Credit: Drazen via Adobe Stock.

7 November 2024

By Ann-Marie Hunter, Elin Arfon, and Zhu Hua

Overview

One of the aims of the UK government’s current curriculum and assessment review is to ‘break down barriers to education’. Our research within the NCLE Language Hubs programme contributes to this discussion by exploring pupils’ access to languages.

We found that policy decisions made at the school level can significantly boost the uptake of languages at GCSE – but this can come at the expense of inclusion. We suggest that this tension is driven by accountability measures and other constraints that shape schools’ approaches, leading them to select pupils to study a language who have high achievement in other subjects like maths and English. We hope our research can contribute to positive action at the national and school level to address this concerning dynamic. (more…)

JESHOOTS-com / Pixabay

19 April 2022

By 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…)