Background
The last two decades have seen government take greater control over the provision of compulsory and optional courses for pupils. The result of this has been that government institutions decide much of the content of lessons in maintained schools, rather than the schools themselves or genuinely independent examining bodies. This system that has centralised powers to civil servants and educationalists away from the frontline is implicated in the significant drop in academic standards, and when it comes to the curriculum itself, it has produced some particularly damaging outcomes.
On this page: Primary schools | Secondary schools
Primary schools curriculum
Primary schools represent the first experience of structured learning for many pupils. In those years, it is essential to impart the skills that allow the rest of the curriculum to be unlocked: literacy and numeracy.
The government has acknowledged this for some time and the aim of the National Literacy Strategy, brought in by Labour in 1998, was to make as many children as possible good readers by eradicating the inconsistency in reading standards between schools. Sadly, it has so far not managed to impact sufficiently on the reading gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. In the words of David Miliband, one-time Schools Minister, '…the bad news is that when it comes to the link between educational achievement and social class, Britain is at the bottom of the league for industrialised countries'. Ruth Kelly, a former Education Secretary, has echoed this admission: '…it appears that we have not managed to narrow the gap between attainment of children from lower and higher income families'.
Its failure to improve teaching methodology lies at the heart of this, and a key element has been the lack of emphasis on phonics during the early years at primary school. Synthetic phonics teaches children the letter/sound correspondences, how to 'sound out' the individual letters in words, and then blend (or 'synthesise') the sounds into words. The theory is that once these basic letter/sound correspondences are grasped, most words in the English language can be decoded without difficulty, allowing children's reading vocabulary to expand. This is a very common-sense way to teach reading (a language with only 26 letters and 44 sounds); certainly phonics was perhaps closest to how children traditionally became literate, until the latter half of the 20th century.
For several decades, however, this technique has fallen out of favour with many in academia. The reason for this is that teaching a set of rules about how to read does not fit the still popular 'child-centred' model of learning where pupils are not instructed but encouraged to discover things for themselves and learn at their own pace. There is much to be learned from such a model of child learning but one area where it has proved inapplicable is in the basic techniques of reading, where some significant structured teaching is necessary.
The government has accepted the requirement to teach synthetic phonics for nearly a decade, but they have found re-implementing a structured reading curriculum through top-down policy making to be a cumbersome, and too often unsuccessful, project. In response to this, Civitas has organised a number of supplementary schools for primary school children that use synthetic phonics as a key method. We have also published the synthetic phonics course, The Butterfly Book, that we have found to be useful in our endeavour to bring literacy within the reach of all regardless of background.
The Corruption of the Curriculum
The traditional view of subjects in secondary schools as bodies of knowledge to be transmitted by teachers to pupils has been usurped in order to accommodate politically expedient targets and fashionable ideologies. Under the auspices of the compulsory National Curriculum, a mechanism originally designed to protect core subjects from bureaucratic interference, politicians and ideologues have disposed of the transmission of knowledge and replaced it with propaganda and social engineering.
'a dispatch from the battlefield describing a national catastrophe' - Max Hastings, Daily Mail
'A devastating study… it is possible to leave school with almost no knowledge of English literature and only the merest acquaintance with British history.' - Daily Telegraph
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