2. What Future for the National Curriculum for England?
We Need to Debate State Education
This blog series will begin by deliberately side stepping much of the cultural and political sturm und drang that has surrounded both the inception and the subsequent development of the National Curriculum for England.
It will also try to avoid indulging in the pointless name calling that has often accompanied the perhaps understandably fevered discussion of the future of English state education and its curriculum. I won’t be using childish phrases like ‘the Blob’.
Persistent ideas about education, in my view, tend to exist for a good reason, and this reason is that they generally capture a partial truth of what most adults want for the education of the next generation. Few long standing educational ideas are entirely wrong.
I generally count myself as left-wing politically but a liberal traditionalist when it comes to the question of education and especially the school curriculum, but I also recognise that progressives, conservatives and radical educators have important ideas that need to be considered.
So whilst I do believe that the perspectives just mentioned often get the balance wrong on what our state system requires, I don’t think that any one position has a complete monopoly on truth and either way truth always benefits from the collision with error.
This is why it is so important that we have an open and honest debate about the future of state education, one in which existing ideas and perspectives are exchanged and new ideas are generated and evaluated. If we don’t have this debate, we will never move our system forward. This debate breaks down when we hurl emotional insults at each other.
However, whilst this blog series does hope to make a small contribution to the national debate over the future of the school curriculum, it does not aim to propagandise for my position on education.
The Importance of Bernstein
My main aim in these posts is to objectively show how the form of the NCfE has changed over time. In particular, my intention is to identify and then explain the various ways in which the NCfE first organised knowledge for educational purposes in 1988 and then structured knowledge differently in each subsequent version. To achieve this, I will need to introduce some education theory, most specifically that of Basil Bernstein, as this will help us to make visible the changing structure of the curriculum.
But before I introduce Bernstein’s thinking, and some other theoretical bits and pieces, I would like to first acknowledge that whilst the National Curriculum for England remains an important element of English state education, and continues to exist as a significant statement of cultural entitlement for young people in its own right, it is also true that the relative importance of NCfE within the system has declined since it was first introduced in 1988. Further, the NCfE has always been just one component of a wider institution that we call English state education.
Film still from Irvin Yeaworth’s highly influential 1958 horror The Blob which was released by Paramount Pictures.
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1 - What Future for the National Curriculum for England?
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