What is a skills based curriculum?

[skewiff]

Our primary school says one of its aims is to make the curriculum more skills based?

What does this mean?

But one of the things that's frustrating about a knowledge curriculum is that it misses whole areas out. I mean, in a sense, all curriculums will, but I remember history being almost solely British - and in fact English, as I grew up in England. And the best history lesson I ever had was one where we were prresented with sources about the princes in the tower, and it's where you realise that Bolingbroke had just as much motive and opportunity as Richard III to kill the princes, and that historical "facts" are hard to come by sometimes.

My dd is doing all the things you describe under CofE, honestly! But there is some value in having a little less undoing to do, at Higher, A level and University level - when I taught undergraduates we had to spend quite some time undoing some very fixed ideas ffrom school, and they were often dispiritingly focussed on what stuff they would need to know for the exam, rather than on developing and thinking for themselves. I think a good skills-based curriculum can offer both - maybe a bit less room for a number of "facts", but the skills to critically analyse and assess what they read and observe are invaluable, and surely not in opposition to "knowledge"?

I guess I feel that it should be possible to reach an academic consensus on the core knowledge we wish children to have by the time they leave primary and then secondary school. The minimum level of knowledge ie facts, that it is necessary to have in order to function as a normal, intelligent, contributing member of society.

Thinking back, although I had a very traditional education in maths and sciences, it was much more topic based in geography and history and I regret that to this day. I wish I knew all the rivers and capital cities of the world. I wish I could identify any given country on a map. I wish I had a good overview of British history and knew the dates of key events and the reigns of monarchs.

The latter historical knowledge would, in fact, have been extremely useful for me at work. I detest having to look things up that I feel I should just know. And I am endlessly embarrassed by my lack of knowledge of world geography, beyond the obvious. A level general studies really brought that home when we had to label up a map of Africa with all the countries and their capitals. I was just guessing!

Yes I could set myself the task of learning all this now, but it is much harder when you're an adult and you have a thousand and one other things to fill your brain with. I feel deprived that this knowledge was not instilled at school. I feel we are continuing to deprive our children, but it is just getting worse and worse.

I have never had any trouble analysing everything put in front of me in great depth... Questioning absolutely everything I am told is my special talent! I've always seen questioning the strength of sources of information as nothing more than common sense. I think you need to have a reasonable amount of confidence of the basics behind you before you go out into the world to do that, though, unless you want your views rejected out of hand by pedants. It's a bit like the coffee stains principle: if you see coffee stains on the tablecloth at a restaurant, you become paranoid that the state of the kitchen and cooking are also pretty dire. Same with having to listen to someone who clearly has a limited grasp of English Grammar and who has to refer to Google before they can answer any question (particularly if they are your GP....). You just start to suspect their skills aren't too great, either, even if they are the best researcher in the world (with a very poor memory).

Good post rabbitstew. In fact this is being borne out on this thread. I, you and others are offering views about education without being trained teachers (at least I am presuming you are not). And on a number of occasions that lack of training has been pointed out. Consequently our views do not hold water to the same degree as someone who has been through teacher training.

Rightly so. Does anyone see the irony here?

And I agree with gaelicsheep - knowing where other countries are geographically and having an internal historical timeline of your own country at the very least, are exceptionally useful pieces of knowledge from which you can then have the frame to hang other, later bits of useful knowledge. Some things I do not want to waste my time looking up every time I need to "know" them - some things I would rather have been encouraged to learn off by heart at school, because they are regularly useful and are a helpful base from which to develop understanding of the world. I find the history of other countries much more personally interesting when I compare it with my existing knowledge and understanding of my own country and what it was doing at equivalent periods of time. I would rather not, for example, have to look up the dates of Queen Anne's reign to know when Queen Anne furniture was made, or to be in the dark about what period Georgian architecture comes from. A lot of references to the past are hung on assumptions of knowledge of the dates of the era concerned and what important events happened over that time. The approximate dates at the very least help you hang your knowledge together in a coherent way.

Absolutely.

The other thing that bothers me here is the constant reference to "mere facts" as being "boring". There is absolutely no need for facts to be boring. Facts can be, should be, fascinating - it totally depends on the means and quality of delivery.

And the imagination of the student.

I actually really dont like the way history is taught in schools. I did my Undergrad in history at the Fen poly and, as a state school pupil, where I really struggled compared to many of my privately educated peers, was a solid understanding of European history from (for want of a better starting point) 1066 till now. I had never been taught anything about the dark ages, the reformation, or the industrial revolution. How can you properly understand a period if you dont understand what happened before and after it? You can't. I think schools need to back off from the detail a bit and give much more of an overview rather than spending an entire term on the minutae of the FWW - "And this week we're going to look at life in the trenches"

Primary school history should be local history and at secondary school they should start again and give a chronological whistlestop tour of Europe (yes, I know Europe isnt the world, but you have to balance detail and breadth, and actually, Europe was the major influence for much of the last millenia.

