In January 2008 Ed Balls appointed Sir Jim Rose to review the current Primary curriculum and recommend changes for implementation from September 2011. Jim Rose, a distinguished professor of education, has reported for this government before. In 2006 his review of the teaching of reading was seized on by education ministers to justify imposing on teachers despite much opposition a single method to teach children to read. A decade and a half earlier, Rose was one of the ‘Three Wise Men’ tasked by the Tories with reporting on the state of England’s Primary schools. The report which Rose together with Chris Woodhead and Robin Alexander wrote was used by John Major to intensify a backlash against so-called ‘child-centred’ educational approaches and to strengthen central government’s control over schooling. The Rose Review into the Primary curriculum will be published in March. But the inadequacy of its remit, intellectual perspectives and attitude towards consultation are all robustly challenged in the latest interim report from the Cambridge Primary Review team: Towards a new Primary Curriculum. Ironically, the report’s author is Robin Alexander.
The Cambridge Primary Review was initiated independent of government by academics in 2004, and began to research, consult and publish findings from 2006. By presenting detailed evidence from a weighty database it has bolstered arguments countering many of New Labour’s central tenets about education. Professor Alexander peppers this latest publication with direct criticism of the Rose Review for intending merely to re-shuffle rather than reform the curriculum. Alexander presents a radical reconceptualisation of what Primary education is for and how it should be organised. He argues that a third of the school-year should be set free from the National Curriculum’s centralised prescription and given over to a ‘community curriculum’ whose content should be decided by individual schools at local level. He proposes an end to the two-tier curriculum currently enforced on pupils by the over-testing regime. While literacy and numeracy take the lion’s share of available time in school, learning in art, music, the humanities, sport and science must compete for what’s left. Quality as well as quantity of provision suffers, and pupils are prevented from obtaining their entitlement to a broad and balanced educational-offer.
Sacrificing breadth of learning-experience to the imperatives of high-stakes testing and the ‘standards’ agenda so relentlessly enforced by New Labour has been a betrayal of pupils and teachers. Better, Alexander argues, to understand breadth of learning-experience as a guarantor of high standards and of child well-being. To secure both breadth and quality, Alexander dispenses with the notion of literacy and numeracy at the core and re-conceives the Primary curriculum as a matrix of twelve specified aims and eight ‘domains’. This is an original attempt to move beyond the entrenched argument about whether ‘traditional’ subjects or ‘progressive’ topics should organise curriculum-content in the Primary school. Alexander argues that the Primary phase is both a period for preparing the child for Secondary education and a period across which the child develops in her own right. The Primary curriculum should be informed by a commitment to the importance of knowledge, understanding, inquiry and disposition as well as skills. Alexander presents these recommendations as a framework. Others, notably teachers and schools, should have charge of the details.
A final report in the Spring will consider testing and assessment. It is clear, however, that the radical changes already outlined require an end to KS1 and KS2 SATs. As this report puts it, the assessment tail will not be permitted any longer to wag the curriculum dog.
The work of the Cambridge Primary Review team is outflanking those perspectives which inform New Labour’s education-policy. While Professor Rose must reckon with the arguments, Ed Balls will have to reckon with the weight of organised support which rallies to an affirmation that teachers and schools should have more autonomy in curriculum-maters, that assessment must be re-cast, and that if breadth of educational experience is attained children’s well-being is more assured and high standards more likely to follow. NUT members can use this report to help prevent their union from accommodating to the Rose Review.
A condensed briefing and the full report can be downloaded from: www.primaryreview.org.uk
