Curriculum in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

When politicians try to make an impact on education, the method of choice is invariably curriculum.
England is in the midst of that process right now: a change in government has seen the launch of a review of curriculum and assessment as Labour seeks to put its own stamp on schools after more than a decade of Conservative education policy.
Yet, curriculum change is rarely easy and often more complex than politicians imagine, according to Mark Priestley, professor of education at the University of Stirling and one of the world’s leading curriculum researchers.
We sit down with him to talk about how policy translates into practice, the global trends in curriculum and a teacher’s role in the process of curriculum creation and implementation.
Tes: How strong is the connection between a national curriculum policy and what actually happens in classrooms?
Professor Mark Priestley: When you look at curriculum policies across the world, they tell you an awful lot about the political imperatives in curriculum-making at policy level, but they don’t tell you an awful lot about how teachers actually teach using that curriculum.
If you look at countries like Scotland, New Zealand, and even Australia to some extent, there has been a shift away from a content-based curriculum to a social efficiency curriculum, which is based on notions of developing skills, developing particular types of citizens, and so on.
But those curricula don’t necessarily represent this sort of practice and the culture of teaching and curricular making in schools in those countries.
If we take the example of Scotland, if you listen to some commentators in England then you would think Scotland has moved away from subjects – but that is actually far from the truth. Scotland has not moved away from subjects. Scottish secondary schools teach very narrow versions of subjects and teach in quite an instrumental way towards passing exams.
Yet the Curriculum for Excellence policy would seem to suggest something very different. There are very few schools that have actually gone with the spirit of the curriculum. They tended to go with the existing practices and, often, curriculum change then becomes a project about rebranding and renaming and changing the paperwork and so on.
So will the ideological or economical aim of the government of the day always struggle to make an impact in schools through curriculum change? In England, where we currently have the Francis Review into curriculum and assessment, will that mean her findings won’t necessarily translate to schools?
If we look at England, knowledge-rich has been in place for more than a decade and it has slowly become established through accountability levers, not necessarily through adherence to curriculum ideas.
In this case, knowledge-rich tends to mean the transmission of content with a particular focus on raising attainment in exams. So there’s a lot of teaching to the test and so on that goes on.
Now that’s a generalisation and I know, for example, that people in the history teaching community have worked very hard to maintain a knowledge-rich approach that is very much about the different types of disciplinary knowledge, but on the whole it does appear that the English system is really what my colleague Joe Smith would talk about as canonical content, rather than a rich approach to understanding concepts.
The fact this idea has become so entrenched in the English system will determine what can be done when it comes to curriculum change, because you’ve got generations of teachers who have spent years teaching in this ecology, they have particular expectations, there’s a particular type of curriculum making capacity in the system.
So while you can have a different philosophy and ideology at policy level, you’ve also got the professional knowledge capacity of teachers to actually think differently about the curriculum.
This is true of any country and this is one reason why that disconnect between policy and the classroom happens around curriculum: any change is going to have to be working systematically with the capacity and reality of the current educational culture in a school, and that culture is not going to change overnight.
What would you say is the dominant ideology governments are pushing when it comes to curriculum?
Places like England and Sweden have become outliers – most other countries have variants of a competency-based curriculum, which is framed around generic statements of competency, which can number into the hundreds or even thousands.
Often, what you end up with is a very bureaucratic curriculum, which is framed around the need for schools to demonstrate that they are fulfilling all of the learning outcomes. And, often, this lends itself to a spreadsheet approach to auditing the existing practice to see what we need to add on and so on.
It’s not a very systematic or coherent way of making the curriculum.
Some countries around the world have departed from this approach with a move towards “big ideas” frameworks. British Columbia is a good example of that. Scotland is currently exploring options in that direction in its curriculum improvement cycle, too.
Why do you think so many countries have gone in this direction?
Neoliberal thinking is about meeting the demands of society and the economy, and so on. So I think what we’re seeing in curriculum policy at the moment is driven by neoliberal governments that frame education around things like performance indicators, learning outcomes, and so on, with a very strong slant towards social efficiency, towards skills, often at the expense of knowledge.
There is a view out there that it doesn’t really matter what you learn now, as long as you develop the right skills – which I fundamentally disagree with, by the way!
Accountability has been a key lever for pushing the curriculum in England and knowledge-rich makes for a very easy-to-assess accountability structure through assessment. Are competency-based systems harder to assess and, therefore, harder to enforce?
If you take Scotland as an example, they are using the results of various assessments for accountability – for example, Higher exams, inspection data and performance against particular performance indicators, for example, attendance.
So you can have a curriculum that ostensibly looks like a very flexible, teacher-driven curriculum, but it is actually driven by outcomes and performance measures in a way that is quite restrictive.
While there are significant differences, then, between the way that the curriculum is measured in Scotland and in England, one could argue that both are using accountability mechanisms that are distorting and deforming practices in schools.
By that I mean we see an awful lot of very instrumental behaviour. Abolishing subjects, for example, that are low performing.
At one school we talked to, they abolished technology in the senior phase because the attainment was low: the easy way to improve the school attainment stats was to get rid of the subject.
Do you think curriculum is too often viewed in isolation, then, when it is actually dependent on so much else? Even going further than the Francis Review in England, which has viewed curriculum in conjunction with assessment?
I view curriculum as a set of social practices through which education is planned, structured, enacted, evaluated, etc. So you cannot disentangle the content from the way it’s organised, for example, or from the way it’s taught, from the pedagogical approaches and the way it’s evaluated, from the way assessments are built in.
If you ignore one of those components, then you might end up with something that’s distorted, incomplete or inadequate in some way.
And does accountability adopting assessment as its metric accelerate those problems?