Why Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale, the Romans, the Great Fire of London, the Victorians and World War II? Why not Boudicca, Marie Curie, the Persian Empire, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Georgians and World War I? At the end of the day, the definition of curriculum content IS somewhat arbitrary.

Sorry but you seem to be confusing the statutory National Curriculum (what you must teach) with the non statutory QCA units (how you might teach it guidance only). You are free to teach about any famous person you don't need to teach Florence or Grace - I did Nelson on the anniversary of Trafalgar instead one year...

That's why museum trips, conversations, entertaining books about Kings and Queens, globes, maps, visits to interesting places of historic interest, etc are very useful for state educated children!... I think aspects of history are taught well in state schools - I loved history, whereas my traditionally educated mother thought it was nothing but learning boring dates - but agree the general overview is missing big time and that makes talking intelligently about the details much more difficult. History could and should be covered in a variety of ways: an overview of the general history of your own country/continent; a study of a particular subject over a very long time line (eg history of medicine or politics); a study of local history; a study of specific recent events somewhere in the world and their effect; a study of historic objects or monuments still readily accessible today (eg castles, country houses, etc); an indepth study of (necessarily) random eras. That's when history is exciting - when you see it is all those things, that it is actually a living thing, open to interpretation and reinterpretation and political manipulation, that views of the meaning of events can shift as time moves on, but at least the dates are something solid to help guide you through it all!

I see a huge difference in "knowledge" between the children who have parents who take them to museums and exhibitions and the children who's parents take them to the pub ... As a teacher I am limited to how many places I can take my class in a year even if we had museums on our doorstep which I'm afraid in a very rural area isn't the case (50 miles minimum) and the cost of transport!!!

Last time we organised a school trip to an open air museum the parents refused to contribute to the £10 cost and it had to be cancelled

www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/NCR-Expert%20Panel%20Report.pdf

Mrz, I am aware of the statutory / non statutory gap...but many, many schools DO stick to the 'breadth of study' and even so, why are those examples suggested rather than others IYSWIM?

Teacherwith2kids, for my sins I have to spend quite a lot of time offering differentiation advice on science (which I have absolutely zero grounding in) wrt a cohort of students with severe language disorders. It is undoubtedly the most difficult part of my job.

My students tend to be pretty okay with the practical application of skill, but the technical nature of the language and - as they progress towards GCSE - the sheer quantity of key words necessary to grasp the curriculum or answer an exam question.

As I mentioned up-thread, I also work more broadly across the age range, and some of the Early Years "Sciencey" topics (minibeasts etc) are great and do focus on that spirit of exploration, comparison etc. However, by the time you get to forces/materials etc.. I wonder if there is too much of a focus on technical language sometimes and too much to cover - air resistance, gravity, balanced forces etc. Are these names and the time expended on teaching them really that important? I think for younger children the experience of finding things out with objects etc and discussing these things in a plain English fashion makes a lot more sense. I can't see any sensible reason why a 10 year old really needs to remember a definition for air resistance, to be honest. I think at primary, children need to use the language that is theirs, and learn to use it well (including writing here) and to consolidate the basics e.g. of numeracy vs be expected to recall and retain meaningless jargon.

I'm always reminded of the breadth of the curriculum when I come to Pivats, where the skills are broken into small steps and seem never-ending. For students like mine, who really need an explicit, step by step approach with much room for overlearning, it can be quite a challenge to cover the range of knowledge and skills covered in the primary school curriculum and frankly, I've yet to see how all the work that goes into it really reaps rewards in the secondary curriculum.

So while I do appreciate that all curricula have their down-sides, I think that attempting to cover everything can lead to retention of nothing, and focusing on some key knowledge and moving from knowledge to understanding to application (e.g. combining knowledge/skills in a consolidated way that a decent amount of time can be spent on) might be best.

Though I don't know. I find it extraordinarily difficult wrt Science. I wish I wasn't in the position of having to have anything to do with it.. and I can tell you right now, as someone who is not a Science teacher by background, trying to support students in learning it without that content knowledge, and trying to mediate my knowledge about what the students need in terms of their learning with the demands of the curriculum while triangulating this with the knowledge of the class teacher is a really hard feat. I have LOADS of skills for supporting learning in these students, but I lack content knowledge... and it's NOT enough that I know where to find it out.

"My students tend to be pretty okay with the practical application of skill, but the technical nature of the language and - as they progress towards GCSE - the sheer quantity of key words necessary to grasp the curriculum or answer an exam question is staggering". Oops, dropped this!

Doesn't all that indicate that the curriculum is currently aimed at middle class children without learning disabilities whose parents take them to museums?

