Free school head without any teaching qualifications plans to ignore curriculum

[mrz]

m.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/mar/10/free-school-head-no-qualification

I think there is a lot to be said for ignoring the National Curriculum, that is one of the reasons why those who can afford to choose private education.

ignoring it when you were formally director of the think tank that advised the government on the contents seems to send a clear message

What message?

that they did a really good job producing an effective curriculum [rollseyes]

So it's good that they are taking up the option to not follow it then. What's your problem?

How extraordinarily rude! I genuinely don't understand what your problem is. Why not just explain?

Would you want the person in charge of your child's school to endorse something publicly, something that is going to be imposed on thousands of other children but in private reject it as "rubbish" ...it says a great deal about that person's integrity

That article was poorly written and difficult to understand. So what are these "free" schools anyway? And yes, OP, why are you being so rude?

The article is clear that the Head of the Pimlico Primary school was previously deputy director of CIVITAS, the organisation that has come up with the new curriculum which is being imposed on all local authority schools. However she clearly thinks this curriculum isn't good enough for her own school, even though the rest of us have to put up with it, and is doing her own thing. So it's clearly a question of "Don't do as I do, do as I say"

Interesting article. Looking at TCC's website, the humanities-based curriculum for the school has not yet been released. I wonder how it'll compare with the draft framework- especially the KS2 history curriculum?

Another example of our hypocritical government. The curriculum is fine for the riff raff but not the privileged few!

Yes, but she is basing her curriculum on E.D. Hirsch's ideas, which formed the basis of the new draft.

'Hirsch believes that the teachers who are currently in our schools, as well as future teachers, should be encouraged to abandon the teaching philosophies of educational naturalism that stemmed from the Romantic movement. He believes that the emphasis on natural and innate ability has proven to be a failure. He says that the emphasis on hands-on learning and critical thinking skills espoused by the theory of natural learning should be replaced with a core, common curriculum that focuses on a specific, shared body of knowledge. Hirsch has developed the Core Knowledge Sequence for grades K-8, which comprises about 50% of the participating schools' curriculum.

He believes that "the goal of meeting students' individual needs in the classroom has been greatly misused in American educational theory". If a teacher has 25 students in a classroom and is giving individual attention to one, they are failing to give attention to 24. He favors teachers using whole-class instruction instead.'

No pesky differentiation there then. (I can't think how that sits with the 2012-13 Ofsted framework, which seems to be differentiation-obsessed!)

Time to start drawing up the new framework in time for the new curriculum next year, methinks

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/oct/15/hirsch-core-knowledge-curriculum-review

I will never forgive Michael Gove for what he is doing to our education system.

And the way he is interpreting E.D Hirsch for the new history curriculum is just nausea inducing - I first went to America in 1995 and the ignorance of people over there about the world outside their own borders was breathtaking. It strikes me that the Hirsch curriculum will only make this worse - it seems to place one's own nation at the centre of the universe at the expense of knowledge of the global environment we now live in. It's backward looking, insular and culturally imperialist.

Perhaps we should send him back to the land of his birth Euphemia

If you can arrange for him to hit his "heed" on every step then it might help knock some sense into the man

Euphemia, you made me laugh

I'm quite shocked that some parents don't see anything wrong with this??? This is a 27 year old with absolutely no educational experience, who, not only sat on the committee advising what should go in the primary National Curriculum for the entire country, but was then appointed without interview, to head a new "free school". This woman then claimed that they did not like the National Curriculum, that they themselves devised and are making everyone else LA controlled do it, so would adopt "content-rich" learning instead, in which studies in the US have found to lower results. To top it all off, someone didn't even know what a free school was???? Gove is systematically destroying education so that he can be noticed enough to get a promotion within Government.
This is our childrens' future we are talking about!!

Thank you Blissx ...

But criticising this appointment is just picking at a scab rather than looking at what caused the wound in the first place.

Without a scab, people aren't going to realise there is a wound in the first place. Gove is very good at doing this. Does anyone realise he made the announcement Academies and Free Schools don't have to appoint qualified teachers on the first day of the Olympic Games last summer???? Yet releases teacher bashing sound bites on a slow news day, that not even Cameron knows about. Gove used to be a journalist after all...
It's all so stealth appointments like this can go un-noticed and he can get Cameron's job. He doesn't care a jot about our little ones' education.