Why the national curriculum is not as important as you think

Other things matter more

In England, the national curriculum has been in the news after the Shadow Education minister, Bridget Phillipson, reminded everyone that a future Labour government plans to review it.

I have written a lot about the curriculum and I think it's an important part of education. But I also think that the national curriculum in England - and many other countries - is not as important as is sometimes assumed. This is not just because some schools in England are exempt from following the national curriculum. Even if it were compulsory for every school, it would still not be a significant lever for change. Four other parts of the education system make a bigger difference to what students learn.

1. Lesson resources

When most non-educationalists think about "the curriculum", I think they have something like this in mind: the curriculum basically tells teachers what to teach each lesson. That is a reasonable assumption, but in England it is not the case. The national curriculum provides nothing like this level of detail, even our current 2014 version which is more specific and detailed than its predecessors. The entire primary and secondary curriculum for every subject is about 300 pages long. A huge amount of work has to be done to turn what you see in this curriculum document into actual living and breathing lessons.

Who does this work? Individual teachers, textbook writers, digital resource creators, central teams at multi-academy trusts...it varies.

And there are huge differences in the way different teachers / schools / publishers will interpret the national curriculum. Back in 2012, I took part in a DfE roundtable on the history section of the new national curriculum. One of the delegates correctly pointed that whilst there was an awful lot of content in the primary history curriculum, there was no mandate as to how long schools should spend on each section. A topic like “the Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor” could be covered in an hour or six weeks. Schools can choose to teach 40 minutes of history a week or three hours. These decisions make a huge difference and are entirely up to schools.

2. Teachers, teacher training & CPD

You can have the most brilliant curriculum & resources in the world, but you need teachers to deliver it, you need teachers who have had training in how to deliver it, and you need teachers who believe that it is deliverable. It is possible for extremely well-designed resources to fail in the classroom if teachers don’t understand how they work.

It is noticeable that countries with successful education systems often integrate their resources into their teacher training - eg, Singapore Maths, Finland before its current reforms.

3. Inspection

You can have a national curriculum document. You can have great resources that have been designed with the curriculum in mind. And you can have teachers trained to use those resources. But what if a school decide not to teach certain content or subjects? How will anyone know?

The standard political response to this question is that Ofsted inspection will check to see that schools are delivering the national curriculum. And certainly, over the past few years, that is a responsibility Ofsted have taken seriously, penalising schools who do not teach the full range of NC subjects and content. The fact that this is happening shows that the national curriculum is not always being followed.

4. Assessment

So you have the great resources, the great teachers, the inspection system ensuring that everything is done as it should be. You are still missing one crucial ingredient: the minds of the students.

Have the students learnt what you wanted to teach them?

Deep down, this is actually what people mean when they say “I think [this important thing] should be on the curriculum”. They don’t really care whether it is on the curriculum or not. What they care about is whether students know and can do [this important thing].

That is what assessment tries to measure. It is imperfect and imprecise and it has all kinds of problems, but it is our best method for finding out if the curriculum and the teaching are making a difference. In the words of Dylan Wiliam, assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning. If student always learnt what we taught them, we wouldn’t need assessment. If we could just read out the curriculum document to students and that meant they had mastered it, we wouldn’t need assessment. But that’s now how it works. We do need assessment, and designing good assessments is an intriguing philosophical and practical challenge, one where you are attempting to peer inside the head of another human being.

This is the reason why, after becoming fascinated with the curriculum, I ended up working full time on assessment. Because in the end, it is assessment which makes the curriculum concrete, and which often produces important correctives to undeveloped ideas about the curriculum. For example, you might think it is very important to teach critical thinking and problem solving. But when you come to design those assessments, you might realise that it is quite hard to assess them in the abstract.

It’s also important to remember that for all the talk about students in England being overburdened with assessment, the vast majority of the national curriculum is not assessed. At primary, nothing apart from English and maths is externally assessed. At secondary, the KS3 curriculum is not directly assessed, and at KS4, most subjects are optional. The history curriculum is one that routinely attracts comment and controversy, yet the majority of students will never sit an exam in history, and those that do are assessed on a tiny fragment of the curriculum. Go back to the statement I chose at the start: “the Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor”. In the absence of any national history exam, we have no real idea how that statement is being interpreted by schools, how much time is being allocated to it, and what students learn from the lessons they receive on it.

What is the conclusion for politicians and for anyone concerned with changing what students learn? Revising the words in a 300 page curriculum document will not, on its own, make much of a difference. It is a much bigger challenge.