Solving the wrong problem

Anastasia De Waal, 20 February 2009

Today the ‘biggest review in forty years’ of the primary curriculum, the Cambridge Primary Review, published its two-part special report today under the remit ‘The condition and future of primary education in England’. As ‘[i]n our [the Primary Review’s] evidence, the curriculum attracted more comment than any other issue,’ the Review findings, which are based on three years of quantitative and qualitative research, focus on the primary curriculum.

Professor Robin Alexander, who has been in charge of the Review, has identified the primary curriculum’s primary problem as being too great an emphasis on numeracy and literacy. However, this analysis is slightly misleading when the true problem is that the curriculum attempts to cover far too much subject content.

Too much too soon applies across the board in primary schools, but particularly so in the case of maths and English. This may sound improbable to our education system’s average critic, who feels that children are in fact being exposed to very little knowledge and few skills and that therein lies the real weakness. However the current ‘mile wide, inch deep’ approach has managed to marry an overly ambitious approach to what can be covered at primary level with a highly inadequate assessment of the basic requirements for later progress.

The result is that pupils spend a disproportionate amount of the timetable doing maths and English (to reiterate, contrary to Alexander’s view, in itself no bad thing) yet still do not gain secure mathematical or reading and writing foundations.

This is where the problem with testing creeps in. The Review appears to see primary testing per se as problematic. A more precise assessment might be that it is teachers having to make up for the overly broad content in the nationally tested subjects (maths, English and science) which is leading to a scenario in which testing is narrowing learning. Precisely because of a lack of secure knowledge in numeracy and literacy, teachers are compelled to cram for the Sats tests in years 2 and 6. Art, history, geography and even the tested but less ‘important’ (in target terms) science are often disposed of in the process.

So the Review is right in worrying about the time currently spent in schools on literacy and numeracy. It doesn’t, however, satisfactorily identify why this is problematic. The ‘solution’ to the primary curriculum problem is not less of a focus on maths and English, because that is not currently the problem.