1. What Future for the National Curriculum for England?
A Very English Story of Challenge, Resistance, Conflict and Control
Jack Cade on London Stone by Sir John Gilbert (1881)
“Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school … It will be proved to thy face, that thou hast men about thee, that usually talk of a noun, and a verb; and such abominable words, as no Christian ear can endure to hear.”
Jack Cade, in William Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2, Act 4, Scene 7, written in 1591
“The [pedagogic] device is considered as a symbolic ruler of consciousness, giving rise to the question “Whose ruler, what consciousness?”. … Thus the device … becomes the focus of challenge, resistance and conflict”.
Basil Bernstein in Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity : Theory, Research, Critique, p185, published in 2000
Introduction
The National Curriculum for England (NCfE) was first introduced by the Conservative Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Baker in 1988 and was immediately a focus for challenge, resistance and conflict.
Since then it has been rewritten in full four times, once in 1995, again during a Conservative administration, and then twice during a period in which the Labour Party governed English state education. The Labour Party first rewrote it as a single document in 1999, but then staggered its second rewrite, publishing a new secondary curriculum in 2008, whilst planning for the introduction of a fresh primary state school curriculum in 2011, by which time the Labour Party was no longer in power.
The last full rewrite of the NCfE happened in 2013, and was led by the Conservative UK Coalition Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove. With this rewrite in particular there was again much challenge, resistance and conflict.
As this blog series begins, it seems likely that a UK General Election will be called soon enough - I mean really, for how long can a government without authority expect to exist? - and that the Labour Party will again take power. If they do so, there will no doubt be yet another rewrite of NCfE, and that, in itself, would be no bad thing, as all curriculums require periodic review.
So whatever one’s politics, and I am on the left, it would appear to be time that those who care for the cultural life of our nation took stock and asked: where have we got to with the story of the National Curriculum for England?
Read on: