 |
Press Release from Cambridge Primary Review - 20 February 2009
The report and accompanying briefing are now available from the Cambridge
Primary Review website (http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/).
THE PRIMARY CURRICULUM: AN ALTERNATIVE VISION
Today, following last year’s 29 interim reports and in advance of its
final report, the Cambridge
Primary Review publishes its findings and proposals on the primary
curriculum.
Drawing on extensive evidence gathered since the Review’s launch in 2006,
and arguing from a position of
political and financial independence, Towards a New Primary Curriculum:
• contributes to discussion of the interim report from the government’s Rose
Review, yet transcends the
narrower debate prompted by Rose and offers a vision for the longer term;
• identifies strengths and weaknesses in existing curriculum arrangements,
including problems which lie
outside the Rose remit and have escaped earlier reviews as well;
• does not merely tidy up existing arrangements but starts where a
curriculum review should start: by
asking what primary education is for and by what values it should be guided,
drawing on evidence about
childhood and the condition of the society and world in which children are
growing up;
• builds on and respects the integrity of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS);
• reinstates, after years of attrition, children’s entitlement to a broad
and balanced primary curriculum,
disposing of the myth that breadth and standards are incompatible;
• proposes a new framework of 12 core aims and 8 domains of knowledge, skill
and enquiry, all of which
are essential and must therefore all be taught to the highest possible
standard;
• places knowledge and skill at the heart of the curriculum, together with a
much enhanced view of
language, oracy and literacy; re-integrates literacy and numeracy with
English and mathematics;
restores science, the arts and humanities to their rightful place in young
children’s education;
strengthens citizenship, personal and moral education;
• presents a national curriculum but also includes a protected community
component which enables
schools, local authorities and the communities they serve to respond to
local needs and opportunities;
• requires a re-assessment and re-balancing of the roles of DCSF, QCA, the
national strategies, local
authorities and schools;
• urges a more rigorous curriculum discourse which dispenses with the
muddle, parody and polarisation
which often characterises talk of subjects, knowledge, skills and themes;
• outlines an implementation strategy which involves national panels working
in parallel with community
curriculum councils;
• has implications for the training and deployment of primary teachers, so
that ‘entitlement’ can mean
quality and standards across the whole curriculum rather than merely the
number of subjects taught.
Current arrangements: successes. The report finds: support for the
principle of a national curriculum and
recognition of its achievements, especially in science (initially),
citizenship and children’s personal education;
support for the EYFS as the platform on which primary schooling can build;
recognition of gains from the
government’s national strategies, especially in numeracy (though less so in
literacy); support for Every Child
Matters and the Children’s Plan as essential contexts for primary schooling.
Current arrangements: problems. The report finds: children’s
statutory entitlement to a broad and
balanced primary curriculum compromised by the national tests and
strategies; particular pressures at the
start (reception) and end (year 6) of primary schooling; acute anxiety about
the fate of the arts and
humanities and, increasingly, science in primary schools; erosion of both
entitlement overall and standards
in ‘the basics’ by a policy-led belief that breadth and standards are
incompatible, when the evidence
consistently shows the opposite – that one requires the other and the best
schools achieve both; a
curriculum which is two-tier not just in its distribution of time but also,
as a result of the relative neglect of the
non-core curriculum in teacher training and inspection, in terms of quality;
excessive micro-management by
government and the national agencies; the dislocation of mathematics and,
especially, English by the
national strategies for numeracy and literacy; a muddled, reductive and
damaging discourse about subjects,
knowledge, skills and themes; the detachment of curriculum from the aims
which ought to inform it, so that
aims become cosmetic and the true purposes of primary education remain
confused.
Proposals
Starting from first principles, the Cambridge Review proposes twelve aims
for 21st century primary education.
Headed by wellbeing and empowerment, these balance children’s needs now and
in the future, encourage
positive and responsible attitudes to other people, society and the wider
world, and place knowledge, skill,
imagination and productive interaction at the centre of classroom life. The
twelve aims interlock with eight
‘domains’ of knowledge, skill, enquiry and disposition, at the heart of
which is the revised and strengthened
domain of language, oracy and literacy. The report stresses that while it is
for schools to work out how to
translate the framework into action, the domains should be seen neither as
subjects to be timetabled as they
stand nor as inviting low-grade topic work. Although time allocated to them
will vary, all eight domains, not
just some of them, are treated as essential, and a proper concept of
entitlement demands that all must be
taught to the highest standards. This contrasts with thinking about the
current core/non-core division, which
confines ‘standards’ to one part of the curriculum and displays little
concern about the quality of the rest.
The proposed national curriculum has a protected local element, the
community curriculum, which enables
local authorities and schools to respond to distinctive local needs and
opportunities, encourages innovation
and flexibility, and addresses the belief of many Review witnesses in
education’s role in community vitality
and regeneration. The domains, however, feature within both the national and
the local component.
Achieving genuine reform
The big risks in educational reform are of superficial change masking
underlying inertia, and regression to
the status quo after initial progress. The report’s proposals are not an
exercise in mere curriculum rebranding.
The identified problems are serious and the required changes are
substantial. The report argues
that success depends on (i) a review of the roles of the relevant national
agencies (ii) capacity-building in
schools and local authorities to achieve the necessary re-invigoration and
re-skilling. It proposes specific
changes in, for example, the role of the national strategies; and to achieve
the goal of a genuine entitlement
curriculum, in which every aspect is well taught, it calls for changes in
teacher training and in the way
primary schools are staffed. These larger matters will be dealt with in more
detail in the Review’s final report.
Cambridge and Rose
The Cambridge report identifies areas of convergence with the interim Rose
report but also important
differences which reflect the reviews’ contrasting remits, scope, evidence
and degrees of independence. The
Cambridge review is rather less sanguine about the problems of the existing
primary curriculum, and does
not exempt current policies from comment. It asks whether the Rose review is
more about curriculum rearrangement
than reform, with educational aims added after the event rather than argued
from first
principles. It expresses concern that QCA’s detailed work on the programmes
of study for Rose’s six ‘areas
of learning’ has pre-empted a consultation process which is officially still
open and to which people are still
contributing in good faith. Nevertheless, the Cambridge report expresses the
hope that the two reviews can
be seen as complementary.
The report
The following three documents have been published 20 February 2009 (click on
them to download):
 Towards
a New Primary Curriculum: a report from the Cambridge Primary Review. Part
1: Past and Present Cambridge: University of Cambridge Faculty of Education,
47 pp, ISBN 978-1-906478-31-5.(617kb)
Towards
a New Primary Curriculum: a report from the Cambridge Primary Review. Part
2: The Future Cambridge: University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, 70
pp, ISBN 978-1-906478-32-2.(725kb)
Towards
a New Primary Curriculum: briefing / summary 4 pp.(166kb)
You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 or a higher version to open PDF files.
If you don't already have Acrobat Reader you can download it free from
Adobe's web site.
|
|
Education
