What Is ‘The Curriculum’ For?

Teachers and students jointly creating what is taught and learnt

On 19 July 2024, the new Labour government announced a wide-ranging review of the English curriculum and assessment system. The national curriculum should be ‘rich and fulfilling’, ‘knowledge-rich’, ‘cutting-edge’, ‘aspirational and motivating…’^[1] Who could argue with that?

On its own terms there is much to welcome and be hopeful about in the proposed curriculum review which is headed by Professor Becky Francis CBE. Other educationists writing in this issue of PDT provide new and important insights about the ‘what’ of lessons and subject disciplines, about progression and continuity, breadth, depth and balance, inclusivity and diversity, and about the role of assessment and qualifications.

So let me offer some thoughts at a tangent to these main themes, to illustrate why I wouldn’t have started from here, with curriculum reform.

First, the descriptors of the proposed national curriculum, including those I have quoted above, sound very much like those of curriculum frameworks and reviews over the past 40 years. This essentially 20th-century paradigm implies that the curriculum is something with a real existence outside individual classrooms; something produced elsewhere which is ‘delivered’ by teachers.

Along with ‘pedagogy’ and ‘assessment’, ‘curriculum’ is an abstract concept, helpful in general contexts such as comparisons between different education systems. But the conceptual distinctions do not fit closely enough with what we might call the phenomenology of teaching, where the lines between curriculum and pedagogy, and between pedagogy and assessment, are hard to draw in practice. There is an obvious way in which this is true – self-evidently, teacher and students between them create what is taught and what is learnt in every lesson within the physical and social space of a classroom.^[2]

Placing the enquiring teacher at the centre of curriculum change

But there is also a stronger argument to be made, which goes back to a period before the creation of a national curriculum in England, to the radical challenge provided by the educationist Lawrence Stenhouse – well-known to us older and retired teachers and scholars but perhaps less familiar to the current generation. He proposed that ‘the curriculum’ is not a fixed entity but a developmental process centred around inquiry-based teaching and learning, and contextualised by the characteristics and needs of the students and their communities.

Stenhouse initiated a movement in which teachers worked with curriculum specialists in higher education institutions to transform the curriculum model from one of mastery of knowledge content to one of speculation about the nature of knowledge. Such a process, Stenhouse argued, engages and empowers students, and grants full professionalism to teachers.

Whilst I am not suggesting that the Stenhousian model of dynamic curriculum development could exert a strong influence over government policy – policy-makers are too wedded to centralised structures and procedures, as well as to policy-novelty – I do think the review could at least look in that direction.

The British Educational Research Association (BERA) has recently published a book commemorating the 50 years of its existence, entitled ‘Curriculum in a Changing World‘. Amongst many cogent essays, all of which are relevant to the curriculum review, I want to single out Professor John Elliott’s piece, ‘Placing the teachers at the centre of curriculum change’, in which he alludes to the idea of classrooms as laboratories of learning, in which ‘explicit pedagogical theory becomes a necessary condition for sustaining a process of collaborative curriculum development across classrooms.’

The fallacy of the work-related curriculum

And now I want to move to a second set of problems for the notion of curriculum, arising from a consideration of ‘the characteristics and needs of the students and their communities’ I cited above. In the aims and terms of reference for the curriculum review, we read about the need for schools to prepare young people ‘for life and work’. Although one can hardly argue with this in broad terms, it nonetheless seems to me to echo the kind of 20^th-century rhetoric that risks reducing education to ‘learning’ as instrumental to becoming an employed adult.

