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Chapter 7 - The Politicization of the School Curriculum
Curriculum Development And Innovative Practice (EDF3010)
Monash University
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7
The Politicization of the School Curriculum
It is important to note first of all that education is essentially a political activ- ity, that the education system is the device by which an advanced society pre- pares its young for adult life in the society, a formalization of the role played in primitive societies by all or most of the adult population. The political context, then, is a major element in any scheme or system of education, and one without reference to which such a scheme or system cannot be properly understood. It is for this reason that most of the major educational theorists or philoso- phers have also been, or even have primarily been, social and political philoso- phers. Plato, for example, offers us his theory of education only in the context of his political theory, introducing his whole discussion of education with the words ‘These are the kinds of people our guardians must be. In what manner, then, will we rear and educate them?’ Clearly, his main concern was with the social or political function of education; and we must note that this has been true also of many of the major figures who have followed him – Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Dewey and so on. At the practical level, this is reflected in the importance attached to schools and teachers in revolutionary times and by totalitarian governments. Control of the school system has been seen as a close second in terms of importance to control of the media of communication in most revolutions; and it has also been a prime concern of leaders of major national movements, such as Lenin and Hitler. In this connection, it is worth noting that the idea of a national cur- riculum which was mooted in the United Kingdom in the 1930s was rejected at that time because it smacked of totalitarianism. We should also note the inter- est in education which has long been shown by religious bodies. It would be a mistake to assume that such interest has always been prompted by charitable intentions and never by a desire to propagate particular religious creeds and tenets. Few can be unfamiliar with the Jesuits’ claim about what can be achieved through control of the early years of schooling. The religious unrest and rivalries which are a sad feature of most present-day societies are thus a reason for nothaving ‘faith schools’ rather than, as is the current stated policy of the government in England and Wales, for extending them. Education and politics, then, are inextricably interwoven with each other, so that one cannot productively discuss curriculum issues in a political vacuum.
Direct and indirect political influences
We must, however, distinguish direct political intervention from influences of an indirect, less overt and thus possibly less effective kind. And we must remind ourselves that, even before the advent of direct political intervention in the school curriculum, there were many indirect constraints within which teachers have always had to work. For it must not be assumed that the former respect for teacher autonomy implied complete freedom or licence for teachers to do as they pleased. Autonomy is always relative; and teacher autonomy may even be regarded as a myth (Maclure, 1968). Among the more influential of the constraints we may identify are the influ- ence of tradition, which always tends to favour the status quo, and the need to respect the preferences of parents, again usually for provision of a kind they can recognize from their own school days. There are also the ever-present con- straints imposed by the administration of the school system, both nationally and locally, and, indeed, those arising from the internal structures of each indi- vidual school and its ‘micro-politics’ (Ball, 1987). Above all, we must never forget the inhibitions which, as we saw in Chapter 6, have always been recog- nized as deriving from the system of external examinations and testing, at 11+ as well as at 16+ (and now also at 5+, 7+ and 14+), and from continuous school inspections. Direct intervention, however, until recently in England and Wales, had been confined to organizational changes and had barely touched the curriculum itself. The state has pronounced, and indeed introduced legislation, on the establishment of compulsory schooling, on the progressive raising of the minimum school leaving age, on access to grammar schools and support for children granted such access, on the provision of secondary education for all and, later, on the provision of this through the creation of comprehensive forms of secondary schooling. All these organizational changes do, of course, have implications for the school curriculum, but it has been left to teachers and other educationists to draw these implications, and, on occasions (as with the raising of the school leaving age in 1972), money was made available to help teachers and others to explore the curricular consequences of the legislation. There were no direct injunctions, however, in relation to the school curriculum (except for the requirement of the 1944 Education Act for the regular provi- sion of religious education for all pupils). As a result, the development of the curriculum was left to influences of an indirect kind. Thus one can identify in the development of education in the United Kingdom a number of competing influences. In particular, one can see a conflict or tension between political/economic forces and idealistic or philo- sophical theories. One can recognize the influence, on the one hand, of notions like that of a ‘liberal education’ and ‘progressivism’ and, on the other, that of a concern with the inculcation of ‘the basic skills’; one can see tensions between
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that of increased political control. The dominant ideology has indeed begun to dominate.