Sadly teacherwith2kids those examples are offered because some teachers are unable to think for themselves and even more sadly we are creating a generation of pupils who can't think either if the universities are to be believed.

RealLife I agree. One of the first things we were told to do for my Eng Lit undergrad was buy the Oxford History of Britain and read it cover to cover, as it was pointless trying to read the literature from a period without a basic working knowledge of the social and political climate in which people were writing. As a result I came out both with a decent working knowledge of literary history and with a fairly solid sense of a historical/cultural narrative over the centuries, which was largely missing from the way we'd been taught history at school. The idea of doing history 'thematically' is just weird unless the theme you're looking at is overlaid on a basic sense that events followed one another in sequence.

I am of the Old School and I don't have kids in the UK system at present so I am trying to catch up with what "skills based curriculum" means.

But I have two questions and I don't ask them to be obtuse.

1. Is there any place for rote learning in today's schools?

Even if I accept (reluctantly :) ) that "skills-based" means rather than learning all the times tables up to 12 with accuracy and speed, it is better to have an understanding of how multiplication works (and learn how to apply that in a given context etc.), as a linguist, I cannot think of any other way of learning irregular verbs other than by rote. Unlike mulitplication tables, there is no rhyme or reason to:

Je suis
Tu es
Il est
Nous sommes
Vous êtes
Ils sont

I believe it just has to be learnt by heart. And so whilst learning the whys and wherefores of multiplication is sensible, learning the times tables off by heart would allow children to learn how to learn by rote IYSWIM. So that learning irregular verb endings (at secondary school presumably) would tap into the skill of sitting down and learning off by heart. In English, there's no necessity to learn irregular verbs by rote (although some children could do with some help with did / done and written / wrote etc.) but even monolingual French children learning French have to learn all the irregulqr verb groups by rote as it is not enough to pick it up via speech.

1. There are people on this thread who reject the idea that there's any inherent value in learning about dead white men (Greeks, Romans, Battle of Hastings, WW1, Tudors etc.) and GaelicSheep mentioned way upthread that in her children's class the children choose the topic and then the relevant skills are extracted from whatever topic that might be. But if you take this to its logical conclusion, we could have children learning fabulous skills by studying and deconstructing and analysing source material and reliability in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Surely there is an inherent value to certain topics, whether they be Norse, Greek, Aztec, Inca or Roman mythology or 19th century Gothica and knowledge of these topics could inform your watching of Buffy with its mythological references? But missing out all of that in favour of jumping straight to Buffy woukd surely be a shame?

1. yes and it's very much part of a skills based curriculum
2. the teacher is still in control and although learning follows children's interests this doesn't mean that the school teaches them about Buffy or Ninjas to the exclusion of everything else. In fact I would be very surprised if a school took more than a passing glance at Buffy

The skill is in providing meaningful learning while engaging the child.

Rabbitstew - I think that most History teachers would love to be able to cover all the things you suggest. However, most pupils drop History at 14. Sadly, its not possible to do all the worthwhile and interesting things you suggest unless the subject is given more time within the curriculum.

which unfortunately would squeeze another subject ... the curriculum is overcrowded

I have read Tim Oates' paper that is the basis for the coming national curriculum reforms and in no way does it suggest knowledge should be taught in the way passionate skills based curriculum advocates suggest that Gove wants. No one would get away with teaching that way. The main idea is that already expressed on this thread, you need to know something to then apply skills.
I'm a history teacher too. Its not a surprise that history teachers are especially interested in this discussion. Our examination is very skills based but we have a big body of content to teach also. I returned to work after 3 years out to discover the impact on A levels of making them more skills based. At AS the examiners for our board now advise us that for the document paper we should stop emphasising content, an analytical physics student should be able to get a 'C' without having any knowledge - having studied no history...
That paper certainly requires skill (its hard) but its not history its critical thinking.
The idea of skills to learn is so seductive but skills based curriculums at primary level expect children to apply higher order skills when a foundation of knowledge is needed. Analysing information out of any real context is not a meaningful exercise.

To illustrate why its just not possible to 'look up what you need to know' and knowledge is so important I can use the example of my Yr 10 history class. If they decided to find out about Germany in 1918 on their own they would be stuffed. This is because they don't know the meaning of the following words:
democracy
revolution
communist
political party
monarchy
dictatorship
revolution
republic
Thats just a few of the concepts they didn't have much idea of anyway!

To help them gain some understanding of these words I need to build on more basic KNOWLEDGE they do have. The fewer hooks they already have in place for me to build on the harder they will find it to learn. In theory they could be brilliant at source analysis without being knowledgable. Actually its the ones that have a more sophisticated KNOWLEDGE of the world that tend to be better at sources. They are also the ones that quickly learnt these new concepts last week.
BTW Don't tell me knowledge of these concepts isn't important....I might choke.