Curriculum review and academies required to follow the state curriculum

[HooverIsAlwaysBroken]

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/07/19/what-is-the-national-curriculum-and-why-is-it-being-reviewed/

https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/becky-francis-leads-dfe-curriculum-review

I had missed this. So there will be a review of the curriculum (good), focus on ensuring access for diverse and SEND in mainstream schools (good if properly implemented), potentially less exams (not sure about this) and academies not allowed to go outside the curriculum. I thought that many academies did well, including the Micaela Community School?

what are people’s thoughts?

Most academies do already follow the National curriculum, but they currently aren’t compelled to. They’re also not obliged to do induction for early career teachers, and I hope that anomaly will also be dealt with.

This is just making sure there is a slightly more level playing field between local authority schools and academies, and removing a freedom that should never have been granted.

What is the induction point? Sorry, I never heard of this.

it sounds like you are supportive of academies being obligated to follow the national curriculum. I thought that some academies used the freedom not to follow the curriculum very well (I did read about the Micaela Community School) and got outstanding results. Is that exaggerated? Or did I misunderstand?

Induction is a training and support process for the first two years of teaching.

Yes, I do believe all state funded schools should deliver the national curriculum. I hope Labour will bring in a better curriculum, but it is not a national curriculum if some schools can decide not to follow it. We’re talking about the content of what is taught, not the values, culture or behaviour regime of a school. It is those expectations that commentators say set Michaela apart, not what is taught in say history or maths.

Sadly, many schools, whether academies or not, have effectively adopted what they believe is an Ofsted-approved style of behaviour management: the fear of an inspector ruling that behaviour is not good enough leads to schools adopting Michaela-type approaches, but without the consistency and supporting structures and processes that help Michaela make it work.

I hope that they take 20% of the content out of the national curriculum. There is too much content and it is rushed through. There is very little time for music/art/drama or any creative topics. My DD is in Y1 and it seems to be a different geog/history/RE/IT topic every week!

Compelling academies to follow the national curriculum takes away one of the freedoms that has been identified as important for schools to perform well. Extending that freedom to all schools makes more sense than taking it away from academies.

They could reduce the national curriculum significantly so that it doesn't take up almost 100% of school time, giving schools more freedom over what to do. That could work. But keeping the current scope and forcing academies to follow it would be a bad move that could see us start to go back down the PISA rankings.

I thought labour were talking about adding to the national curriculum rather than taking away ?

The review certainly talks about broadening the curriculum so that pupils "don't miss out on music, arts, sport and drama, as well as vocational subjects".

Independent studies into the factors that lead to countries achieving high rankings in PISA have found that giving schools greater autonomy over the curriculum and assessments leads to better results. It seems the government intends to ignore this evidence.

@prh47bridge can you point to any evidence of the freedom to opt out of the national curriculum contributing to schools performing better in England? Drawing on PISA rankings ignores a wealth of other contextual factors and takes a very narrow view of effectiveness.

@Bankholidayhelp It is possible to have both a broader and a smaller curriculum. Removing the ‘naming of parts’ approach to grammar teaching would be a good place to start in primary.

It is possible to have both a broader and a smaller curriculum. Removing the ‘naming of parts’ approach to grammar teaching would be a good place to start in primary.

I completely agree. A good 20/25% could be cut out of the primary curriculum. We need to focus on breadth, not depth. There is too much focus on pointless terminology and not on understanding or using and applying. It would be far better if young children had a sound grasp of nouns, adjectives and adverbs rather than spending time focusing on ‘expanded noun phrases’ (miss, what’s an expanded noun phrase again…just write a loads of adjectives to describe your object…miss, which one’s an adjective again and why’s it called an expanded noun phrase if we’re writing adjectives?) or ‘fronted adverbial of time’. Gove wanted a return to 1950s grammar but those bollocksy made-up phrases were never taught to my parents who WERE at school in the 50s.

A solid understanding of word types would be a good start, plus cultivating a love of reading-and there are plenty of lovely books, not just books where an animal dies or there’s a war.

Same for maths-let’s have a solid grasp of something before always moving on to something else or something hard. Various topics seemed to find themselves suddenly needing to be taught in the year below-why?! Do things properly and thoroughly, and learn to use and apply it on lots of different situations.

I'm not aware of a study that specifically looked at England, but it is one of the factors that is thought to have led to academies generally improving standards. The studies I've seen look at a range of countries, both those that perform well and those that perform badly in PISA, to see what factors correlate with high performance.

The UK is currently 14th in Maths, 15th in Science and 13th in Reading (with England being higher than the other home nations in all three subjects). If we go back to, say, 2009, England was 26th in Maths, 14th in Science and 23rd in Reading.

I would agree that PISA isn't the be all and end all, but maths and reading are fundamental to pupils' success. It would be disappointing if we start to go backwards in these subjects relative to other nations.

@prh47bridge i think you’re making a huge and misleading leap. Very few academies have veered away from the national curriculum, and in any event the evidence that academies have improved outcomes is thin to put it mildly, and strongly contested.