The early historical context
From the beginning of the school system in England and Wales, schools wishing to qualify for public funding had to demonstrate their efficiency, and this was moni- tored by His/Her Majesty’s Inspectors, a body which came into being in 1839. This control of elementary schooling was strengthened by the Revised Code (1862) and the ‘payment by results’ policy then instituted on the recommenda- tions of the Newcastle Commission (1861), persisted until the last decade of the century. Even that extension of educational provision and broadening of curriculum which followed the passing of the Education Act of 1870 was subject to similar funding policies. Thus, while there was no direct control of the curriculum, indirect control was exercised through procedures for student assessment and school evaluation. And, as Matthew Arnold (1908:113) said of that time, ‘making two-thirds of the Government grant depend upon a mechan- ical examination, inevitably gives a mechanical turn to the school teaching, a mechanical turn to inspection’. Plus ça change... Successive codes at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries led to the introduction of alternative forms of curriculum and the abolition of the annual assessment of pupils. ‘Having for thirty-three years deprived the teachers of almost every vestige of freedom the Department sud- denly reversed its policy and gave them in generous measure the boon which it had long withheld’ (Holmes, 1911:111). And the transfer of responsibility for educational provision to local education authorities (LEAs) reinforced this policy of devolution. One can even detect a concern to avoid uniformity of provision, so that, instead of directives, schools and teachers were provided with regular issues of ‘Handbooks of Suggestions’, and there is little evidence of any concern to dictate even the subjects to be taught, let alone the content of those subjects. The 1926 Code, for example, makes no mention of any particular subject – possibly, as John White (1975) suggests, through fear of what a possible future Labour Govern- ment might do with powers to dictate the curriculum. And, in this context, it is important to remember that the 1944 Education Act, the work of the wartime coalition government, offered no directive in relation to the curriculum other than the compulsory inclusion of religious education and a daily act of worship.
The ‘Golden Age’
Thus the way was open for experiment and change, and the influence of the so- called ‘Great Educators’ and of ‘progressivism’ generally began to be felt. Certainly, this is a feature of the major reports which were published during this
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time, from the Hadow Reports (1926, 1931, 1933), through the Crowther Report (1959) and the Newsom Report (1963) to that of the Plowden Committee (1967). In the early years of this period, this influence had less effect at the level of practice. A major reason for this was the continued restrictions created by the examination system. For, although there was now no regular testing of pupils for funding purposes, grammar and technical schools still had the task of preparing their pupils for public examinations. And in the primary sector, even before the 1944 Act separated this off from the secondary, there was the ever- present responsibility of preparing pupils for secondary school selection, the tripartite form of which was strongly endorsed by the Hadow (1926), Spens (1938) and Norwood (1943) Reports, first by way of the ‘scholarship’ and then by the 11+ examinations. And so, although more development can be seen at this level than in the secondary curriculum, even there progress was limited. Even so Denis Lawton (1980:22) has said that ‘from 1944 to the beginning of the 1960s may be seen as the Golden Age of teacher control (or non-control) of the curriculum’.
Contradictory developments
The 1960s, however, saw two contradictory developments. First, it saw the comprehenisivization of secondary education and consequently the abolition of the 11+, at least in its more competitive form. And, conversely, it saw the beginning of serious questionning of the wisdom of allowing this degree of cur- riculum control to teachers. The cynic might resolve this apparent contradic- tion by suggesting that teachers were permitted this degree of control, this level of autonomy in curriculum planning just so long as they did not use it, and that the challenge came when, in the context of the freedom conferred by compre- hensivization, some teachers did begin to effect major changes. In 1968, Stuart Maclure was able to speak, as we saw, of ‘the English myth of the autonomy of the teacher’ (1968:10), but by 1985, Janet Maw was drawing our attention to the fact that ‘it is inadequate to dismiss the notion of teacher autonomy as simply a myth... It influenced the whole style of the curriculum development movement in this country, and it had a powerful (though haphazard) impact on teachers’ conceptions of their professional responsibilities and their willingness to engage in the realities of curriculum change. In other words, the belief in the teachers’ autonomy had an impact on practiceat all levels’ (1985:95). In fact, prompted by the Newsom (1963) and the Plowden (1967) Reports, spurred too by the planned raising of the school leaving age to 16+ in 1972, and taking a lead from the work of several research and development bodies (most notably the Schools Council), significant changes were occurring in the curricula of both primary and secondary schools. At secondary level, this period saw the advent of new subjects on the secondary curriculum, new combinations
The Politicization of the School Curriculum
Study Group, a ‘commando-like’ unit to make raids into the curriculum. However, the professional opposition to this was so strong that the successor to Sir David Eccles, Sir Edward Boyle, on the advice of the Lockwood Committee, recommended the establishment of the Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations, which, as we saw in Chapter 5, came into exis- tence in 1964 and was from the start under the control of the teaching profes- sion itself and thus largely a politically independent body. It is clear, as Denis Lawton (1980) has shown, that that was not the end of the matter, and that the intention to wrest curriculum control from the teachers continued to be pursued, and those attempts, as we shall see shortly, slowly became more overt, particularly as we moved into the 1970s, an acceleration of events which was prompted to a considerable extent by the oil crisis of 1973/4.
