Why write a book on area-based approaches to curriculum development? For us, there are three main reasons. The first is personal; the second is political; and the third, and perhaps the most important, is pedagogical.
The personal dimension
The personal motivation for this book comes from our backgrounds as teachers and teacher educators. Will was bought up in Stoke on Trent and taught for a number of years in Wigan, in the north-west of England. Jonathan was bought up in Surrey, and taught during the 1990s in Suffolk, the most easterly county of England. Our stories and lives merged in Didsbury, in south Manchester, on one fateful day during the summer of 2001. We were both attending an interview for the same job – running the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in Music programme at what was then the Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Job interviews are always stressful. Along with a number of other candidates, we gave our presentations, had lunch and were interviewed. We cannot remember all the details, but we are sure there was a lot of macho posturing during the process. But at some point during the day we were informed that the university was not going to appoint one person, but two! That was a surprise to everyone. Following the completion of the day’s activities, and while on our respective journeys home to Wigan and Suffolk, we both received phone calls that offered us our jobs. We have both done that job to the present day.
Working as a team over the last 13 years has been highly enjoyable. Anyone who knows us both will tell you that we are both very different from each other. Will is a northerner, Jonathan is a southerner; Will has a sharp sense of humour, Jonathan tries hard; Will rides his bike to work, Jonathan drives an old Mazda; Will has numerous sharp designs for facial hair; Jonathan is just glad he has some hair left. We could go on!
But there are also many things that we share. We had both worked in McDonalds at one point (Will was a manager, Jonathan got ‘one star’), we both enjoy a round of golf, and we have both got impeccable dress sense.
Musically, although we have many differences (Jonathan was bought up playing classical percussion in an orchestra, Will was bought up in the brass band world playing the tuba), we have found common ground and understanding in our love for music and our commitment to developing the very best educational experiences for our pupils (in both the school and the university).
More seriously, though, the key things that make us both similar and different go back to some fundamental elements – our genes, our upbringing, our experiences in early life as shaped by our parents and our siblings, our schooling and, of course, where we were bought up and the communities within which we lived.
We have both become the people that we are today because of a complex web of people and places and their influences on our lives. The same is true for you and those you work with, including your teaching colleagues and your pupils. As we will be discussing throughout this book, teaching and curriculum development go handin-hand, and both need to be located within a local context in order to be truly effective. Who you are is shaped by where you have lived. Similarly, who you are as a teacher is shaped by where you teach. By this, we do not just mean the school where you are located. That school is situated in a locality, in an area, and that will influence the way that it educates its pupils. This book will explore how.
But before we explore further what we mean by an ‘area-based’ curriculum and how this might impact on your work, there is an important second dimension that we need to consider carefully: the political dimension.
The political dimension
Educational reform has always been very political! But perhaps this has been particularly obvious since 2010. During this time, the Department for Education, led by Michael Gove and his various colleagues, undertook a restructuring of the school system within the United Kingdom that has had significant consequences for the theme of this book. Although it is beyond the scope of our book to comment extensively on these reforms, we will say that it is our view that it is highly unlikely that these reforms will be overturned by a future government whatever their particular political ‘colour’. For this reason, we have considered it important to outline how these political reforms have strengthened the need for this particular book.
One of the key elements of the educational reforms that have been implemented since 2010 is the strengthening of schools as independent, autonomous bodies with significant power to determine their own policies, practices and, importantly, curriculum. While the new National Curriculum, which covers all Key Stages, was implemented in September 2014, it is not really ‘national’ in any meaningful sense. Individual schools, such as academies and free schools are able to design and teach their own curricula. However, Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) will assess whether any individual school’s ‘alternative’ curriculum is robust and fit for purpose.
This apparent ‘loss’ of the national curriculum has been bemoaned by some, while others have been quick to draw a distinction between curriculum frameworks which are external to the school, and the school curriculum itself which is central and internal to the school. In 2011, Tim Oates, the Chair of the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum Review, wrote:
This distinction between the National Curriculum and the school curriculum is vital, and it’s been lost. The National Curriculum is that which is stated in law. The school curriculum – what actually happens in a specific school with specific pupils – falls within the autonomy of the school and is critical in delivering public and personal benefits, providing a safe environment where intensive learning can take place, and giving wide experience.
(Oates 2011, p. 30)
We are not so sure that schools make this subtle distinction. But there is no doubt that today schools are enjoying a considerable degree of freedom in this area compared to 10 years ago. This ‘freedom’ has extended to important pedagogical processes within the curriculum. An obvious example of this concerns assessment. Previous iterations of the National Curriculum contained attainment targets and assessment levels. From this baseline, schools invented all kinds of data-driven approaches to monitoring pupils’ development including approaches to baselining, benchmarking and target setting. This had a profound effect on how you, as a teacher, had to justify the progress that your pupils have made in your subject or year, as well as how you communicated that progress to senior managers and parents. Much of this is now changing.
