Beyond A-levels

Curriculum 2000 and the Reform of 14-19 Qualifications

Ann Hodgson, Ken Spours

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135726263
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Since its introduction over 50 years ago, the A-level has been a constant subject of debate in schools, HE and government. Sometimes hailed as a 'gold standard', there is now intense speculation about the future of the A-level in particular, but also about post-14 qualifications in general. The furore about quality and standards which accompanies each year's A-level results has become an annual fixture in the UK press calendar. With the introduction of Curriculum 2000, and an increasing number of calls for Baccalaureate-style examinations, vocational qualifications and more, the need for serious debate - and change in this field is clear.
Based on primary research by two of the leading commentators on the qualifications, this book is a wide-ranging and critical view of the fundamental approaches of the education system in Britain today. With government action on this subject looking inevitable, this will be a challenging and important book for anyone interested in this debate.

1: The importance of ‘policy memory’ and ‘system thinking’ for curriculum and qualifications reform in England

We believe that there is little chance of fully understanding the current or future nature of curriculum and qualifications reform without an appreciation of its wider historical and system context. The purpose of this chapter is to provide such a framework of understanding.

Our central argument is that recent history shows a consistent and considerable reluctance by all shades of government over the last 15 years to reform the upper secondary or 14–19 curriculum in a decisive and coherent manner. In our view, as this book will testify, this also includes the most recent attempt known as Curriculum 2000. At the centre of this reluctance has been the unwillingness of the Conservatives to reform A levels and the fear of New Labour to be seen to be doing so. Instead, what governments have done is to make changes to curriculum and qualifications in a piecemeal, divisive and permissive manner in order to respond to wider social and economic factors and, in particular, rises in full-time participation in post-compulsory education over the last decade or so. What our historical analysis will show is that the main reform effort to date has focused not on a systematic approach to curriculum and qualifications, but to organizational and regulatory frameworks within an education market. The formation of the new Learning and Skills Council (DfEE, 1999a) is the latest manifestation of this particular policy trend.

Recent events, notably the ‘crisis’ of the A level examinations in 2002 suggest to us that this approach has run its course. The Government now stands at a crossroads in its second term of office. The Green Paper, 14–19 Education: Extending Opportunities, Raising Standards (DfES, 2002a), which we will see was simply an extension of the policy of post-16 voluntarism carried into the 14– 19 phase, has, in important respects, been rejected by the education profession (see Chapter 8). There are signs that, in response to the A level crisis, the views of the teaching profession and the appointment of a new ministerial team, the Government now feels able to embark upon a more radical and long-term transformation of curriculum and qualifications for the 14–19 phase of education (DfES, 2003).

It is the purpose of this chapter to develop the concepts of ‘policy memory’ and ‘system thinking’ to support professional understanding of the possibilities and pitfalls in 14–19 curriculum and qualifications reform. By ‘policy memory’ (Higham et al, 2002) we are referring to the ability of those involved in the policy process to understand where mistakes were made and what good practice deserves to be incorporated from the past into the current reform effort. By ‘system thinking’ (Hodgson and Spours, 1997a) we refer not only to the historical dimension already outlined above, but also to the relationship between curriculum and qualifications reform and wider economic and social trends, together with education and training system factors that ‘shape’ these reforms. System thinking is about appreciating that curriculum and qualifications reform cannot be undertaken in isolation from powerful shaping factors such as funding, performance tables and teacher supply.

In order to provide a conceptual framework comprising historical analysis, system thinking and policy memory, we begin by setting out a brief account of the main social, economic and wider education and training trends since the late 1970s, which builds on and updates our previous analysis (Hodgson and Spours, 1997b, 1999a). We then lay out the key national qualifications and curriculum policy responses to these trends to provide a basis for discussion of the relationship between reform in this area and its wider education and training system context. Within these national policy developments we also discuss the role of local and institutional actions. Together, these three factors form the historical and analytical framework within which we locate the recent Curriculum 2000 advanced level qualification reforms and the new 14–19 education and training policy agenda.

