Last updated: 28 Feb 2005

An overview of the forces for curriculum change.

	Low resolution	High Resolution
QuickTime player
Real Player
Windows Media Player

Transcript

John White, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Education, Institute of Education: 'I think the 2000 aims statement is a good start to shaping the national curriculum because they put the emphasis on the sort of person that we want a pupil to become.'

Ian Colwill, Director of Curriculum Division, QCA: 'We have a set of aims and purposes in that document that make very clear that education is not either about learning and achievement or about personal development, but it's about both and that they go together; and I think we need to make those aims and purposes much clearer, we need to link them in a lot stronger with the importance of the subjects and we need to make it clearer how those subjects fit into those broader aims and purposes.'

Angela McFarlane, Professor in Education, University of Bristol: 'Let's be brave here and say: yes, we may still be covering 10 subject areas, but within each of those subject areas we're only going to cover a small number of big ideas and we're going to cover them in depth; and we're going to make links between those big ideas that occur in history and in science and in language learning.'

Colleen McLaughlin, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge: 'I think we need to look at a curriculum that looks at different ways of organising knowledge and helps young people to look at things thematically, to look at them through processes, as well as to look within a subject discipline.'

Niel McLean, Executive Director, Educational Practice, Becta: 'We've got to recognise that if we're talking about a personalised system that goes beyond what the state can prescribe. A state can quite confidently write one national curriculum, but it can't write 6 million. If you're going to get this kind of bespoke, personalised learning that means the only way of achieving this capacity is by local innovation.'

Carmel Gallagher, Curriculum and Assessment Development Manager, CCEA: 'What we have achieved in Northern Ireland is making very explicit the aims, objectives and values of the curriculum and that that is what leads the curriculum not the needs of individual subjects.'

Angela McFarlane, Professor in Education, University of Bristol: 'I think because of the high stakes involved in assessment, it inevitably frames everything that teachers and schools are trying to do to help their youngsters achieve the highest standards they can. So it's very important that when we think about trying to change that framework we think about the impact that's going to have.

John White, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Education, Institute of Education: The greatest change that's required in the curriculum now is for us to see it as a whole and not as a series of pieces. For too long we've seen it as simply various blocks; various subjects; various chunks, as it were. Now we've got to see it as a whole.'

Professor Guy Claxton, Professor of the Learning Sciences, University of Bristol, Graduate School of Education: 'If education is about exercising young people's learning muscles, helping them develop their learning power, then the topics that we have to choose for them are those which are most engaging and most challenging, both of those things at once, in terms of recruiting their interest and also encouraging them to stretch their own minds. That becomes more important than the venerable bodies of knowledge in their own right. We have to balance both those criteria now.'

Angela McFarlane, Professor in Education, University of Bristol: 'Potentially the benefits of e-learning and e-assessment are huge, particularly if we leverage e-assessment to be able to get at reliable and valid accreditation of skill sets among young people and move us away from this high dependency on giving kids credit for what they know rather than how they learn.'

Ian Colwill, Director of Curriculum Division, QCA: 'The curriculum we've got at the moment recognises that it has to adapt and change to meet the changing needs of society and what we're about is looking at how you take forward the existing structure and adapt it as opposed to throwing the whole thing out and starting again.'

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