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A Baccalaureate Curriculum

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 1 February 2024

Secondary school students in a drama class. Phil Meech for UCL.

Secondary school students in a drama class. Phil Meech for UCL.

David Scott

This blog post is not just an opinion piece but also, I hope, a reasoned argument about the curriculum, and for the introduction of a ‘true’ Baccalaureate into the English Education System – with all the implications this has, not just for the 16-19 phase, but for the system as a whole. A more detailed account of this argument is available in my edited book, On Learning: volume 2, Philosophy, Concepts and Practices, which is free to download at UCL Press.

The call for England to adopt a broader curriculum for the 16-19 phase is one that has surfaced intermittently. It is echoed in the government’s plans to introduce an ‘Advanced British Standard’ (more…)

Bringing women curriculum theorists into the light

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 8 June 2023

Six women curriculum theorists, clockwise from top left: Maria Montessori, Lucy Diggs Slowe, Susan Isaacs, Susan Haack, Martha Nussbaum, Maxine Greene (Wikimedia Commons)

Six women curriculum theorists, clockwise from top left: Maria Montessori, Lucy Diggs Slowe, Susan Isaacs, Susan Haack, Martha Nussbaum, Maxine Greene (Credit: public domain; Alpha Kappa Alpha; IOE Institute Archives; zooterkin; Robin Holland; Ryan Brenizer, all Wikimedia Commons)

Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott.

At David’s retirement party, after all the toasts and speeches, we started discussing something that represents a still accumulating problem in the field of curriculum studies: how is it that so many of the seminal works relating to curriculum theory focus exclusively on the contributions of men, given that there are many such female theorists (and professional educators are more likely to be women)? To that end, recently we have been giving a great deal of thought to different formations and interpretations of feminism, as a way of gaining new insights into the field. (more…)

The aims of the curriculum should be the fount from which everything else in school life should flow

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 22 April 2022

John White.

What are England’s schools for? Many parents and other citizens may well assume the authorities have a good answer to this. But have they?

Well-known philosophers from both sides of the Atlantic interested in education – from Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and Illinois as well as from UCL IOE – are broadly agreed that a worthwhile education has three or four key aims: self-maintenance through work, personal fulfilment, citizenship and moral concern. Their discussions of each aim differ in detail but there is consensus both that there are complex interconnections among the aims and that expounding what each involves painstaking elucidation. Philip Kitcher, for instance, an eminent philosopher from Columbia University in New York, devotes just over half his new book The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (2022 ) to what its aims should be.
These 201 pages are mainly about the four mentioned above.

Compare this to the 41 words on the aims of the English National Curriculum: (more…)

The limitations of bricolage: Ofsted’s Curriculum Research Review for Languages

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 19 April 2022

JESHOOTS-com / Pixabay

Norbert Pachler and Elspeth Broady.

During 2021 and 2022, OFSTED has published a number of curriculum research reviews seemingly with the aim of identifying factors contributing to high quality school curricula and how subjects can best be taught with the help of research findings.

Whilst attempts to leverage research findings to underpin, inform and improve subject pedagogy must be viewed as laudable and desirable, the curriculum research reviews raise a number of important questions and issues, certainly if the recent furore over the maths review is anything to go by (see e.g. Schools Week but see also the journal Routes for a discussion of the review for geography). While controversy is seemingly more intense in some subjects than others, common problematic features emerge from the reviews in general: (more…)

Thinking allowed: teachers must reclaim their moral purpose

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 15 November 2018

David Lambert
Teachers, generally speaking, work incredibly hard. They work under highly controlled and high stakes conditions, and very publicly. So how do teachers feel about their work? Is teaching a confident profession?
I believe that the profession, at least in secondary schools, may have collectively lost the plot in terms of its core values and purposes. It is buffeted this way, then that way, and in trying to keep up it has lost its heart to the empty process of delivering performance indicators. I don’t blame the teachers themselves, but I do argue that teachers can and should take a more active role in curriculum leadership – a theme in a forthcoming special feature of the London Review of Education (16.3) which I have had the privilege of guest editing.
Recently, I had the great pleasure to spend the afternoon with some enormously impressive, mostly young, new teachers. I spent the entire time challenging their expectations, sometimes showing and explaining, often debating with them … as to what it means to teach geography well, and why this is so important. Possibly not the geography you remember from school. Maybe not even the geography they experienced as students. But worthwhile, engaging geography lessons exhibiting the highest quality (more…)