Factors shaping curriculum and qualifications reform—a system perspective

There are a number of important factors which, over the past 25 years, have played a shaping role in curriculum and qualifications reform in this country. Some of these have been present throughout the whole period (eg labour market and participation trends) while others, which are the result of direct education and training policy intervention (eg performance tables and higher education expansion), have only had an impact at certain periods. We will outline these major factors briefly here and then discuss their effects more fully at different stages of the curriculum and qualifications reform process in the following section of this chapter.

Participation and achievement trends

Arguably the most important background factor throughout the whole period from the late 1970s to the present has been changes in the youth labour market and the related increase in full-time post-16 participation. The same period has seen a general rise in social and educational aspirations, but also one of sharp polarization, in which sections of the population have become excluded from this general trend and have not seen education as a viable means of social progress (Oppenheim, 1998; Pearce and Hillman, 1998; Social Exclusion Unit, 1999). The late 1980s, under the Conservatives, saw an increase in participation in full-time education from what, in retrospect, could be seen as ‘easier to reach’ parts of the cohort (ie the middle quartiles of the youth population) (Green and Steedman, 1997). The Labour Government, from 1997 onwards, focused more explicitly on widening participation in education and training to those sections of the cohort who had been left behind in the Conservative expansion and on those who had traditionally not participated in postcompulsory education and training (Hodgson and Spours, 1999a).

In our historical analysis of the effects of participation on curriculum and qualifications reform policy we identify two distinct periods (Hodgson and Spours, 2000a). The first was a period of rapid growth in full-time participation in the late 1980s and early 1990s leading to the need for new types of education provision, particularly in the field of post-16 broad vocational qualifications. The second was a period of slower participation growth, from the mid-1990s, which caused the Government to think again about the type of qualifications and courses that would encourage more learners to stay on and to achieve from 14+.

From the late 1980s and underpinning this wider participation trend, there have been rises in educational achievement which have led to demands for more full-time post-compulsory education, including higher education. However, this improvement has followed a similar pattern to trends in participation, and the annual percentage increases of learners achieving ‘good GCSE grades’ and Level 3 qualifications (A levels and their vocational equivalents) has declined since the mid-1990s. We have termed the relationship between these two sets of trends in participation and achievement ‘system slowdown’ (Hodgson and Spours, 2000a). This phenomenon has been recognized as providing a challenging context for meeting the national target of 50 per cent participation by 18–30-yearolds in higher education by the 2010 (HEFCE, 2001) and is thus now shaping the debate about curriculum and qualifications reform for 14–19year-olds, as we will see below.

The market and regulation in education and training

A further key background factor to the debate about curriculum and qualifications reform is the ‘marketization’ of the education and training system (Ball et al, 2000; Green and Lucas, 1999). Both Conservative and Labour governments have supported the concept of an education and training market in which learner demand is intended to drive institutional provision (DES/ED/WO, 1991; DfEE, 1998). During the Conservative era, particularly the period from the late 1980s and the early 1990s, this policy was pursued through the encouragement of institutional autonomy and increased competition between post-16 providers to attract learners. The Labour Government, on the other hand, has placed greater emphasis on stimulating learner demand (eg Education Maintenance Allowances and Individual Learning Accounts), while at the same time encouraging schools, colleges and training providers to collaborate over the supply of provision which is responsive to learner need (DfEE, 1999a). This can be seen as a ‘managed market’ approach within a voluntarist framework.

While Conservative and Labour administrations have taken somewhat different approaches to participation and stimulating educational demand, they have pursued a very similar policy over accountability and central control. Both have focused on greater levels of accountability as institutional autonomy has increased and as the education and training system has become more marketized and diverse. Both have also used targets and performance measures linked to international comparison, national inspection systems and funding methodology to mould the behaviour of the education providers. We will see at several points in the book that all of these steering mechanisms have had a strong effect on institutional motivation to implement curriculum and qualifications reform.

