Designing the perfect assessment system, part 4: slimming down the curriculum

Do we need depth before breadth?

This is part four of a series on curriculum & assessment - read part one, part two and part three.

In debates about the curriculum, you’ll often hear that we need to "slim down" the curriculum. We need to focus on fewer concepts in greater depth. We need to stop racing superficially through a torrent of content and give students the chance to really understand what they are learning.

These kinds of phrases are very typical of education debates. They sound superficially smart and appealing, but they are so abstract that they can mean different things to different people, and therefore can be used to justify totally different types of classroom practice. And when everyone is talking at cross purposes like this, it makes having a productive conversation much more difficult.

Here is one way in which I think slimming down the curriculum is a good idea, and two ways in which I think it’s a terrible idea.

Why slimming down the curriculum is a good idea: focus on fundamental concepts

In some subjects, there are fundamental concepts that underpin all further learning. Number bonds & multiplication tables in maths, the letter-sound code in reading, and sentence structure in writing. These aren't concepts that can be grasped in a single lesson or even a term. They require sustained practice, and if you try and move on before you have grasped them, you will struggle. A number of researchers have noted that many East Asian maths curriculums have a slimmed down early years curriculum and high performance at the end of compulsory schooling. They go slow to go fast, because if you take the time to build solid foundations you make it easier to add an amazing superstructure.

For this reason, I’m in favour of organising the primary curriculum to prioritise these concepts. England’s curriculum at the moment already prioritises phonics, so nothing needs to change there. You could argue that in the maths curriculum, you could remove the statistics content at primary and just focus on number, measurement and geometry.

The biggest change I would like to see in England at primary is a reduction in the grammar content. Currently, students are answering questions about modal verbs and fronted adverbials when they struggle to identify what a verb is. This is a classic example of running before you can walk - or, in a metaphor I’ve used many times before, training for a marathon by running a marathon.

Why slimming down the curriculum is a bad idea: some fundamental concepts need breadth, not depth

Concepts like verbs and multiplication require a lot of practice in different contexts. But not everything is like verbs and multiplication. What about the skill of reading comprehension and inference? This is just as vital as sentence structure or number bonds, and in recent years, it’s been taught as though it is like them - something you need a lot of practice at over time. But the research does not bear this out. Students don’t need tons of practice at using inference strategies. Instead, to be able to read well, what you need is a large vocabulary and background knowledge. When it comes to vocabulary, breadth matters more than depth. Good readers need a vocabulary of thousands of words, but you don’t need to be spending a year learning the meaning of the word “consolidate”.

It’s for this reason that the cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has argued that reducing the time spent on history and geography in order to focus on reading skills is counter-productive. The kinds of knowledge you learn in history and geography make you a better reader. So that’s an argument for increasing the breadth of content on the curriculum, not reducing it.

Why slimming down the curriculum is a bad idea: ultimately, concepts are content

If you accept the first point, about reducing the content in primary and early years in order to focus on the fundamentals, then the corollary is that you need to increase the content in secondary. The whole point about going slower to go faster is that eventually, you go faster! You spend time on the fundamentals in order to make the superstructure easier to build. I can see the argument for eliminating the statistics content at primary. I can’t see the argument for eliminating statistics at secondary. I think students do too much extended writing at primary, but I think they should be doing lots of extended writing at GCSE.

Another great line that Dan Willingham is fond of quoting is that “the best geologists have seen the most rocks”. Concepts and content are intertwined. Skills are made up of knowledge. It is impossible to develop a sophisticated conceptual understanding of historical change and continuity if the only historical era you know is Germany 1919-1939. Metaphors that pejoratively refer to curriculum content as “fat” and “clutter” miss this point. It’s not fat, it’s muscle. It’s not clutter, it’s substance.

So what should we do?

The attractive premise of the “fewer concepts in greater depth” argument is that we can have our cake and eat it - we can reduce the content in the curriculum and magically improve standards at the same time. I think this is wishful thinking. Yes, there are some parts of the primary curriculum where we should look to reduce content, but that’s generally as a precursor to being able to teach more content at secondary. If a curriculum reform leads to an across-the-board reduction in content, it’s likely to have lower standards. Now of course, standards aren’t everything, and perhaps there are other powerful reasons why you are happy to reduce content & lower standards. That’s fine, but in that case you need to accept the trade-off - we think it’s worth it to reduce content and lower standards because it will produce xyz other benefits.

There is no primrose path to conceptual understanding, and there’s no magic wand that gives you high standards with low content.