Daisy I entirely agree with you and l would also agree in the context of Secondary Science your worthy argument might imply KS3 should be taught over a three year period, as originally designed, and securing a solid foundation of the core knowledge and procedural knowledge might yield the depth and breadth, the readiness to take part in the marathon as KS4.
Great article, Daisy! It's surprising that many educationalists that claim the curriculum must be slimmed down simultaneously advocate adding useless or secondary content such as statistics in primary, as you refer, or purely "motivating" seductive details
We absolutely need to reduce the depth in both primary English and maths. When I was at primary school in the 1950s/'60s very little technical language was used in English. Adjectives were called describing words and adverbs were doing words. Presumably at some point I learned that they were also known as adverbs and adjectives. I studied English and drama for my degree and attained a first class honours so I can only deduce that an early grasp of the correct linguistic lingo didn't hold me back. I'd also go for slimming this down at KS3 and 4. There's far too high a percentage of youngsters still failing to attain L4 in GCSE English and maths. Reading examples of the papers I'm not surprised. I can recall doing log tables etc for O level. Oddly enough they've yet to make an appearance in my actual life despite the grief they gave me at secondary school. Trigonometry ??? My parents were the generation who left school at 13/14 years of age. They both read well, spelled well, and had as good a grasp of maths as I did. They also had amazing general knowledge. I think they weren't alone in that. Don't get me wrong. I'm an advocate for learning having spent over 40 years as a primary teacher, headteacher and local authority adviser but something's going wrong if kids are leaving school at 16 apparently not meeting a national standard in maths and/ or English after having spent 12 years in the school system. I suspect it's both the type of English and maths content we expect them to engage with and the type of assessment we're using. PS: I fondly recall being taught that I must never start a sentence with the word and. And that's a story for another time.
To be honest I think the whole exam system, including in many HEIs, is well past it's sell by date. There's an article from three years ago by Simon Jenkins that expresses my feelings well I think.
GCSEs right now are only really useful if you're going on to do A levels. And to be honest you don't need the exam pass to study the subject at A level. Think how much time and funding would be saved if it wasn't used on running GCSE courses and exams. We've also now got the anomaly that the school leaving age has been raised to 18 but there's nothing useful in place for those youngsters who don't have the paper qualifications to carry on to A level. The Gove reforms of over a decade ago mean that you can't get onto to any meaningful course at FE without L4 GCSE in English and maths. And you can forget apprenticeships because the few that exist are snapped up by kids who have university entrance qualifications but are opting for apprenticeships because they can earn while they learn and avoid a student loan. Hence the huge shortage of youngsters learning crafts. Artisan crafts people from electricians to bricklayers to stone masons are disappearing because of very limited opportunities to train unless you have the magic ticket of GCSE L4 in English and maths.. Foundation Skills exams are a better option but few schools offer these are FE colleges want the 16 to 18 year olds to keep doing resits because that's the rule. There are plenty of examples in the real world of people leading successful, purposeful lives who have few if any paper qualifications to their name including Jamie Oliver and Queen Camilla to name but two.
What if we ask a different question -- instead of depth or breadth, what if we asked "What if there were no curriculum at all?" Most of us assume that you must have a curriculum -- otherwise what would teachers and kids do? Yet, our "modern" ideas about a curriculum that is adhered artificially to a subject or grade level would be puzzling to students and educators before the industrial age. Deciding on the parameters of a curriculum is a bit like deciding what size of pail should be filled. When learning is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail, we actually return to traditional notions of school. That's not to say for a moment that there aren't certain things that need to be learned - and you and others have certainly pointed out some important ones. But let's let the learning belong to the student, not the course; let's learn how to allow for the individual differences that we know every child brings to class. Guess what? It can be done and kids can learn at high levels especially when we learn how to help them take more responsibility for their own learning. Assessment in that scenario shifts away from a deficit-based approach and becomes asset-based.
