Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, during the consultation period that preceded the issue of the current National Curriculum, they took account of the expectation in education systems in continental Europe that teachers are well-informed on the nature of vocabulary and lexical semantics and that they will give separate prominence in mother-tongue teaching; and if so, why they did not include such an emphasis in the National Curriculum of this country.

The review of the English National Curriculum involved consideration of the curricula of high-performing jurisdictions around the world in which English is the medium of instruction. The high-performing jurisdictions selected for the review, which included looking at how vocabulary development was approached, were all outside continental Europe. The analysis for the review was extended to some non-Anglophone jurisdictions in order to assess how different jurisdictions define expectations around the reading of literature in their curricula. The eight European non-Anglophone jurisdictions selected were Denmark, Estonia, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal and Poland.

The report from the review of what we can learn from the English, mathematics and science curricula of high-performing jurisdictions can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-national-curriculum-in-england-what-can-we-learn-from-the-english-mathematics-and-science-curricula-of-high-performing-jurisdictions