By David Williams
The national curriculum is too big, too centrally controlled and has deskilled the teaching profession, an MPs’ investigation has found.
The national curriculum is too big, too centrally controlled and has deskilled the teaching profession, an MPs’ investigation has found.In a report published on April 2, the children, schools and families select committee urged the government to rethink the system and give more freedom to teachers.
Chair Barry Sheerman argued that two decades of ‘ministerial meddling’ had produced a curriculum that accounted for almost all classroom time but lacked coherence.
He said the curriculum, together with additional guidance in the form of National Strategies, had also reduced the ‘vivacity and individuality’ of teaching. The committee said schooling had become ‘a franchise operation more dependent on a recipe handed down by government’.
‘You’ve got to start trusting teachers more,’ he told Public Finance. ‘The pendulum has got to swing back. You’ve got to give them the resources, the stimulation and the support to help reclaim territory they’ve lost.
‘This isn’t to abolish the national curriculum, because most of the evidence we took said it was necessary. But we don’t have to have such a dominant and all-consuming curriculum.’
The independence enjoyed by academy schools, which follow the curriculum only for maths, science, English and ICT, should be extended to all state schools, the MPs said.
Their report also called for a cap on the proportion of teaching time taken up by the curriculum, the discontinuation of National Strategies, and guaranteed independence for the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency.
The National Union of Teachers welcomed the findings as ‘a major challenge to the government’s impulse to prescribe and dictate’.
Mary Bousted, Association of Teachers and Lecturers general secretary, said: ‘We want the national curriculum to be slimmed down, with decisions over what is taught made locally by teachers and schools.’