The initial ambivalence of officialdom
The ambivalence we have noted, the parallel development of a competence- based view of curriculum within the profession and pressure for a move to a performance base from the politicians, is illustrated most interestingly, and effectively, in the official literature of the time. In particular, that literature reveals a tension between HMI, as representative of the professional view, and the civil servants of DES, promoting an instrumental view of the curriculum on behalf of their political masters and mistresses, ‘a lack of consensus within the DES itself, between the political/administrative view (the civil servants) and the professional (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate)’ (Maw, 1985:96). Both in tone and in content, this tension is most apparent. Up to as late as 1980, HMI were offer- ing us a view of the curriculum, framed in terms of individual entitlement. ‘We have to ensure that the curriculum does everything possible to help pupils to develop as individuals’ (HMI, 1977:1). The same document speaks of ‘the responsibility for educating the ‘autonomous citizen’, a person able to think and act for herself or himself, to resist exploitation, to innovate and to be vig- ilant in the defence of liberty’ (1977c:9). And it suggests that this can only be attained through a curriculum framed in terms of ‘areas of experience’, the famous ‘eight adjectives’ which, as we noted in Chapter 4, it offers as an alter- native to school subjects – aesthetic/creative, ethical, linguistic, mathematical, physical, scientific, social/political and spiritual. And a similar ideology of cur- riculum was to be seen in A View of the Curriculum, published in the HMI Matters for Discussionseries in 1980. Indeed, many HMI, individually as well as collectively, were still at this stage also advocating ‘progressivism’ and ‘child- centredness’ in primary schools. These statements from HMI compare most favourably, not only in content but also in the intellectual quality of the arguments they mount in support of that content, with a document like A Framework for the School Curriculum, which was published, also in 1980, by the DES. In terms of sheer banality and
The Politicization of the School Curriculum
intellectual impoverishment, this has no rival in 2000 years of discussions of education (except perhaps for the weakest of student essays). However, its task was to set out the political view, the instrumental, performance-based, approach to the school curriculum. And this it sought to do in a very basic form, listing what it saw as the esssential subjects to be included in that cur- riculum, and outlining the merits of each, almost entirely in instrumental terms. It was seen at the time from within the profession as the typical, uninformed outpouring of administrators who lack all understanding of the nuances of the educational process. It was in fact something rather more sinister than that; it was the first major shot across the bows of the competence-based curriculum, an early attempt to replace personal empowerment with vocationalism as the prime concern of the school curriculum. A feature of the 1980s was the rapidity with which this conflict between HMI and DES was resolved. HMI were brought to heel very smartly, and it is impossible to tell, without looking closely at the small print, what is the precise source of subsequent documentation. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the HMICurriculum Matters series, to which we have referred before, and which illustrates very clearly how far HMI had been brought into line with the offi- cial ideology, how thoroughly their academic voice had been stifled, how com- pletely their professional independence had been surrendered, so that it came as no surprise when they were later ousted by a very different form of Inspectorate, as we shall see later. We must now trace the major landmarks in this shift in curriculum ideology and policies of which the events we have just considered were the early indications.
The shift to direct intervention and control
It was suggested earlier that, while there is a sense in which the whole social context of curriculum planning can be described as political, it is also possible, and indeed necessary, to identify more overt forms of political influence and pressure; in short, to note the point at which such pressure changes from being an influence on curriculum development to being a deliberate attempt to exert control over it. It was also noted that a change of this kind has occurred in England and Wales during recent years. We must now consider some of the ways in which those general influences which we discussed earlier have become sharpened up by recent political devel- opments to the point where their impact on education has become more clearly overt, direct and significant and where the degree of autonomy and of respon- sibility exercised by teachers has become correspondingly more limited. In short, we will be tracing the development of some of these influences into agen- cies of direct control.
