The new “child-centred” curriculum for secondary schools could give teachers more freedom, but only if exam pressures are tackled.
No matter how boldly schools reorganise their timetables and tailor teaching to individual requirements, there is no sign that they will be freed from pressures to push up exam scores. Teachers will still be required to drill their Year Ten and Eleven pupils in the arts of examination technique and cram their heads full of facts. Where, they may well ask, is the freedom in that?
Many teachers and pupils will welcome the flexibility and variety the reforms may bring to their timetables. But freedom to innovate and to stray from a strictly prescribed syllabus may be regarded by some teachers as a burden, not a boon. There is a very real concern that only the very best and the most enthusiastic will be able to rise to the challenge.
The new insistence on making education relevant to young people is also a double-edged sword. As Alan Smithers, the Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, points out, what is relevant today may not be relevant tomorrow.
Rather than concentrate on climate change, far better, he thinks, to concentrate on traditional subject teaching that will give students sufficient background knowledge and understanding to make sense of potential future shifts in scientific and social orthodoxy.
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Some, like Martin Stephen, the headmaster of St Paul’s School, southwest London, believe the Government is whistling in the wind with these reforms as they will do nothing to address the really serious problem in the state education system: the shortage of good teachers in specialist subjects.
Others, including Debra Myhill, of the University of Exeter’s School of Education and Lifelong Learning, fear that the reforms contain too little innovation. The new curriculum, Professor Myhill says, retains all the topic areas that have formed the backbone of the curriculum for 50 years.
And it is hard to see, she says, how lessons in financial awareness and cookery will be enough to address deep-seated national concerns, such as the underachievement of white working-class boys and the decline of social mobility.
But from the students’ point of view the reforms do in some respects present interesting opportunities for change, most notably the Qualification and Curriculum Authority’s idea of holding five-minute lessons two or three times a day.
There are some subjects such as maths and languages that lend themselves very well to short bursts of learning. Conjugating verbs may seem less like a chore when the lesson is only as long as a pop video, while the need for repetition many times a week may help the information to sink in, boosting motivation and confidence.