This government has viewed many of these practices as unhelpful. By removing these assessment elements from the National Curriculum they are handing over responsibility for when and how pupils are assessed to individual schools. Their expectation is that schools will embrace this freedom and find new ways to assess their pupils that are relevant and appropriate within their local context (and these approaches will be evaluated and judged through the inspection process). Time will tell whether or not these reforms initiate and sustain a more productive model of assessment in our schools. But the key point is clear – schools are now more autonomous than ever. There is a greater degree of opportunity and flexibility for schools to operate very differently from each other. Part of this shift could involve schools working much more closely with their local communities and reflecting key attributes of that in their curriculum arrangements: an area-based curriculum.
But there is an important flip side to this coin that directly impacts on the broader considerations of this book. In terms of school governance, many of the reforms initiated since 2010 have resulted in schools being distanced from their local communities. Links with local authorities are being dismantled, private companies with ‘chains’ (what an unfortunate word) of schools are being favoured, and many schools are being forced to become independent academies. Why is this such a big deal? Well, in the process of becoming an academy all of the school’s assets including its grounds, its buildings and staff are taken out of local authority control and placed under the control of that academy’s trustees. Trustees are not school governors (although individual governors may become trustees). The processes by which trustees are nominated and appointed are highly variable. Local representation at the level of these trustees is also highly variable and there is no requirement for trustees to be members of the local community that the school serves. Local communities are losing direct influence over and control of their schools and this is highly contentious (but also, sadly, largely unnoticed by local communities).
These significant changes in educational policy have been highlighted and discussed in a range of educational debates spanning back many years (Elliot 1998; Barber 2001). More recently, Hargreaves (2009) anticipated that we would move towards a decentralisation of educational policy that would result in a ‘post-standardisation’ era in education through which curriculum design would inevitably become devolved to local regions and the schools therein. This is precisely what is happening today.
Previous versions of the National Curriculum (especially the one implemented in 2007) explicitly acknowledged this and built on this principle as one of its core values. It promoted ‘greater flexibility and coherence’ among its core messages, expressing a key aim as empowering schools to ‘personalise learning experiences and meet their learners’ through ‘less prescribed subject content’. In particular, the National Curriculum, it was hoped, would allow each school to ‘design and build its own locally determined curriculum that matches the ethos of the school, the needs and capabilities of its community of learners and the local context’ (QCA 2007, p. 5).
We would echo the importance of these aspirations. While the current National Curriculum is very short on rhetoric such as this, rightly or wrongly, it does give this freedom directly to schools in alternative ways.
However, this is not a golden bullet. It is important to remember that in the United Kingdom’s recent history alternative approaches to curriculum development have been facilitated and rejected. Prior to the first National Curriculum (implemented in 1992), there was a long period of progressive educational practice that was rooted in school-based curriculum development. There was a huge variety and diversity of practice, including active experiential learning approaches, negotiated tasks, project-based and thematically based programmes, blurred curriculum and subject boundaries, and much more besides (MacDonald and Walker 1976). The unevenness and patchiness of such approaches was one of the significant reasons why the National Curriculum was introduced, as was their incapacity to challenge in any substantial or meaningful way the issue of educational disadvantage (Thomson and Hall 2008).
For us, there is one important element in this discussion that is largely missing so far. That missing element is you, the teacher! Whatever the policy frameworks that are in play within a particular political age, your work with your pupils should be central to your thinking about curriculum development. It is to this dimension that we turn our attention now, through a quote from the writing of Elliot Eisner:
Those interested in curriculum matters and working with teachers … recognise that the conditions teachers addressed were each distinctive. As a result, abstract theory would be of limited value. Each child needed to be known individually … each situation … was unique. It was a grasp of these distinctive features that teachers needed … to make good decisions in the classroom.
(Eisner 2002, p. 381)
The pedagogical dimension
In Facer’s phrase, ‘teachers are the curriculum makers’ (Facer 2014, p. 3). It is through your understanding of your school and your pupils, through your assumptions and your beliefs about teaching and learning, that the creation and enactment of a curriculum is facilitated.
Curriculum development of this type is a core element of every teacher’s work. We would argue that the process of constructing and delivering a curriculum is far more than a simple reorganisation of bodies of knowledge within a subject area. Built around processes of reflective inquiry, action research and collaborative mechanisms that help you and your colleagues work together, curriculum development can become an important site of professional development that can be beneficial for yourself and your school.
More than half a century ago, the Crowther Report stated that ‘everything in education depends ultimately on the teacher’ (Central Advisory Council for Education 1959). It is a sentiment that one of the greatest educational thinkers of recent decades, Lawrence Stenhouse, would have undoubtedly ag...