Assessment is a judgement we make about student progress, but we talk about assessment as if it’s somehow framing or inhibiting education.
The reality is that assessment is not the problem – the problem is how assessment judgements are used by the system.
We know that accountability impacts pedagogy – teaching to the test, for example – but can or should curriculum influence pedagogy?
Professor Zongyi Deng [professor of curriculum and pedagogy at University College London], who’s on the Francis Review panel, says quite clearly in his work that you cannot disentangle questions of curriculum from questions of pedagogy, because you cannot say what you’re going to teach without having some discussion or thought about how you’re going to organise that and how it’s then enacted in classrooms.
Walter Doyle, who’s a famous curriculum theorist, actually describes pedagogy as curriculum events, so the enactment of curriculum in the classroom is pedagogy.
So it’s important, actually, that the Francis Review doesn’t just consider what is taught, but it considers broader questions of how.
For example, is the traditional organisation through subjects the most appropriate way of doing everything? Is it possible to hybridise some subjects to defragment the curriculum?
Integrated social studies is a very common approach worldwide. It’s not so common in the UK.
These sorts of questions are very important, and then, of course, once you’re in those spaces where you’re teaching, what are the appropriate ways of engaging young people with this knowledge and developing these skills?
Is it, for example, through direct instruction, which is popular in England now? Where is it appropriate to use approaches like cooperative learning, dialogical learning where young people are able to articulate their views on the subject and listen to others, which of course is very much about sense-making?
So, all of these things here need to be thought about in terms of what they do and how they feed into the purposes of education, and they’re all curricular practices.
Unravelling subject-based practices would be a revolution in the English system….
Subjects are not the same as disciplines and I think Deng is interesting here because he talks about the difference between knowledge and content.
So you might want someone to understand, for example, the concept of democracy in history. OK, that isn’t content. That’s a high-level concept, which can be framed easily in a curriculum policy.
What you want to do is to give schools the opportunity to, for example, over time, develop that concept of democracy through the selection of appropriate content. That could be reactive to their cohorts, to local context, to national priorities, but it sits with the school.
We need to think very carefully about a framework of concepts that can be set out in policy that we want to explore through education. And then schools need to determine what content they select in order to address that.
You would argue we don’t have that balance in curricula now?
The problem we’ve had in the past is we have either over-prescriptive content-driven curricula – parts of the national curriculum and certain iterations of it specify minute detail, what’s to be taught and in what order – or we have very vague competency-based curricula as in Scotland.
The purpose of policy should not be to prescribe what people do minute by minute or to provide a set of outcomes to tick off, it’s actually to provide a set of educational purposes and a conceptual framework for organising teachers’ thinking as they do their curriculum making in schools.
Is the fact governments have not found that balance down to a lack of trust in teachers to do that curriculum-making?
Yes, there is a lack of trust and part of the problem is an international arms race around things like the Programme for International Student Assessment and so on. Governments feel they can’t afford to fall behind.
But, also, there is a lack of trust in professionals, generally, in education systems.
However, an issue we do see if the curriculum is not framing practice properly is that we can end up with unacceptable levels of variation between schools and that raises equity issues. A good curriculum is going to try and mitigate that to some extent.
But policy can only do so much, and one of the mistakes we’ve made in the past is trying to be too ambitious for what policy can do. Policy can only provide a framing for action. People will always interpret it and mediate it.
So, how do we find a happy balance?
One of the things that we’re doing in our work is trying to emphasise the importance of what we call the meson (middle) layer. These are the activities or the infrastructure that connect policy and practice.
I’ll give you an example: in the early days of the Welsh curriculum, there was something called the Pioneer Schools Network. Teachers from these schools were seconded out of school for part of the week, so they would be teachers for half the week and then they’d be pioneer teachers for the rest of the week.
Their role was quite varied: some were involved in writing the curriculum policy, they were involved in what might be called curriculum leadership activities at a regional level through the regional clusters, but they were also teachers, so they kept their feet firmly grounded in practice.
There is a similar system in the Republic of Ireland, where there are teams of teachers who actively support schools to develop curricula in particular areas. Their role, basically, is to act as a sort of broker to connect teachers in schools with the complexities of policy.
So this is a way of mitigating the variation because you’re offering a fairly standardised process through which teachers are able to engage with the curriculum policy in order to develop practice in their schools.
Teachers don’t generally have the time and the space or the mechanisms to make sense of curriculum policy. So what we tend to do as teachers is have a quick look at the new policy and then we see how it fits with what we do already. And if it doesn’t fit very well, we’ll do something to sort of tick the box and so on.
It’s really important we have the infrastructure through which teachers can be guided, supported and have the space to make sense of curriculum policy. The trick is to do it in ways that are informed and constructive, and for me, what is critical is using processes that enable teachers to make sense of policy in the context of their own local imperatives and purposes.
Even with that form of “middle layer”, will curricula always be political?
One of the big problems we have nowadays is that curriculum has become very politicised: it is on political manifestos, people’s individual political careers are made or broken on whether or not they’ve fixed education.
We do see these cycles of political interference and one of the ways of dealing with that is by making education agencies fairly independent from political decision-making processes.
I don’t know how you achieve that, to be honest, because politicians aren’t going to want to release the reins. And I know certainly, having talked to civil servants in various parts of the UK, they’re very reluctant to release the reins as well on that.
So you go back to what we can do despite that, and it’s about curriculum policy only being part of the curriculum picture.
Curriculum is not just the framework, it’s the support infrastructure in the system, it’s the practices through which we develop pedagogy, it’s the assessment and so on.
I think seeing the curriculum more holistically helps here, we need to actively interpret it and make judgements as professionals about how it best works in our setting.
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