12 July 2007

At one level, there is nothing particularly new or remarkable about this curriculum.

In history, young people will study, amongst other things: 

• the development of political power from the middle ages to the twentieth century; 
• the evolving relationship between Crown and Parliament; 
• the British Empire; 
• slavery and its abolition; 
• the two world wars and the Holocaust.

In English,

• they will learn grammar and punctuation; 
• they will read Shakespeare and other prescribed playwrights, poets and authors from the English literary heritage; 
• they will read the works of great contemporary writers;
• they will write extended pieces in a range of styles, and learn to express ideas cogently and persuasively; 
• and they will take part in formal presentations and debates.

They will study the physical and human geography of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the world, including countries in different stages of economic development; and as geography has always done, the relationships between Man and environment.

And in mathematics: linear equations, algebra, polynomial graphs, Pythagoras, transformations, and experimental and theoretical probabilities.

These are some of the inputs: the intended outputs are maximum progress in learning for each individual pupil.

Curriculum, or the syllabuses of study for each discipline, have traditionally been expressed only in terms of inputs.

And equally traditionally, the job of the teacher was to teach the syllabus, and the job of the pupils was to learn.

If teachers covered the syllabus each term, and the syllabus for the year, then they could be judged to be 'teaching', even if few in the room were learning.

Across the Western world, the rate of improvement in educational attainment has slowed down in the past decade; in some countries it has reached a glass ceiling, through which it cannot break. The traditional approach to covering the syllabus has been exhausted; it has delivered all it can; it will work no more.

Abundant and rigorous research – again throughout the Western world, but much of it in the United Kingdom - has pointed the way forward.

We now know that to maximise the learning for each individual, we must first measure the level of progress that the student has reached (which is called 'assessment for learning'); we must then plan and deliver the learning necessary to enable the pupil to advance to the next level of progress (which is called 'personalised learning').

The development of such a customised or child-centred approach to teaching and learning is not some new-age obsession with making students feel good, or any rejection of the importance of formal teaching, or a drift from discipline-based curriculum: it is the internationally proven research-based strategy for improving learning and raising attainment at individual, school and national level.

Personalising learning requires highly focused teaching: assessing performance today, in order to shape the next step in learning for that child or that group of children – a step not to be taken next term, or next year, but tomorrow.

The new curriculum is designed to enable the personalisation of learning, in a way that the previous curriculum did not. While still prescribing the fundamental body of knowledge, skill and understanding that must form the core curriculum diet of all young people - using the heritage of the past to prepare them for the challenges of the future - it has the depth and range necessary to enable teachers to focus their teaching on what each individual needs in order to progress.

Each child is continually challenged by tasks just at the current outer limit of his or her capacity: as each task is achieved and a new one is set, growth in learning occurs progressively and sequentially. The alternative – when learning is not differentiated according to the readiness of the individual to learn – is for many children to become disaffected because the task is utterly beyond their current reach, and for others to be bored because it is so easy. For both groups of children, no learning takes place.

Thus, for example in a key stage 3 English class, the teacher might direct some pupils to the works of Conan Doyle or HG Wells or Robert Louis Stevenson, while others might be reading Hardy, George Eliot or Chaucer. For all those youngsters, real learning will occur. The essence of the new curriculum is that the prescribed programmes of study for all twelve subjects, and the three non-statutory programmes, provide – in each discipline - a rich and deep resource for the personalisation of learning.

There is much else of course within the new curriculum which is totally new and contemporary, and which reflects and enhances contemporary practice in the most successful schools in the nation, which have had a direct input into this work.

New areas of learning, both within the traditional disciplines and in new programmes of study, such as economic wellbeing and financial capability, will meet the needs of young people whose lives will be lived to the end of this century, in a world very different from this one.

New cross-curriculum emphases: enterprise and creativity; the acquisition and exercise of skills; using assessment to promote progress in learning; new approaches to organisation of the school day - all these are aimed directly at the fundamental learning domains of knowledge, attitude and skill.

The United Kingdom is at the forefront of measuring and reporting student learning, and implementing strategies to raise levels of attainment.

Those efforts must be supported by the appropriate curriculum.

There are some who will condemn this curriculum as

• 'progressive' (I certainly hope it is);
• or as 'out-comes based education' (what other sort could there be?);
• or as 'child-centred' (is that a problem?);
• or as 'trendy' (which I find amusing);
• and will want to visit upon it a range of other perceived ills such as constructivism, whole language teaching and fuzzy maths - all of which it rejects.

Such critics see education as a winnowing device to sort the wheat from the chaff - a game of winners and losers.

Those who have put this curriculum together have a contrary view:

• of the purpose of education being to give every young person the very best preparation for life
• of maximising and recognising the potential and achievement of each individual
• of bridging the divisions within our society - ethnic, religious, cultural, social, economic, regional, and those divisions which arise from disability
• of education supporting social mobility and the long-term economic security of the nation and its citizens.

Years of international research evidence have demonstrated that a new curriculum precisely along the lines of that now being introduced is the key to continued growth in educational performance for the individual, the school and the nation.

The foundation on which it is built can no longer be seriously questioned: the international jury came in years ago, and it is nationally important that we get on with it.

Ken Boston