‘Get the government out of the curriculum’
By politics.co.uk staff
Central government needs to drastically reduce its involvement in the national curriculum, an influential committee of MPs has said.
“There is a regrettable tendency for governments to make continual changes to the structure and framework of the curriculum,” said Barry Sheerman, chair of the children, schools and families committee, which conducted the report.
“Ministerial meddling must stop. We need to trust schools and teachers more and empower teachers to do what they do best.”
The report found the national curriculum and the guidance on how to teach it have de-skilled the teaching profession and effectively turned schooling into “a franchise operation more dependent on a recipe handed down by government rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers”.
It recommended a radical simplification of the curriculum and a cap on the amount of teaching time it accounts for.
It would essential universalise the system employed by city academies, whereby the institutions are required to follow the curriculum for the core subjects of English, maths, science and ICT, but are free to teach however they like outside of those subjects.
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