Last updated: 28 Feb 2005

Examining in greater depth the challenge posed to the curriculum by new understanding about learning.

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Susie Parsons, Chief Executive, Campaign for Learning: 'The curriculum needs to be focused on what the point of learning is: learning is a process of active engagement; it's what we do to make sense of the world. It develops our skills and our knowledge and our understanding and it should lead to a desire to learn more, to carry on learning throughout our lives.'

Professor Guy Claxton, Professor of the Learning Sciences, University of Bristol, Graduate School of Education: 'We now know that the idea that intelligence is some kind of fixed-sized capacity that you're given when you're born, and that dogs you for the rest of your life, that it sets a ceiling on what you can be expected to achieve is neither scientifically justified nor educationally useful.'

Professor Kate Myers, Senior Associate, Leadership for Learning, Cambridge University: 'We need to think about how students learn and the flow of learning. So spending a whole day, perhaps, on a project, perhaps on the arts, writing some music or playing some music, perhaps learning a language in an intensive immersion course in a month; rather than 20 minutes or 40 minutes a day over five years. We need to try to link up what we're trying to teach with what we know about learning.'

Professor Guy Claxton, Professor of the Learning Sciences: 'There are one or two blind alleys around in thinking about the development of the curriculum. One of them is the notion of learning styles, which is very powerfully around at the moment. Young people differ in the way they go about learning, but those differences are a matter of habit and preference. They can be developed, changed and built on. We need to be identifying a snapshot of their current habits and say how can we help you develop and stretch the ones that perhaps you're not already so good at.'

Tim Oates, Head or Research, QCA: 'There's very interesting work on conceptual misunderstandings that children have in specific subjects. So by looking in detail at the mistakes they make, just common mistakes, you can get a grip on how they build up knowledge in a subject and that can be of great importance for teachers in structuring their material, in giving people examples and opportunities to learn material.'

Angela McFarlane, Professor in Education, University of Bristol: 'One of the things that we're beginning to understand better about the way people learn is what's engaged in the process of learning rather than judging learning purely through its outcomes. So how effective were you at acquiring that new vocabulary rather than simply testing you on a list of words, for example. Digital technologies are quite important here because when you work with digital technologies it's often possible to record a history of what you've done. Even if that is simply a series of drafts of a piece of writing; and then to look at those with the child and talk about how their thinking has developed and what they might have done to help that thinking accelerate; in a different way; how they might have done that work more effectively.'

Professor Guy Claxton, Professor of the Learning Sciences: 'All young people can get better at learning. There is enormous room for all of us to develop our ability to persist in the face of difficulty, to ask good questions, to be better at collaborating. This is truly what we should be offering young people because it is something they can all gain from, they can all win at, there need be no losers in the game of building young people's learning power.'

Disclaimer: This film is intended to stimulate debate. Views expressed are not necessarily those of QCA.