England Plans To Make Academies Follow The National Curriculum But It's Been Getting More Prescriptive For Years

(MENAFN- The Conversation) A national curriculum sets out what state school pupils should be taught during their time at school. But in England, the national curriculum currently applies to only around 44% of children – those in schools run by their local authority.

The remaining children, including 81.7% of secondary school pupils, are at academies. These schools, the result of a policy to address disadvantage in education, are free to set their own curriculum. Independent, fee-paying schools have never had to follow the national curriculum.

The government's children's wellbeing and schools bill proposes that academy schools would, for the first time, be required to follow the national curriculum.

This proposal, along with others set to reduce the autonomy of academies, has raised some debate. Academies and their associated freedoms were a flagship policy of the previous Conservative government. Laura Trott, shadow education secretary, has said :“The Bill seeks to turn its back on Labour's history and take back those academy freedoms on curriculum, on pay and on behaviour. You name it, they are reversing it - all the things that have done so much to improve our education system ... And who will suffer? The poorest pupils in society.”

As well as considering whether all pupils should be taught the national curriculum, England is currently in the middle of a review of the content of the curriculum itself. This is an excellent opportunity to consider how England's national curriculum can best serve pupils and improve their education. Much evidence suggests the current curriculum is too prescriptive.

One advantage of not having to follow the national curriculum is that schools can develop a programme of teaching, and how they go about teaching it, that is more closely aligned with the particular context of their school community and pupils.

Teachers value having autonomy over what they teach. LightField Studios/Shutterstock

Also, for many teachers, the power to control their curriculum is an appealing prospect that links with their professional identity (although evidence has shown that in some multi-academy trusts – groups of academy schools run together – teachers actually have less autonomy).

Evidence from my forthcoming book with colleague Yana Manyukhina on how children experience the national curriculum shows that some schools who do not have to follow the national curriculum make use of it anyway. However, the academy school in our research project was also able and confident to innovate with their school curriculum by giving children more choices over their learning – in ways that the children we interviewed said highly motivated them.

Government control

A national curriculum was first established in England in 1988. Since then, there have been multiple significant revisions. Sometimes these revisions have been quite radical, overturning the ideas and details of previous national curricula.

The current national curriculum was instituted in 2014. It was developed under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government and during Michael Gove's time as secretary of state for education.

One of the claims in favour of a country or region having a national curriculum is that this ensures that all pupils in a country have an entitlement to learn the same knowledge, skills and other aspects, such as values. The idea is that this will support educational standards by ensuring that all pupils have access to a baseline of knowledge.

But national curricula often give power to governments to control what happens in lessons in schools. This limits what teachers can make professional decisions about, and provides less scope for teachers to build their teaching on the interests of the pupils that they teach.

Before 1988, primary school teachers had full control over the curriculum and the teaching methods that they used. England's first national curricula specified the knowledge to be taught but did not stray into the methods that teachers should use in order to teach.

For more than two decades, my colleagues and I have tracked the intensification of control, by successive governments in England, over not only the content of the subject of English in primary schools but also the way it is taught . For instance, from 2021 guidance was added to the national curriculum prescribing that the teaching of reading must be taught through the one approach of “synthetic phonics” .

Government actions are often to some degree based on political ideology. If they have the power to control the curriculum, their ideology can sometimes result in programmes of study that are not sufficiently based on what research shows is likely to be effective.

For instance, my research shows that the heavy emphasis on the teaching of formal grammatical terms in the current curriculum is not based on evidence as to its value in teaching writing, suggesting that it is rather the result of ideological commitment.

Irrespective of whether ultimately all schools are required to follow the national curriculum, the new curriculum should be much more evidence-based than the current one.

A national curriculum can be a useful framework for schools. But it should not restrict subjects and teaching methods that may be of great benefit to children. I would argue that all schools should be given more freedom over the curriculum, and particularly over teaching methods. The government should publish a recommended curriculum that, crucially, schools are not bound in law to follow.

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