The Nutty Professor

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

The Gove curriculum is simply laughable

Michael Gove has been keen to tell everybody for the past nine months that he does not wish to intervene in education and that he wants schools and teachers to be autonomous. He doesn’t want local interference or any smarty-pants from government telling headteachers how to run their schools. However, it turns out that he does want to intervene – and radically – in prescribing what they teach. An ordinary sort of person might assume that this was the major area of their business and, therefore, one in which they really ought to be autonomous but not Michael Gove. He has also set up an independent review panel and then spent most of the week telling its members what they should say.

The national curriculum has always been a dog’s breakfast. When Kenneth Baker first brought up the idea and set up his own expert groups, a gang of loony academics driven by subject interests knocked out a curriculum which you couldn’t have covered in twenty years let alone in ten. Since then, more politicians have messed around with the structure popping in fashionable studies like citizenship and PSHE, developing examinations in religious education and wondering vaguely where preparation for life, employment and living might fit in.

Along the way, no one has ever been very certain about what a national curriculum is. Is it the sum total of human knowledge that you would like a well educated 16-year-old to present with? Or, is it a syllabus – a set of lessons – to be delivered to every child whatever their ability and background? Is the English bit important and is it recognised that there is some kind of cultural and historical embodiment in there? Is it what you get taught or what you are entitled to learn? We could do with a vision statement here!

Then there are some bigger questions. Is this ragbag of knowledge the best preparation for life or employment? Is it sensible to look back to the past and the grammar school curriculum of the 1950s to inform the needs of adults in 2020 and beyond? Does anybody really think that bookish, factual knowledge is the only kind there is? Is it right to constrain schools and make it difficult for them to teach about technology, business, engineering and information management.

Oh, and yes there is a bigger question. If schools were left to match learning to interests, needs and potential, and learning was personalised and appropriate to the individual, and if children were taught at the point where they were capable of understanding and applying that knowledge would schools be better at teaching and learning and would society benefit?

Michael Gove doesn’t think so. He thinks it would be good to have more facts as if history or geography is simply a collection of them. He isn’t sure which facts should be compulsory but the experts can decide that. He thinks that there should be separate sciences and that foreign languages are a good thing so that everyone can ask for directions to the post office in Calais or visit the town hall.

There are a lot of funny assumptions in these notions of subject knowledge. The Daily Mail focus group wants Greeks and Romans in year 7 with a quick nod to cavemen so that you get to 1945 by year 11 and the Spanish Armada in year 9. These models seem to assume that there is no progression in ability. If you really think that the Greeks are so important do them last! In the same way, geography starts locally and spreads wider as if it is easier to think about my town rather than towns in general. Science at key stage two, which Michael Gove is particularly keen on and which has a lot of facts presents children with information on gravity and on solids, liquids and gases which is simply not true in terms of modern scientific knowledge about subatomic events. Schools spend quite a long time teaching children about the internet today and about how to assess the validity of the alleged facts they encounter there. They encourage them to look for more than one source, to seek authorities and cross references and to listen to the social construction of knowledge. Michael Gove’s facts are simply to be transmitted without discussion.

The final oddity about this new curriculum is that the new academies and the free schools which are at the forefront of government policy and change do not have to follow it. In fact, they can do what they like because they are, well somehow, a bit superior rather like the people who are going to decide on what facts are appropriate for our children. In the end, this curriculum development is elitist and ideological driven. It is what Michael Gove and his cronies think the oiks should be told to keep them in their places.