Inside a Curriculum Project

A Case Study in the Process of Curriculum Change

M. D. Shipman, D. Bolam, D. R. Jenkins

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138319394
• eBook ISBN: 9780429844409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1974. This book presents research into the planning and implementation of the Keele Integrated Studies Project. From 1969 to 1972 the work of the project team was investigated through observation, questionnaire and interview to obtain a picture of the way decisions about curriculum innovation are made and of how these decisions are executed in schools. The book is mainly the outsider's view, but the Project Director and the Assistant Director have contributed chapters and comments by members of the project team are also included. Three aspects of the curriculum project are covered: the interaction between project team, trial schools, university, local authority and Schools Council; the relations within the project team, within the trial schools, and between the curriculum innovators and the classroom teachers; and the impact of the project after the finish of the trial in the schools. The final chapters include conclusions on the process of curriculum change and on the education system in which it occurs. The problems of reconciling the different perspectives and interests of all the parties involved are examined in detail, showing that negotiation, adaptation and compromise are at the heart of curriculum change.

1. Problems in establishing an innovation

Planned curriculum change is not new in English education. What is new is the urgency of such planning in the last two decades. The early focus was primarily on the reform of science teaching, but in the 1960s the humanities moved into the limelight. This concern arose partly out of the Newsom Report of 1963 where the need to reform the curriculum for the average and below average pupil in the secondary schools was stressed. Up to 1960 history and geography, taught as separate subjects, were usually considered sufficient by themselves. But in the next decade these subjects broadened in scope and social studies in some form began to appear in the secondary schools. Social studies had for long cut across subject boundaries in the primary schools and now the integration of previously subject-bound areas of knowledge received support in the secondary sector.

This move towards more social and integrated studies was reinforced by the drawn-out debate over the raising of the school leaving age. There was unanimity over the need for a new curriculum for the young school leaver once the leaving age was sixteen. If that curriculum was to be interesting and useful it would have to be relevant to the lives of the pupils outside the schools. This was the educational context in which the Schools Council Integrated Studies Project was designed.

The establishment of the Schools Council in 1964 was a symptom of the urgency of the need for change. By 1973 the Council had launched 123 research and development projects. Sixteen of these were in the humanities. Most of the curriculum projects have consisted of small teams, usually centred in universities, concentrating on the production and trial of new materials before spreading the new ideas through publishing, courses and conferences. Curriculum development was seen as a scattering of seed in the form of projects in hope that the ideas produced would germinate, grow and spread.

Much of the case study in this book revolves around the problems of reconciling the different perspectives of the Schools Council, university, local authority and trial school teachers. The compromises that resulted will exasperate those who yearn for rapid centrally directed change and those who support change through initiatives in individual schools. But these compromises must be interpreted in the context of the organization of English education, which is itself a compromise. There is a continually shifting balance between central and local government, teacher unions, professional associations, universities, examination boards, trade unions and employers. This balance of interests is built into the Schools Council. A majority of teachers are represented on each main committee and cost is shared between the central government and the local authorities. The governing council has representatives from thirty-five different interest groups.

This context for curriculum change at the local level consisted of diverse groups each pressing what seemed to those involved to be reasonable and legitimate views.[1] The Keele project could only be launched after these interests had been contacted, consulted and reconciled. Even after launching, the need to reconcile contrasting interests delayed getting the project under full steam. The effort involved left less time to determine objectives and procedures in advance. The end-product of the project was determined in the field, in contact with the schools, not on the drawing board. Early project documents were full of curriculum theory and principles of integration. But in the end it was what worked that survived.

Early negotiations

The history of the Keele project started in 1965 when a paper was sent from the Schools Council to teacher organizations, local authorities and universities proposing local and regional centres for curriculum development. It linked this development with in-service training and envisaged a cooperative effort by local education authorities, universities and colleges of education. Each of the thirty-five to forty-five centres would be linked to the Schools Council. This structure for curriculum development and support was devised by Morrell, probably the most influential figure in the early days of the Council. It was never organized and Morrell did not stay long enough at the Council to push his ideas. Only the North West Regional Curriculum Development Project seems to have a direct link to the proposal. But the idea was accepted at Keele where steps were taken immediately to mobilize support for a regional centre.