Part of the national regulatory agenda accompanying marketization has been the trend towards the ‘unification’ of national regulatory agencies. The first merger was between the Department for Education and the Employment Department, which became the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) in 1995. This was followed by the merger of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ) and the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA) to form the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) in 1997. Hard on its heels in the same year came the rationalization of the main eight examining and validating bodies into the three unitary awarding bodies: Edexcel, AQA and OCR. Finally, the funding and organization of all post-16 education and training provision (with the exception of higher education) was brought under a single national body, the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) with its 47 local LSCs, together with a Common Inspection Framework which covers all providers in the LSC sector (OFSTED/ALI, 2000). The overall effect so far of this unified regulatory framework has been to create a more direct relationship between central government policy and its implementation at institutional level.

The changing role of teachers and lecturers

The creation of a market in education and training and the inevitable accompanying central government accountability agenda has not only affected the way that post-16 institutions are managed and organized, but has also had an impact on the role and conditions of service of teachers and lecturers. The increase in participation in full-time post-compulsory education has led to more diverse groups of learners and, in many cases, a growth in class sizes. The number of temporary and part-time contracts has increased while, at the same time, more teacher time is spent on bureaucratic and administrative tasks and there is less time for professional development (Leney et al, 1998). Within further education, in particular, a ‘new managerial class’ has been created to cope with changes in funding and the drive to recruit and retain learners (Green and Lucas, 1999).

Recently, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the factors we have just outlined, there has been widespread concern about the shortage of teachers in all sectors. Moreover, constant and often ill-conceived curriculum and qualifications reforms have meant that practitioners have had to spend their time mediating topdown national reforms (Higham et al, 2002) rather than being involved in their shaping and management. The combination of these changes in the role of teachers and lecturers, together with centralist or piecemeal reform, has tended to force the education profession into a defensive and reactive stance.

The significance of changes in Scotland and Wales

Despite the general shift towards the centralized control of education (which we also associate with marketization), in the late 1990s there was also a movement towards the political devolution of Scotland and Wales. Up until this point Wales had been almost entirely part of the English education and training system, while Scotland had enjoyed a degree of administrative autonomy since the late 1970s. Increasingly, both Scotland and Wales are now reforming their education systems along different lines from England (Scottish Office, 1994; Welsh Department of Education and Training, 2002). This will allow ‘home international comparisons’ to be made within the UK in addition to those with other national systems beyond the UK. We will speculate that these comparisons will stimulate debate for more radical change within England as both Scotland and Wales move more firmly to more planned and collaborative systems with a stronger and inclusive curriculum ethos.

Four broad phases of curriculum and qualifications reform policy

In this section we outline an historical and analytical framework to explain the development of curriculum and qualifications policy over the last 25 years. We take the late 1970s as our starting point because it is widely recognized that what has proved to be a constant period of post-14 curriculum and qualifications reform began at this point as a result of intensified economic crisis (the end of the ‘long boom’), the growth of youth unemployment and government concerns to create a stronger relationship between education and industry. In this respect, a defining moment was Prime Minister James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech (Callaghan, 1976). Our historical analysis finishes with the publication of the Government’s Green Paper, 14–19 Education: Extending Opportunities, Raising Standards (DfES, 2002a) and its response following the consultation process. The framework we use, which is organized into four broad overlapping historical phases, describes the complex and dynamic relationship between national curriculum and qualifications policy, the wider contextual factors already outlined and local and institutional interpretation and implementation of national reforms.

The New Vocationalism (1976–1986)

We define the period of the New Vocationalism as one that stretches from the mid-1970s through to the mid-1980s and the founding of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ). What characterizes this period is a series of initiatives for the young unemployed (eg the Youth Opportunities Programme and then the Youth Training Scheme) which were eventually accompanied by a range of pre-vocational qualifications and awards, such as the Certificate of Extended Education (CEE), the Certificate of Pre-vocational Education (CPVE) and City and Guilds 365. In addition, the Government introduced the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) to encourage the growth of a more vocational, applied and technical approach to the full-time 14–19 curriculum in schools and colleges.

There were two landmark policy developments in the era of the New Vocationalism. The first was the publication of A Basis for Choice (FEU, 1979) which proposed a rationalization of the disparate unemployment initiatives within a single ‘framework of preparation’, which eventually resulted in the creation of CPVE. The second was the publication of the New Training Initiative (NTI) (MSC, 1981), which spawned the Youth Training Scheme. The NTI could also be seen as setting out a new agenda for thinking about the design of qualifications through its argument for outcomes-based standards of a new type. This was eventually to lead to the development of NVQs in the late 1980s.