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In short, one can detect at least the beginnings of an ideological shift – from a prime concern with society’s needs to a favouring of those of the individual, from the rhetoric of educational equality towards its realities, from the eco- nomic to the social function of schooling, from education as the transmission of knowledge to education as individual development, and from the notion of the teacher as instructor to a clearer view of the teacher as educator. Two further factors can be seen as adding to the difficulties of this movement. The first is the accelerating rate of technological advance and the consequent view that the educational system needs to be able to respond continuously to this. The second is the continuing economic recession, which has not only created a desire for schooling to be used to promote, above all else, economic productivity, but has equally and perhaps more significantly led to a reduction in the level of resourcing of education (as of all other social services) and thus to an ever increasing demand for ‘value for money’. To put it rather simply, and perhaps crudely, there had been less concern with the resources and energies teachers were devoting to the promotion of educational equality, education as development, the ‘social service’ dimension of educational provision, when the state could afford this as well as the other, more economically useful, things that schools were doing and can do. But that ‘golden age’ (if it had ever really been such, except with hindsight and by comparison with the present) was about to end. It is worth noting also that this general trend can be discerned in most of the ‘developed’ countries throughout the world (Kennedy, 1995), and for the same reasons. An increased rate of technological advance, along with a reduction in the resources made available to education (again a change paralleled in other social services), has resulted, therefore, in a move towards the increased external control of the school curriculum and of teachers, and a corresponding loss of teacher autonomy. That shift towards a more liberal view which we noted just now has had to be arrested. The movement has had to be reversed, away from the view of education as a social service, away from the Crowther Report’s view of it as the right of every child regardless of return (CACE, 1959), towards the view of education as a national investment, towards an emphasis on its economic function, towards a curriculum framed solely in terms of subjects and with an emphasis on those subjects whose major contribution can be seen to be utilitar- ian. Lawrence Stenhouse’s (1980a) era of ‘curriculum research and develop- ment’ has given way to an age of accountability, ‘the fashion has swung from “curriculum reform” to “educational accountability”’ (1980a:259); and the period which Maurice Kogan (1978) describes as ‘the onset of doubt’, from 1964 to 1977, has become his ‘struggle over curriculum and standards’. This is a development whose major landmarks it will be interesting and enlightening for us to trace.
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Major landmarks in the move towards central control
Denis Lawton (1980) argues with some conviction that the movement to estab- lish greater central control over the school curriculum began immediately after the failure to establish the commando-style Curriculum Study Group in the early 1960s. That movement began to reveal itself in overt forms in the late 1960s and gathered increasing momentum throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
The ‘Black Papers’ One of its first manifestations was the publication of a series of ‘Black Papers’ on education in 1969 (Cox and Dyson, 1969a and b). The contributors to these pub- lications, in Jeremiah fashion, inveighed against all the forms of educational innovation we mentioned earlier as emerging in response to a growing concern within the profession for improvements in quality and the increased understand- ing of education and curriculum which was becoming available through various forms of research. These innovations, they claimed, were leading to a serious decline in educational standards, and, on their definition of educational stan- dards, perhaps they were. In reality, it was the very concept of what might con- stitute educational standards which was changing. For them, however, since this was resulting in significant changes from traditional patterns of schooling, it had to be unacceptable. Individual contributors to the Black Papers attacked the com- prehensivization of secondary schools with its concomitant ‘destruction’ of the grammar schools, the introduction of mixed-ability classes, the spread of infor- mal approaches to teaching in primary schools with their emphasis on ‘play’ (a vastly misunderstood concept) and corresponding lack of attention to what they called ‘the basic skills’, although these they never clearly defined. In general, the claim was that all such developments were leading to a lowering of educational standards. And this was asserted with no apparent recognition of the need for evi- dence to support such a claim, for some conceptual clarification of notions such as that of ‘standards’, or even for an acknowledgement of the research evidence which had led to these innovations in the first instance. In fact, the lack of any kind of respect for the basic principles of intellectual debate and argument has been a major feature of this movement from the beginning, and it continues to chime very oddly in the claims of those whose prime concern is stated to be the raising of academic standards. Scaremongering, however, has never relied on evidence or logic or any aspect of rational argument. Its basic premise is that if you frighten people sufficiently they will begin to support your alternative, usually reactionary, policies.
