrich, motivate or inspire far too many pupils, as the astonishing numbers of persistently excluded and persistently absent pupils attest.

It’s a central paradox of the review seeking to ensure relevance in a rapidly changing world that the driving force of this review is based on evidence and data. Obviously, we want research to guide our thinking. But the kind of evidence preferred by the Education Endowment Foundation is not fit for purpose in guiding our thinking about emerging innovations in a rapidly changing world. The review talks of AI, for example, as something we will need to consider carefully.

It is clear to me that our current curriculum is too crowded, too controlled and too centralised. And while I am focusing on words beginning with the letter C, let’s lament the fact that it currently misses out creative thinking, collaboration and communication, whereas the research from the OECD, UNECSO and the World Economic Forum – to name but three – makes these core competences or dispositions.

Transforming curriculum

The curriculum needs a radical overhaul. There’s currently too much content and not enough freedom to vary this according to individual and local needs. Too much of what is taught overemphasises memorisation and recall rather than application and utility. Specifically creative thinking, collaboration and oracy need to be included, not as discrete competences, but interwoven into all subject disciplines.

The bottleneck at age 16 needs dramatic surgery. The legacy of EBacc and the requirements of Progress 8 have narrowed the curriculum. We need to think of a 14 to 19 baccalaureate, with pathways that are academic practical and applied, with courses like A levels and BTECs, but also with many modular opportunities. Above all we need a mind-body shift, to acknowledge fully that we take not only our heads to school but also our hands and our hearts.

Modest progress could be made towards these goals very rapidly, with changes to curriculum and course requirements at age 16 and proactive promotion of project qualifications such as the EPQ and HPQ, along with some targeted pilot work in the areas of creativity and engineering.

Transforming assessment

We need to move from a deficit model of assessment to a strengths-based one. A clear signal of this would be the careful introduction of a digital learner profile and accompanying school-based portfolios for all pupils. In this, we would be building on work in Australia, Portugal, the USA and Scotland as well as extensive piloting underway across the UK being coordinated by Rethinking Assessment. To facilitate this, we will need to make a reality of digital credentialing.

We will also need to decide which elements should be nationally warranted, which regionally, which can be school-based, and which need no external validation. The major revolution here will be to develop a more sophisticated range of formative assessment tools so that the process of evidencing the development of pupils’ competences, skills and knowledge is multimodal.

Often this will be through demonstration and viva, frequently being assessed when the learner is ready, rather than when it suits the system. Our mantra with all assessment must be that, as the Gordon Review in the USA of a decade ago argued, assessment must do no harm and must proactively help learners and their teachers to learn and teach more effectively.

My hope is that the Curriculum and Assessment Review will set out a bold agenda for transforming schools; changes do not have to be made instantly but can be carefully planned and implemented over a rolling period of five years.

Bill Lucas is Professor of Learning at the University of Winchester and co-founder of Rethinking Assessment.