Daisy I entirely agree with you and l would also agree in the context of Secondary Science your worthy argument might imply KS3 should be taught over a three year period, as originally designed, and securing a solid foundation of the core knowledge and procedural knowledge might yield the depth and breadth, the readiness to take part in the marathon as KS4.
Great article, Daisy! It's surprising that many educationalists that claim the curriculum must be slimmed down simultaneously advocate adding useless or secondary content such as statistics in primary, as you refer, or purely "motivating" seductive details
We absolutely need to reduce the depth in both primary English and maths. When I was at primary school in the 1950s/'60s very little technical language was used in English. Adjectives were called describing words and adverbs were doing words. Presumably at some point I learned that they were also known as adverbs and adjectives. I studied English and drama for my degree and attained a first class honours so I can only deduce that an early grasp of the correct linguistic lingo didn't hold me back. I'd also go for slimming this down at KS3 and 4. There's far too high a percentage of youngsters still failing to attain L4 in GCSE English and maths. Reading examples of the papers I'm not surprised. I can recall doing log tables etc for O level. Oddly enough they've yet to make an appearance in my actual life despite the grief they gave me at secondary school. Trigonometry ??? My parents were the generation who left school at 13/14 years of age. They both read well, spelled well, and had as good a grasp of maths as I did. They also had amazing general knowledge. I think they weren't alone in that. Don't get me wrong. I'm an advocate for learning having spent over 40 years as a primary teacher, headteacher and local authority adviser but something's going wrong if kids are leaving school at 16 apparently not meeting a national standard in maths and/ or English after having spent 12 years in the school system. I suspect it's both the type of English and maths content we expect them to engage with and the type of assessment we're using. PS: I fondly recall being taught that I must never start a sentence with the word and. And that's a story for another time.
Do you think the high proportion of students getting below grade 4 at GCSE is because the grade 4 standard is too high?
To be honest I think the whole exam system, including in many HEIs, is well past it's sell by date. There's an article from three years ago by Simon Jenkins that expresses my feelings well I think.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/07/gcse-exams-pandemic-education-system
GCSEs right now are only really useful if you're going on to do A levels. And to be honest you don't need the exam pass to study the subject at A level. Think how much time and funding would be saved if it wasn't used on running GCSE courses and exams. We've also now got the anomaly that the school leaving age has been raised to 18 but there's nothing useful in place for those youngsters who don't have the paper qualifications to carry on to A level. The Gove reforms of over a decade ago mean that you can't get onto to any meaningful course at FE without L4 GCSE in English and maths. And you can forget apprenticeships because the few that exist are snapped up by kids who have university entrance qualifications but are opting for apprenticeships because they can earn while they learn and avoid a student loan. Hence the huge shortage of youngsters learning crafts. Artisan crafts people from electricians to bricklayers to stone masons are disappearing because of very limited opportunities to train unless you have the magic ticket of GCSE L4 in English and maths.. Foundation Skills exams are a better option but few schools offer these are FE colleges want the 16 to 18 year olds to keep doing resits because that's the rule. There are plenty of examples in the real world of people leading successful, purposeful lives who have few if any paper qualifications to their name including Jamie Oliver and Queen Camilla to name but two.
Really thought provoking read, Daisy. Thank you.
Thanks for this. I’ve enjoyed this series and everything else of yours I’ve read.
What if we ask a different question -- instead of depth or breadth, what if we asked "What if there were no curriculum at all?" Most of us assume that you must have a curriculum -- otherwise what would teachers and kids do? Yet, our "modern" ideas about a curriculum that is adhered artificially to a subject or grade level would be puzzling to students and educators before the industrial age. Deciding on the parameters of a curriculum is a bit like deciding what size of pail should be filled. When learning is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail, we actually return to traditional notions of school. That's not to say for a moment that there aren't certain things that need to be learned - and you and others have certainly pointed out some important ones. But let's let the learning belong to the student, not the course; let's learn how to allow for the individual differences that we know every child brings to class. Guess what? It can be done and kids can learn at high levels especially when we learn how to help them take more responsibility for their own learning. Assessment in that scenario shifts away from a deficit-based approach and becomes asset-based.