Pressures for an instrumental approach to the school curriculum The first group formally to board this bandwagon was the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which itself began to assert that schools were not doing enough to encourage high standards in what it also called, but again never
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Its significance for education was not so readily apparent. The consequent eco- nomic recession, however, was bound to lead to major reductions in the resourcing of the education service and to those demands for ‘value for money’ referred to earlier. In fact, the education budget continued to expand in real terms until as late as 1977 (Kogan, 1978), but the problems of the economy soon caught up with it and, as we saw earlier, this became another element in the tale being unfolded here. There followed a series of events which can be seen as leading remorselessly to the level of central control of education encapsulated in the 1988 Act.
The Manpower Services Commission In 1974 the Manpower Services Commission was created with a clear brief and the necessary resources to develop schemes to correct what was seen as a mis- match between the qualities and skills displayed by school leavers and the needs of employers. Its focus was on the further education sector of schooling, a sector increasingly seen as embracing the age group from fourteen to eighteen, and successive schemes, such as its Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP), Youth Training Scheme (YTS) and Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI) led to a progressive separation of training from education which resulted in ‘the creation of a separate group of worker-pupils’ (Ball, 1984a:15), and thus in the emergence of a new form of tripartism in which ‘a clear technical–vocational stream is being established alongside the academic stream within comprehensive schools’ (Simon, 1985:227) and in which ‘it is likely that the intention is that this stream should bifurcate into a higher and a lower level, the majority focusing on more strictly vocational activities in the latter’ (1985:227). It can be seen from recent official pronouncements that now, in 2004, that vocational bifurcation is complete; in fact it is now not so much bifurcation as that the vocational stress has been extended also to the traditional academic areas of the curriculum. One can thus see the place of this development in the scheme of things we are describing here and, in particular, its significance for the redefinition of education and educational standards in instrumental, utilitarian and economic terms.
The establishment of the Assesment of Performance Unit (APU) In the following year, 1975, the Assessment of Performance Unit was estab- lished. There is no doubt that ultimately this Unit’s work made a significant contribution to curriculum development (Kelly, 1987), but there is equally no doubt that that was not the object of its creation and that it must be seen as a further milestone on the road to greater centralized control of education and of the curriculum. For its main task was to monitor standards and to identify the incidence of underachievement in schools and, while there is no suggestion here that its concern was to be with any redefinition of standards in vocational or economic terms, it can be no coincidence that its initial attention was
The Politicization of the School Curriculum
directed towards what were later to become the core subjects of the National Curriculum (DES, 1987a) – mathematics, English and science – or that a major subsequent concern became design and technology. There is no doubt that it was set up to act as a watchdog over the curriculum or that it was viewed in that light, in spite of its many efforts to carve out for itself a more positive role in curriculum development. Its establishment thus represents another step towards centralized control.
Teacher training At about this time, too, events were occurring in teacher education whose implications were to prove far-reaching, not least in turning it into teacher training. Miscalculations in the Department of Education and Science had led to a massive over-production of newly qualified teachers in the early to mid- 1970s as school rolls fell dramatically. There was much unemployment among teachers, especially those just completing their initial courses, and clearly there was a need for tighter controls of entry to such courses. It was an opportunity to raise entry qualifications for the profession and it was used as such, first to create an all-graduate profession and later to make additional requirements for such qualifications as GCE ‘O’ level mathematics and English language passes for all new entrants. It also offered, however, seemingly sound pretexts for intervention of a more direct kind in the work of institutions offering courses of teacher education. To reduce the number of students on such courses, colleges had to be ‘diversified’ (have their attentions switched to courses other than teacher education courses), merged with one another or with other institutions of higher education to make viable units, or even, in many cases, closed altogether. Decisions of this kind were to a large extent left to be decided at local level, but they ultimately depended on the allocation of student numbers by the Department of Education and Science. The Department thus gained effective control over the system through the distribution of these numbers and it is no great step, as subsequent events have shown and as we shall see in due course, from that kind of control to control over the nature and content of the curriculum of these courses. The need to reduce the number of teachers in training, therefore, was the thin edge of a wedge whose effects in prising open not only the colleges and departments of education but also the schools and, indeed, the universities were to prove very far-reaching indeed.
James Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College There followed a series of events which made overt and public the drive towards greater central control. For most people the first indication of this came in the autumn of 1976 with a famous speech by James Callaghan as Prime Minister, at Ruskin College, Oxford, in which he mounted a direct attack on the teaching profession for failing to respond to the needs of society by per-
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provision, and the 1988 Education Act gave the Secretary of State unprece- dented powers of control and, by reducing the roles not only of the teachers themselves but also of the local authorities, effectively replaced that triangular form of control with a set of mechanisms which are largely unidimensional. The declaration of James Callaghan at Ruskin was followed by the so-called ‘Great Debate’ which was conducted through all the media and stage-managed by Shirley Williams, Secretary of State for Education and Science in that Labour government. Ostensibly, the point of this was to make education a matter of public concern and discussion. Its real purpose can be seen only as a step towards increased centralization of control. This debate culminated in the publication in 1977 of a Green Paper (DES, 1977b), which set out an interventionist strategy based on several major pro- posals of a specific kind for, amongst other things, the establishment of a national curriculum, performance testing of pupils and the appraisal of teach- ers. In the same year, Circular 14/77 required local education authorities to produce detailed statements of their curricular policies, and this requirement was naturally and immediately passed on to schools, which suddenly found themselves faced with the task of preparing and producing curricular state- ments at a level of detail they had in most places never experienced before. The year 1977 also saw the publication of the Taylor Report (DES, 1977a) on the government of schools, a report whose main recommendations were that governing bodies of schools should be given increased powers, especially in relation to the school curriculum, and that there should be increased repre- sentation of parents on all such bodies. Also at about this time began to appear that plethora of official documents on the school curriculum, emerging from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate and from the Department of Education and Science, which we noted earlier.
The 1980 Education Act The first piece of the legislation which was to translate these discussions and proposals into official policy was the 1980 Education Act, which gave more power to local authorities in the matter of controlling the curricular provision of their schools, although at the same time requiring of them statements of their own general policies in this area. It also increased the powers of parents, not only by translating into statutory form some of the recommendations of the Taylor Report concerning membership of governing bodies, but also by giving them increased scope for the choice of schools for their children and, as a corollary to this, requiring schools to make public their curricula and their achievements, especially their results in public examinations.
The first of the quangos Attention then turned to less prominent, although equally important, aspects of educational provision. As we saw in Chapter 5, the Schools Council was recon-
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stituted in such a way as to remove that control by teachers over its finances which we suggested in Chapter 5 was so crucial to its work. This move effec- tively put an end to all open, teacher-controlled, politically independent research in education. The money available through this channel for research (never a very large sum) was now to be spent according to policies generated by administering committees on which politicians and industrialists were to have effective control. It was no surprise, and not much more of a loss, there- fore, when, with effect from 31 March 1984, all public funding of the Council was withdrawn and it was thus effectively killed off. It was immediately replaced by the Schools Curriculum Development Council (SCDC), which was essentially a political rather than professional agency, and which looked remarkably like that Curriculum Study Group which we saw Sir David Eccles had failed to establish in the early 1960s. In the early 1980s the Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE) was also established, again a political quango with a very strict and detailed brief to review all courses of initial teacher education and to approve only those which conform to specifically laid down criteria. These criteria were mainly quantitative, but they revealed a clear underlying policy, since they included requirements such as that all four-year undergraduate courses leading to qualified teacher status must devote at least two of the four years to the study of a ‘curriculum subject’, even for students preparing to teach nursery age chil- dren – a clear example of the simple knowledge-based view of the school cur- riculum which pervades all current official policies. They required too the setting up of advisory committees to oversee the planning of courses in all insti- tutions preparing teachers for entry into the profession, and these committees were to include representatives from commerce and industry and from the employers of teachers as well as from the teachers and teacher-educators them- selves. We noted earlier how, in response to the need to control entry to the profession, at least in numerical terms, the Department of Education and Science had taken to itself the power to allocate target numbers for admission to teacher-education courses in all institutions. We can see here how that power was extended to encompass control over the content and the curricula of such courses since, if they were not accredited by CATE in terms of their content and curricula, they were allocated no target figures and no resources, so that they would (and in some cases did) wither and die. The work of CATE has now been taken on by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), a body which has made much of its role in establishing a ‘national curriculum for teacher training’, in spite of the fact that such a national curriculum has long been established through the initial work of CATE. In relation to all of these quangos, and especially to the ‘professional’ con- tribution to them, one suspects that they all display the notice once made famous by a Parisian hotel, ‘Please leave your values at the front desk’!
