When a National Curriculum was first introduced to schools in England through the 1988 Education Reform Act the intention was that it ‘should be a balanced and broadly based curriculum’.
Sixteen years later, after the most intense ‘national testing offensive’ that primary schools have ever been subjected to, the Government reiterated those sentiments by stating it would ‘make sure that every subject is taught well in primary schools and that every child gets the benefit of a rich, well-designed and broad curriculum’.
Now, we are told in what has become the traditional style of government ‘leak’ to the media, that primary school children will study fewer subjects to concentrate on ‘the basics’.
There is a ring of déjà vu to this. Data, which my research centre at the University of Manchester has been collecting from a large representative national sample of primary schools since 1997, indicate that for all of that 10 year period all subjects except for English and mathematics at both Key Stages 1 (ages 5-7) and 2 (ages 7-11) have suffered reductions in their teaching time (Boyle & Bragg, 2006).
Those reductions have been solely to make more time for the ‘teaching’ of English and mathematics which are coincidentally the only two subjects which the Government measures for its Standards agenda league tables. During those 10 years English and mathematics have been taught for over 50% of the available teaching time thereby reducing the other nine statutory subjects to an undignified partitioning of the remaining 50% of teaching time between them. Our subject teaching time data reveal that history, geography, art and music have all but disappeared as discrete taught entities so it will be easy to ‘roll them into one’(as the ‘leaked report so graphically describes what used to be called cross-curricular teaching).