The first step was to call a meeting and interest local authorities and colleges of education in the vicinity of the university. In May 1966 a committee was constituted under the title of the Keele Consultative Committee for Schools Council Proposals. Representatives came from colleges of education, the local authorities, the teachers, the inspectorate, the university and, later, the Schools Council. From records of early meetings there was some confusion about the meaning of the proposal from the Schools Council, but little opposition to the view of the university that a positive response should be made. The humanities and the school leaving programme were chosen as topics for concrete proposals to the Council and the university Institute of Education was asked to prepare drafts.

The first draft was presented to the committee in October 1966 and after many amendments the proposal for a project in the humanities was sent to the Schools Council in February 1967. These early negotiations not only determined the terms of reference for the Integrated Studies Project once it got down to work, but inadvertently placed it in a politically difficult position. The committee had discussed the school leaving age and humanities programmes as separate issues, but when the latter was prepared, many seemed to have assumed that the humanities proposal included that for a school leaving programme. The local authority advisers certainly claimed in interviews at the end of the project that this was their understanding. Thus the move towards working on integrated studies across the whole secondary school curriculum was seen by them as a double-double-cross. It deflected attention away from the problem of the young school leaver that was their major concern at this time and it seemed to lower the priority given to the humanities that were crucial for a relevant programme for the fifteen and sixteen year olds. This feeling of betrayal was confirmed when junior packs were prepared by the project team and packs for seniors in the secondary schools were left incomplete by the end of the trial.

This difference of interest also stopped any progress towards establishing any centre for general curriculum development at Keele. The humanities proposal was to be the only one ever presented. This was mainly due to the difficulty in reconciling the different interests brought to the committee. It was also due to the rapid turnover of key staff in the early days of the Schools Council and at the university.

The draft proposal

The proposals from Keele were finally accepted by the Schools Council in April 1967. There had been feverish activity over a couple of months as the usual economy cuts forced the Council to prune budgets. This curriculum project, and probably all the rest conceived at his time, was the product of frantic to-ing and fro-ing, of telephone messages interpreted in contrasting ways by those on each end of the line, of last-minute revisions to drafts that had taken months to prepare. There was no experience in designing curriculum projects. Large numbers were being considered and tidied up by only a few Schools Council officers, all of whom were new to the job. Looking at the correspondence, at the final draft proposals and at Schools Council committee papers of this period, brought home the remarkable achievement of getting so much off the ground in so short a time. Obviously mistakes were made and the overall strategy may have been suspect, but between 1964 and 1969 new network of projects was organized.

The final approved draft contained a unique staffing proposal. There was to be a full-time Director and an Assistant Director, but these would be supported by three or more full-time coordinators. These coordinators would be serving teachers whose work was known to be original and who would be seconded by their LEA for the duration of the project. The Director and Assistant Director were to be at Keele, but the coordinators would be based at points throughout the area in accommodation provided by the LEAs. In retrospect, this organization made the Keele Integrated Studies Project a case study in cooperation between a university-based project team and local authorities. It increased the sensitivity of the project to local needs and gave it a grassroots flavour. There were great advantages in this organization. However, the divided responsibility of the coordinators assumed a harmony between the project and local authorities that was sometimes difficult to sustain.

While the organization of the project was clearly laid down in the proposal, the terms of reference were left vague. Early drafts had just referred to a project on the humanities. The final proposal described it as part of a school leaving age project. An important aim was seen to be the investigation of possible means of integration within the humanities. After acceptance the project was referred to as concerned with the integration of the humanities, or, in some papers, the coordination of the humanities. In May 1967 it was being referred to as the Schools Council Study of the Coordination and Integration of the Humanities in Secondary Schools. In June it was referred to as the Keele Humanities Project.

These different titles reflected a fundamental difficulty in deciding the scope of this project. There were two possible interpretations. One placed the emphasis on the humanities and was concerned with the subjects that could be included under this umbrella. The second was concerned with the possibilities and principles of integration.[2] Some idea of the difficulties in using this term can be gauged from the way the terms ‘coordination and ‘integration were used interchangeably in this early period. These two possibilities were further confused by the emphasis on the project being part of the school leaving age programme. Once the raising of the school leaving age was postponed, the need to consider this as a priority disappeared.

