National Curriculum

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kidron]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Black, for mentioning his cat, since I am going to mention my children. I declare an interest as a co-founder of Film Club, a charity that has a presence in more than 7,000 state schools.

Tim Oates’s review lays out the four pillars of an education as practised across all the high-performance jurisdictions. I found it helpful because one of my children goes to an independent day school and this, broadly speaking, is the education that he is given. In his school the spectre of the EBacc qualification neither reared its head nor receded, as it was declared stillborn, nor did it suffer the decline in music and art teachers as the status of the arts was diminished. The announcement of the history curriculum, decried by academics and at least one of the Government’s own advisers, is not a conversation that will touch these young men. When the dust settles, they will still get multiple A*s on a broad curriculum that sees England as more than an island and develops their intellectual curiosity in a wider world. These children do not have to make choices between arts and science or drama and languages. They have sex education and a broad range of extracurricular activities. Perhaps most importantly, their school’s reputation is judged not on part but on the whole.

By contrast, a year ago I found a young child emerging from a GCSE consultation in tears, not understanding why she was being “forced”—her word, not mine—to take history. There were more tears from a teen in Southampton, unable to get on a vocational course at the age of 16 because it was being reconfigured to start at 17. She was unable to return to school because she did not have the correct GCSEs but was unable to get a job or claim benefits because she should be in education.

What of the eloquent teenager in a council chamber in the north-west, making a case for her student council that was being disbanded, only to hear the councillor say with great regret that he had no jurisdiction over the school because it was now an academy? As the importance of oral learning is finally established across the curriculum and the CBI makes a case for the importance of transferable skills, student councils, a perfect rehearsal for public life, can be dropped in our “flagship” schools with no accountability.

Perhaps worst of all, for me, were the woeful faces of those who missed a grade boundary last summer, their plans in tatters as the goalposts were moved in the middle of the game. These children, unprotected by privilege, are the victims of an ideological tussle played out in our schools by Ministers insisting on targets that distort the allocation of resources and exacerbate the gap between those with access to cultural and financial capital and those without.

The Government have indeed solicited advice from the best educational jurisdictions, which unanimously recommended a broad curriculum, yet we are faced with a proposed system in which some subjects are more equal than others. If we are to help young people to contribute to the life of the nation, why has citizenship been demoted and why are ethics, religion and philosophy not in the academic core, as in the French bacc? If personal development is a cornerstone of good learning, why has there been obfuscation of the language that describes issues of puberty and genitalia in science, while PSHE has been left out of the discussion altogether to fight an uphill battle on an entirely separate battlefield?

The national curriculum review asserts that curricular aims are,

“essentially ethical, moral and political statements, making transparent the values and ambitions to which a nation aspires”.

This process has not been coherent. There is implicit unfairness in setting the rules according to the status of the institution rather than the needs of the child. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, if it is a national curriculum, why not have it in all our schools? In my view, what has been described—I do not have time to go into it in detail—is detailed but simply not ambitious enough, broad enough or deep enough for children who lack privilege in other parts of their lives.