National Curriculum

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, there is a great deal that I like in the new curriculum. Of course, not all that I like is new, and not all that is new is to my liking. Let me begin on the cheery side. I like the goals and the direction of travel. I like the way that vocabulary and language development are explicitly spread out across the whole range of core and foundation subjects. I also like the way that two of the core subjects, maths and English, are accorded special status; rightly so, because of their uniquely dual role in education, a point that was noted by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. It is my understanding that English and maths will be taught up to the age of 18 in the event that pupils have not achieved a satisfactory level at GCSE. It is vital that we get these two subjects right.

Well, those who designed the maths curriculum seem to have risen to the challenge. We find a well thought out pedagogical progression, step by step, year by year, together with the gradual introduction of the requisite vocabulary. It is just dismaying to compare this with English, where the people responsible seem to have lost their way or never found it. They do not seem, for example, to have taken on board the clear injunction laid down when the review process began in January 2011: namely, that they should study and emulate the corresponding curricula in the world’s most “high-performing jurisdictions”, a phrase that the Minister himself used earlier this afternoon.

People at the DfE could have learnt a great deal from programmes for teaching the mother tongue in countries not as far as Hong Kong or even Massachusetts but neighbouring countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Germany. There is little sign that they even tried. There are many other and more overt defects. The most obvious is the gross unevenness: for example, dozens of pages are devoted to KS 1 and 2 while key stage 3 is dismissed with barely a wave, yet this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, reminded us, is when puberty-fired youngsters are at their most restlessly keen to explore, and when teachers—God help them—need all the supportive guidance they can get.

Then there is the unnerving difference in expertise as we pass from one content area of the English curriculum to the next. By far the most professional is the treatment of spelling, with its formidable and convincing step-by-step progression, laid out in extraordinary detail and at extraordinary length. The treatment of grammar is far less professional, both linguistically and pedagogically. There are, I grant, glimpses of attempts at something more sophisticated than the old preoccupation with a few shibboleths, but such efforts are lost in muddle and inconsistency and dumbed down in a curious diffidence. I am told on the grapevine that the note of nervous apology is because many teachers, and teacher trainers, still hanker after the grammarless “anything goes” days of yore, when standard English was the butt of smear and sneer. Others at the DfE whisper, “No, no, it’s not that—it’s because teachers are frightened of grammar and the arcane terminology”. Well, I just do not buy that. Teachers—in many cases, the same teachers—take in their stride the no less arcane terminology of maths and science with their square roots and quadratic equations, their molecules and precipitates. They happily and confidently explain the difference between sulphate and sulphite and sulphide, so why not the difference between semantic inverses such as imply and infer? If grammar is prescribed diffidently and inconsistently, lexicology, semantics, and the vital matter of vocabulary networks seem beyond the DfE entirely.

There is no sign of linguistic professionalism to help teachers build on children’s hungry interest in naming things and finding better ways of describing them, and no sign of any step-by-step progression in enriching pupils’ word-stock. Yet this is the very soul and centre of language. Like others, I have provided the DfE with detailed criticism and, serious as the defects are, they can be speedily put right if the advice is understood, accepted and, of course, implemented.

But I am left with worries that cannot be so readily dispelled. Getting a good curriculum agreed is one thing; getting it taught across the country is quite another, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said. Are the many thousands of teachers in post willing to teach it and are they equipped to do so? There is much in the curriculum that will be unfamiliar to them. Then there are tomorrow’s teachers. Are our teacher-training institutions willing and—again—equipped to make the big, radical changes in what they must instil into their pupils?