By the time the project team was appointed the humanities and their integration was the problem to be considered, across the whole of secondary schooling. The project team was to face a situation without clear guidelines. The only developed model for curriculum development was Nuffield Science, and most contemporary projects were starting under the Schools Council for the first time. There was also very little experience of humanities teaching in this country in the mid 1960s. This situation was probably shared by most of these first phase projects. The extreme alternatives were to go for a small, easily defined area of work and prepare a detailed set of proposals and curriculum materials, or to gather up information about existing work in schools and then present possibilities for a new curriculum. These questions would have to be answered by project teams who themselves had no experience of curriculum development. These early pioneers were having to carve out their own methods of working in a situation where, for the first time, a major national initiative was being taken to undertake innovation at local level.

The actual guideline for the project team within the original proposal read as follows:

One of the principal purposes of this enquiry would be to explore possible means and meaning of integration in the humanities.

The investigators will have to try to answer questions such as the following, providing data from the schools in this area:

(i) How far does the organization of teaching in secondary schools lead to a division of labour which runs counter to common strategy by the teachers?

(ii) What are the kinds of strategy employed in the humanities by teachers leading to the coordinated presentation of the subjects?

(iii) Is any attempt being made to see what kind of coordinated understanding pupils have of the humanities?

(iv) Is it possible to regroup ideas and knowledge between subjects in the humanities in the secondary school so as to provide new and intellectually reputable curricula?

(v) Are the ‘expressive subjects’ related to, can they be, or ought they to be related to the ‘intellectual disciplines’ in the humanities like English, history, languages?

(vi) In what sense if any is integration in the humanities taking place? Are there additional ways in which it should be attempted?

Answers to questions like these will be different for pupils of different ages and probably also for pupils of different ability levels.

Across the three years of the project this original proposal was to become increasingly remote from the actual work that was done.[3] The rest of this book is an account of the pressures that led to this transition. It is not a criticism of the original drafters of the proposals, but more a commentary on the process of innovation in education.

The Keele project probably suffered more than most from the difficulty of defining the area for research and development work. But it was typical of planned curriculum change in its exposure to the pressures of national and local interests, each of which was pressing its own case and trying to influence the project. Even the most precisely defined curriculum projects were exposed to these pressures. During the early negotiations the pressures were represented on the committees at local and national levels. Any product of two sets of committees is liable to lack sufficient definition. But this committee structure is a reflection of interests that will be at work on all projects. A balance has to be struck somewhere between entering the field with a clearly defined brief, which may then be rejected or frustrated by local interests, or entering with more flexible, if vague ideas which can be adjusted as the project develops. We know too little about the actual process of innovation in education to be confident that one method is superior to the other. There is probably room for both.

The research on which this book was based was not concerned with the evaluation of the curriculum materials and methods introduced into the trial schools. However, the relation between project team and schools which was of prime concern can be understood only in the light of developments recommended by the Integrated Studies Project. The publicity handout issued by the project in 1970 contained the following crucial points:

RANGE OF ENQUIRY: The project is examining the problems and possibilities of integrated humanities courses, during the four years of secondary education (11–15) and across the whole ability range. The project is concerned centrally with the organization of learning most likely to lead to a relatedness of the disciplines and their distinct methods of enquiry and verification. ‘HUMANITIES‘ & ‘INTEGRATION‘ : ‘Humanities’ are understood as any subject, or aspect of a subject, which contributes to the rational or imaginative understanding of the human situation. ‘Integration is understood as the exploration of any large area, theme or problem which:

(a) requires the help of more than one subject discipline for its full understanding, and

(b) is best taught by the concerted action of a group of teachers.

The direction of the changes proposed by the project for the role of the trial school teachers was as follows:

Traditional role	Proposed role
1. Subject ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Problems in establishing an innovation
• 2 Communication and identification
• 3 Contrasting interpretations and definitions
• 4 Pressures on the project team
• 5 The teachers’ part in innovation
• 6 Schools, teachers and curriculum change (D. R.Jenkins)
• 7 Impact and survival
• 8 The experience of the project (D. Bolam)
• 9 Implications
• Appendix: The collection of data
• References
• Index