The factors shaping these developments were found principally outside the education and training system, while radically affecting curriculum and qualification debates within it. Foremost among these was the economic recession and the rise in youth unemployment. The main way in which these economic factors affected the education and training response was that they gave rise to a perceived need for the development of generic or transferable skills to prepare young people for changing labour markets, as well as to cope with youth unemployment. While A Basis for Choice proposed a single curriculum framework, what actually emerged was a plethora of initiatives and new awards subsequently dubbed the ‘qualifications jungle’ (Pratley, 1988). These initiatives were essentially aimed at those who could not gain O or A levels and who could not immediately gain entry to a shrinking youth labour market or apprenticeship.

However, the New Vocationalism was not simply seen as an alternative curriculum for some. By the mid-1980s, and often articulated through TVEI with its role in relation to full-time learners, there was a strong call from a mixture of academics and politicians for a more applied and vocationally-relevant curriculum for all learners (Broadfoot, 1986; Pring, 1986; Pring et al, 1988). What had started as a narrow form of vocationalism in the early 1980s was turning into a wave of ‘bottom-up’ curriculum innovation by the end of the decade.

The period of the New Vocationalism was essentially driven by the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) and the Employment Department (ED) rather than by the Department of Education and Science (DES). It has also been seen as representing a movement to greater centralized control of the education and training agenda and, in particular, of the curriculum, with critics arguing that it represented an imposition of social control (Ranson, 1985), a divisive approach to education and training (Cohen, 1984; Green, 1986) and an emphasis on vocationalism in the absence of jobs for young people (Finn, 1987).

The major impact of the era of the New Vocationalism on curriculum and qualifications reform was fourfold:

1. It marked the beginnings of an attempt to ‘massify’ post-compulsory education and training, albeit in a controversial way.
2. There was a move to a more applied curriculum with a greater emphasis on more active teaching and learning styles.
3. It marked the beginnings of a move away from terminal examinations and towards the use of continuous assessment and an outcomes-based curriculum.
4. Towards the end of the 1980s, the New Vocationalism moved from an association with the proliferation of qualifications to a policy of rationalizing vocational qualifications within a national framework.

A national two-track qualifications system (1986–1991)

While vocationalization of the curriculum was still prevalent in the late 1980s, it was only in 1986, with the founding of the NCVQ, that a national system of vocational qualifications began to be developed. This could be seen as the beginning of the creation of a national two-track qualifications system— academic and vocational—to replace the piecemeal vocational qualifications and vocational initiatives that characterized the previous era. Interestingly, while this period represented a concerted move towards the formation of a more centrally controlled national curriculum and qualifications system (eg the National Curriculum, GCSE and NVQs), it was also a period of intense local innovation and curriculum development (Hodgson and Spours, 1997b). In fact, in our view, this was the most experimental period for curriculum and qualifications development of the last 25 years, though its scope was limited. The underlying assumption of this period was that a minority of learners would continue to participate in full-time post-compulsory education and the rest would be on training programmes or in the workplace. Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) were also established during this pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: The Importance of ‘Policy Memory’ and ‘System Thinking’ for Curriculum and Qualifications Reform in England
• 2: Understanding and Judging Curriculum 2000
• 3: Curriculum 2000—Patterns of Change
• 4: Reforming a Levels Under Curriculum 2000–A Halfway House?
• 5: The Advanced Vocational Certificate of Education–A General Or Vocational Qualification?
• 6: Developing Key Skills in the 14–19 Curriculum: from an Assessment-Led to a Curriculum-Led Approach
• 7: Shaping Curriculum 2000: The Role of Higher Education and Other External Incentives
• 8: Beyond a Levels–A New Approach to 14–19 Curriculum and Qualifications Reform
• Appendix 1: The Institute of Education/Nuffield Foundation Research Project (1999–2003)
• Appendix 2: The Take-Up of Agnvq and Avce, 1999–2002
• Appendix 3
• References