The Politicization of the School Curriculum
The 1988 Education ‘Reform’ Act The process which this section has endeavoured to describe reached its culmina- tion in the Education Act of 1988. The pieces of the jigsaw were all finally put together and, if the picture was in any way obscure before, it then became com- plete and clear. There would be a subject-based, centrally determined National Curriculum; its core subjects would be mathematics, English and science, to which 30 to 40 per cent of curriculum time should be devoted, although at primary level ‘the majority of curriculum time... should be devoted to the core subjects’ (DES, 1987a:6); in addition ‘the foundation subjects should comprise a modern foreign language, technology, history, geography, art, music and physical education’ (1987a:6). There would be a programme of national testing at four key stages during the period of compulsory education – 7+, 11+, 14+ and 16+. To this has now been added ‘baseline testing’ at 5+. All schools other than nursery schools (although this policy has now been extended to them) were to be given responsibility for managing their own budgets – Local Management of Schools (LMS). And local education authori- ties must prepare and submit to the Secretary of State for approval a formula by which they will allocate resources to the schools within their jurisdiction. These schemes must also show how responsibility for managing each school’s budget is delegated to its governing body. Governing bodies also have greatly increased powers in respect of the appointment, suspension and dismissal of school staff. And they have the right to apply to the Secretary of State for grant- maintained status, in short to ‘opt out’ of the supervisory control of their local authority and ‘go it alone’ with direct funding and supervision from the Department of Education and Science. All schools will thus become independ- ent not only of local authority funding but also, to a large degree, of local authority control (and, consequently, support). One current consequence of this is that the problems of underfunding are now manifesting themselves in individual school budgets rather than at the wider level of the local authority. Further than this, the Act also ended the life of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) and established in its place a number of smaller LEAs across the London constituent boroughs, thus increasing costs by eliminating ‘economies of scale’. Finally, although it is not our direct concern here, it is worth noting, since it reflects those general trends we have been identifying, that the Act also con- tained many clauses designed to ensure much greater centralized control over higher education. There are new arrangements for the funding of universities and colleges through funding councils containing a significant non-professional element. Local authorities lost direct control over polytechnics and other col- leges of higher education currently within their jurisdiction, and here too, as in the case of the financing of schools, they were required to obtain the approval of the Secretary of State for schemes for the delegation of budgetary responsi- bility to governing bodies of all but the smallest colleges. Furthermore, at least
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half the members of such governing bodies must in future be representatives of employment interests. The trends, then, are virtually complete: direct central control, knowledge- based curricula, an emphasis on economically productive subjects, increased involvement of industry and commerce in the management of educational insti- tutions of all kinds, and a much reduced professional role for teachers at all levels from the nursery to postgraduate studies. And the whole shebang managed, directed, controlled and steered by a succession of quangos.
Events since 1988
The Dearing review of the National Curriculum At first glance, it might appear that the most significant development since the 1988 Act itself and its implementation is the revision of the National Curriculum by the Committee chaired by Sir Ron Dearing. This revision, however, was cosmetic only (Kelly, 1994), since the committee’s brief was to do no more than to slim down an overlarge curriculum, to simplify the adminis- tration and especially the testing arrangements and to review the ten-level attainment scale (SCAA, 1993). Thus, while the content to be transmitted was reduced, the ten-level scale simplified and the testing procedures rendered so simplistic as to be educationally largely valueless, no change was made to the essence of the performance-based curriculum which the 1988 Act put in place. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Dearing Report (SCAA, 1993) was the embargo it placed on all further change for a period of five years. For this provided official confirmation of the fact that we have a curriculum which is planned as static and monolithic, and that the notion of curriculum development has, as we suggested earlier, been jettisoned. No matter what social and techno- logical changes might occur, even at a time of the most rapid change humankind has seen, there must be no change in the school curriculum.
The creation of a new style of inspectorate However, the most significant event in the period since 1988 is the replacement of HMI by a non-ministerial government office, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). This quango, headed by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, now a government executive, has the task of managing the national scheme of regular school inspections by independent Registered Inspectors (RI). HMI, now massively reduced in number, are no longer the front-line inspectors, their role now being to supervise the monitoring process carried out by others, and to advise and support schools which are deemed by those others to have weak- nesses and inadequacies. They have been replaced by a ‘powerful and independent Inspectorate’, as it has been described by the DfEE (1992:para.1), which aims to inspect every school once in every four years. It consists of people, including lay-persons, who
The Curriculum
Chapter 7 - The Politicization of the School Curriculum
Course: Curriculum Development And Innovative Practice (EDF3010)
University: Monash University
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