School education needs major surgery too

Credit: WavebreakMediaMicro via Adobe Stock.

24 September 2024

By John White

‘Major surgery, not sticking plasters.’ What Keir Starmer said recently about NHS reforms applies also to school education in England. For nearly 40 years we have been blighted by a National Curriculum whose main rationale is as the central pillar of a selective system as indefensible as the eugenics-based binary system of the post-war years but all the more effective for being less visible.

School education is a sorting device built around tests and examinations and, today, league tables. The ‘equality of opportunity’ it is said to provide is of the same ilk as the ancient belief that if people are poor, it’s their own fault. The educational equivalent is that if children don’t do well in the exam stakes, they had a chance but failed to take it. Our inhumane school system leaves many of the unsuccessful with next to nothing.

National curricula can be of different kinds. Ours is built round a small number of discrete subjects, mainly knowledge-based, like science, mathematics, history and geography. It has become even more knowledge-orientated since 2014 with the demotion of art and music on the one hand and the official emphasis on the transmission of ‘essential knowledge’ as the primary purpose of education. This claim is hardly surprising in a test-driven regime. None of this should be taken to imply that disciplinary knowledge is unimportant. No one could reasonably deny that school education should to a large extent include maths, science, history and geography, whether taught in separate compartments or in other ways. The question is: why and how should they be included?

This brings us back to the rationale for the National Curriculum. Some people may welcome it as a ‘traditional’ curriculum. This is hardly a justification of it, but it contains more than a grain of truth. The 1988 National Curriculum was virtually identical to that introduced in 1904 for secondary schools. At that time it marked the victory of a school education thought suitable for the now dominant industrial and commercial middle classes over the classics-based education long prized by the establishment.

What accounts for the nineteenth-century middle-class preference for an array of subjects taught in separate compartments? Part of the answer has – once again – to do with examinations, beginning with the subject-based matriculation exam first introduced by the young UCL in 1838 as a precondition for taking a London University degree course.

But, as I discuss in The Invention of the Secondary Curriculum, a deeper reason takes us to the dissenters, a prominent group among the new middle classes, excluded from public life from the 1660s until 1828. This exclusion had led them to found their own schools – the dissenting academies – based on an encyclopaedic curriculum into all major forms of knowledge. In this they were influenced by the Calvinist Jan Comenius (1592–1670) and his immediate predecessors. Comenius is famous for his ‘pansophism’. This basically says that, given that man is made in the image of God, since ‘omniscience is chief among the properties of God, it follows that the image of this must be reflected in man’.

In 2024 we still have an encyclopaedic curriculum. Its religious rationale is now far behind us, but in its absence, it now lacks any justification. The question for the new Labour government is whether to stick with this inadequate curriculum or whether to begin from a different point.

The last Labour government decided to do the latter. In 2007 its revised National Curriculum for secondary schools was built around three overall aims to enable all young people to become:

1. successful learners, who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve
2. confident individuals, who are able to lead safe, healthy and fulfilling lives, and
3. responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society.

These aims were intended to map on to slimmed-down programmes of study in the different subjects, while schools were left more freedom to make their own curricular decisions within this overall framework. There is every reason for Labour to pursue something like this 2007 pattern today. The traditional curriculum with its roots in dissenting Christianity was not created with the requirements of a twenty-first century liberal democracy in mind. Today we would put more emphasis on education for citizenship and individual fulfilment, to say nothing of coping with the threat of climate catastrophe. This approach does not fit neatly into subject silos and would draw heavily on interdisciplinary perspectives while, as noted above, not neglecting the importance of specialised knowledge.

We live in a society where children are often bored at school or absent from it. Labour’s curriculum policy should try to ensure that learners are wholeheartedly absorbed in what they learn, whether in classrooms, in the natural world outside the school, or in the local community.

As yet there are few signs that the Labour government wishes to follow the path taken by its predecessor in its 2007 curriculum. Its election manifesto talked about building on the success of ‘knowledge-rich’ syllabuses, while also protecting time for physical education, music and other creative subjects, and work on healthy relationships. All this looks like sticking plasters rather than major surgery. But the longer term may be more promising. As with the government’s intentions for reform of the NHS, let’s hope the new review of curriculum and assessment led by Becky Francis can pave the way for the more radical kind of cure.