The initial problem with trying to make too close a link between education and employment is partly a question of a constantly-shifting labour market, in both the short and longer terms. This website gives the general picture in 2024:

‘Many of the occupations with the largest year-on-year declines in job postings are associated with sectors reliant on under-pressure consumer discretionary expenditure, including production, retail, distribution and consumer services. Construction, meanwhile, has been hit by a housing market slowdown as interest rates have risen.’^[3]

‘Indeed’s 2024 UK Jobs & Hiring Trends Report: Challenges Ahead in 2024’

In any case, for decades it has proved extremely difficult to align educational curricula and qualifications with employers’ expressed needs and wishes. A recent government report (Ofqual 2023) notes that:

‘Learners were most likely to value VTQs, FSQs and EPAs compared to the other groups, while employers especially showed lower levels of agreement here.’^[4]

‘Perceptions of Vocational and Technical Qualifications in England – wave 6’

The report also notes that employers provide their own training and routes to qualifications; what they want new employees to have is work experience. Figures for employers requiring specific qualifications, even at higher level managerial and professional posts, were all below 50%. On the other hand, a 2022 report from the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development claims that:

‘many employers report that the education system does not prepare young people for the workplace. The most commonly identified reasons were that young people lacked experience of the world, employability skills and common sense, or had poor attitudes or a lack of motivation.’^[5]

‘Employer views on skills policy in the UK’

I won’t pursue the argument further here, because these issues are identical to those consistently identified from the late 1980s, when the ‘work-related curriculum’ came into vogue, and onwards through recession and boom alike.

A curriculum to survive and thrive?

What is new are the challenges young people face now and which (on current showing) will only get worse in future, most of all the existential threat of global climate breakdown; but also the unpredictability of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on livelihoods and life in general, as well as on teaching and learning.^[6] The underlying issue for young people is not ‘What do I need to know?’ but rather ‘Where do I belong in all this? what can I do about any of it?’

At present, education is not working for many young people; it is not helping them to answer these questions; and this is being revealed in a shocking variety of ways, such as:

• in the data for special educational needs, and the system’s failure to make adequate provision for children who need extra support to flourish
• in the data for suspensions and exclusions, and the system’s failure to provide support and a trusting, trustworthy environment in all schools
• in the data for the growing gap between rich and poor, with 4.3 million children living in poverty – that is, without enough food for their brains and bodies, space for homework or sleeping, and with exposure to stress and violence
• above all, in the data for young people’s mental ill-health, and particularly the high levels of anxiety they are living with.^[7]

Surely, to survive and thrive in these conditions and with these challenges, young people need to be helped to develop some serious intellectual and psycho-social qualities, including critical analysis, compassion, a sense of connection with the past and future, a sense of collective responsibility, and a sense of humour? STEM subject domains are centrally important to understanding and engaging with the world; but so are the Humanities – the clue is in the name. So we need to ask, how helpful are these subject-silos?

When Bridget Phillipson was Shadow Education Secretary in 2023, she wrote an article for the TES in which she said that Labour’s intentions for education entailed ‘a challenge that goes far beyond education…’^[8] I imagine she realises that education is no longer the route to social mobility, and thus that the curriculum cannot be transformed to be inclusive, aspirational or cutting-edge without making the education system more fit for purpose; and that the education system cannot be made more fit for purpose without large reforms in the wider polity.

To reiterate, I wouldn’t have started from here…

This article is part of our series on curriculum reform edited by Graham Handscomb.

Lesley Saunders has worked all her life in education, as teacher, researcher, policy adviser and independent consultant. Her main posts were as Principal Research Officer and Head of the School Improvement Research Centre at the National Foundation for Educational Research; and subsequently as Senior Policy Adviser for Research, General Teaching Council for England. Lesley is a visiting professor at UCL Institute of Education and her professorial lecture, given in 2004, was called ‘Grounding the Democratic Imagination: Developing the Relationship between Research and Policy in Education’.

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1. Announcement of Curriculum and Assessment Review, Department for Education, 19 July 2024
2. for example https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0013189X241238698
3. https://www.hiringlab.org/uk/blog/2023/12/07/indeed-2024-uk-trends-report/:
4. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/perceptions-of-vocational-and-technical-qualifications-wave-6/perceptions-of-vocational-and-technical-qualifications-in-england-wave-6
5. https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/employer-skills-survey-1_tcm18-110268.pdf
6. Josh Brake, ‘Here’s How I’m Engaging AI This Fall’ https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/heres-how-im-engaging-ai-this-fall
7. https://natcen.ac.uk/publications/children-and-young-peoples-mental-health-2023
8. https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/exclusive-bridget-phillipson-labour-plans-education