Even if all academies had taken advantage of the freedom to adopt a different curriculum, that would be statistically highly unlikely to be the main factor behind our improved PISA rankings. The introduction of synthetic phonics (while unpopular with many) has made a big difference to reading skills. (More and different work now needs to be done, but the DFE credit this with improved KS2 reading outcomes.). In maths, there has been a huge investment in regional hubs, supporting schools to adopt more consistent approaches to teaching maths, from EY all through primary and KS3.

Maths mastery and synthetic phonics (the latter effectively enforced by Ofsted) played a huge part in our improved rankings and they are examples of a standardisation approach, rather than more freedom.

I've worked in academies for 14 years and never once taught outside of the national curriculum

Is this not all to prevent dubious religious schools meddling in the curriculum?

All the big MATs follow the NC . As does Michaela, albeit narrowly.

Do you understand what the NC is , OP? I ask, because you call it 'state curriculum'.

I think what would be helpful at GCSE level is to have more foundation level papers. So history, English etc - there should be foundation level for all to broaden the more academic subjects like History and English for all. I think it is good for all students to choose if they want to sit 10 GCSEs rather than having to swot English to a high level. There should be simpler foundation texts available.

@partystress According to the studies I've looked at, the determining factor is whether schools have freedom over curriculum, not whether they actually use it. I don't know why this should be, but there is a clear correlation.

It'll be just like the last curriculum review:

• plenty of things added, a handful taken away
• timescales unrealistic (for teachers and parents)
• requires everyone to buy new books (teachers and parents)
• more testing
• costs a fortune
• little resulting benefit

That said, I'm one of the few people that actually liked the last curriculum update in 2014 for primary school Maths. I can see the improvement in children's mental arithmetic as they go through primary (versus the previous curriculum).

I hope it’s not just a useless exercise that only succeeds in making teachers spend hours changing all their planning and making educational publishers a fuck tonne of money :(

Have academies improved standards? I thought the jury was still very much out on that one. The last research I saw said that LA schools, on average, turn negative Ofsteds around quicker and improve the schools further than chains do. It's different to do a proper comparison at a secondary level, due to the number of academies vs state schools, but at a primary level, plenty of the top performing schools are state schools.

@prh47bridge lost a long post so just going to say correlation is not causation. Curriculum freedoms in a country with a highly educated early years workforce, or even just a culture where education is more highly valued than in England mean you can’t possibly attribute good performance in PISA to curriculum freedom. What is your interest in this and who has written the studies you’re referring to?

No, correlation is not causation, but the studies I've looked at concluded that this was one of a number of factors leading to improved school performance.

My interest is that I want an education system that works and gives our children the best possible chance in life.

The studies include one by Fuchs and Wößmann, one by Wößmann, Lϋdemann, Schϋtz and West and three separate studies conducted for the OECD. There are others.

Fuchs and Wößmann - this study is from 2006 so predates the modern academy programme. Whilst it does suggest that autonomy improves outcomes, it isn't actually linking that to curriculum content nor to the current National Curriculum.

Wößmann, Lϋdemann, Schϋtz and West - there are multiple versions of the same piece of research from this group but, again, before the current curriculum and the rise of academisation.

What we do have, relating directly to academisation, is evidence that shows:

1. academic results in maintained schools are higher on average than in academies,
2. disadvantaged pupils in particular do, on average, worse in academies than maintained schools,
3. there is no improvement in Ofsted rating visible between academies and maintained schools,
4. schools that join academy trusts after negative Ofsteds are less likely to improve as effectively or efficiently as maintained schools,

Given that the academisation experiment has had autonomy over staffing and curriculum content for years, yet not been shown to have any positive impact on the education of children, the fact that they are going to have to employ qualified teachers and fulfill the requirements of a curriculum should not at all be assumed to be a negative thing.

I’ve noticed however that the maintained schools that don’t tend to academise tend to be the really successful ones anyway. I know in my city most have become academies, the ones that haven’t have always been the better schools in terms of results and cultures. They also seem to always be in the most expensive areas and in my opinion would do well regardless because the children who go there have a lot of advantages

Just thinking that there are other factors at play that can make comparing different schools hard

I haven’t seen anything that has persuaded me that academies raise anything other than the salaries of a select few at the top of the chain. They are often places where their teaching and support staff are treated abysmally.

As there is no money left and we have a teacher recruitment crisis and a SEN crisis, I think Labour should just maintain the status quo.

KS1 SATs are already optional now and KS2 SATs are quite demanding. Maths is taught very well in primary schools now and if they have to, some of the more obscure grammar terms can be dropped but incorporating them in writing is important.
Secondary schools need more funding full stop especially for SEN and differentiation. 16 plus needs looking at more closely and ties with industry need strengthening. All children should do some voluntary service in the community at that age and all children should be helped to get relevant work experience.
We really should not in a recruitment crisis reinvent the whole wheel again and incur extra costs for books and change everything yet again.