Hot off the press: the IOE debates series for 2018/19

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 13 September 2018

IOE Events.
Last year we launched our new flagship events programme, which includes our much- loved debates series What if…? radical and inspiring ideas for alternative education futures. Through this series we bring together prominent speakers on education issues – from policy makers to academics, practitioners to parents – to hear their views on key debates in the field.
So far, we’ve tackled education’s role (or not) in social mobility, vocational education’s Cinderella status, teaching’s image problem, the (unmet) needs of schools operating in the most challenging circumstances, the special educational needs and disability (SEND) crisis, the AI revolution, the promise of educational neuroscience, and how to get all kids to love (or at least not hate) mathematics. Phew. (You can watch all these back/listen back to all these here, or find write ups here.)
But there are many crucial topics that we haven’t yet covered. We intend to put that right in 2018/19.
To get us started, on 1 October we’ll be looking at young people’s mental health and well-being – asking What if…we wanted our kids to be happier?. Young people’s (more…)

Until the DFE understands curriculum its well-meaning pilots will run off course

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 7 August 2018

Arthur Chapman and Sandra Leaton Gray. 
Colleagues at the UCL Institute of Education were very excited a few weeks ago to see that the Department for Education had announced funding for a number of school-centred Curriculum Programme pilots worth £2.2 million.  These grants aim to support teachers in developing curriculum programmes in science, history and geography. We always like to see practitioner research encouraged, and thinking through curriculum issues is a good way of building a strong basis for professional practice. We were disappointed to see, however, that the DfE in this instance didn’t seem to have done its homework properly in drafting the specifications, which leaves them wanting from an educational point of view.
The main thing that seems to be lacking is a proper understanding of what teacher knowledge means. This is rather  (more…)

The death of history has been greatly exaggerated

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 30 April 2012

Chris Husbands
The teaching of history is one of the most perennial topics of controversy in the school curriculum. The current review of the national curriculum is bringing the topic into sharp relief once more, and now two eminent historians – David Abulafia and Robert Tombs, from the University of Cambridge, have proposed their own models for the teaching of history in a pamphlet for the think tank Politeia. Abulafia, himself the author of a stunning Human History of the Mediterranean, outlines 37 key dates and events which should form the backbone of every child’s learning of the past – from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of ca 500 AD to Tony Blair’s election victory of 1997, by way of the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), the loss of the American colonies (1776) and the Irish Home Rule bill (1886).
The central problem, of course, is that there is just too much history to teach. Any history curriculum is a selection from what might be taught, and any selection betrays the assumptions and biases of the selector. Compulsory education was extended in most countries in the later nineteenth century – a development omitted from Abulafia’s list – and the development of national identity was one of the principal pre-occupations of the prescribed curricula which were developed then. A sense of identity – personal, communitarian, national – has remained a concern of school curricula, but it’s all much more difficult now in a closely inter-dependent, multi-cultural world. So Abulafia’s list  contains Indian Independence (1947) but not Clive’s triumphs in India in 1757 or the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Any selection involves other selections if history is not, in the words of the  American poet Edna St Vincent Millay, to be one damned thing after another.
A more challenging problem for the building of history curricula is the vexed issue – one which we now have a good deal of research and knowledge – of what it means to “know”  and understand history. There’s a good deal of evidence that pupils learn history not by accumulating information – important though that is – but by progressively developing deeper understanding of key concepts – causation, consequence, change, significance, the ability to select evidence and so on. Without proper attention to these concepts,  history remains inert information, and a chronologically structured history curriculum will produce a five year old’s understanding of the Anglo-Saxons and a sixteen year old’s understanding of the Labour victory in 1997: any argument for a “strong narrative thread”  inevitably falls into this trap.
The good news – and good news is rarely reported – is that history teachers are amongst the best qualified teachers in schools, and Ofsted’s most recent survey report (2011) found that in a majority of schools they were able to build intellectually challenging  courses which shuttled between the information base and the conceptual frameworks in  ways which supported high quality learning. A third Cambridge historian, Richard Evans,  Regius professor of history, who has taken time to explore teaching in schools, pronounces himself impressed by the quality of national curriculum history. It’s not surprising that history teaching is perennially controversial, touching as it does on issues of identity, power, and social change. Perhaps its equally unsurprising that Cambridge dons cannot agree on it.