\n<\/p>\n
S<\/span>chooling in Britain today is where medicine was in the days of bleeding and leeches. It is trapped in the past, between teachers wedded to their subjects and politicians obsessed with tests. Doctors generally know if they have cured you, lawyers know if you are found not guilty. Educators have only exams to measure their <\/strong>professional success. The result is that English schools cower beneath an examination mountain \u2013 a global outlier in terms of the volume of assessment.<\/p>\n This week\u2019s report on reforming the curriculum in England was greeted by conservative critics with cries of wokery, dumbing down and falling standards. My heart sank, until I read its 200 pages. As a former education correspondent, I can only say I found it uplifting. There was the odd reference to diversity but it was hardly \u201cwoke\u201d. What shocked me was its outspoken commentary on the existing system, a curriculum that is overly academic and culturally barren, and with teachers treated as robots.<\/p>\n The last curriculum reform, 10 years ago, was initiated by Michael Gove. It was refreshing in showing that public policy had a role to play in education. It was less refreshing in prioritising traditional classroom teaching of traditional subjects, a reversion to Dickens\u2019 satire of little pitchers \u201cwho were to be filled so full of facts\u201d.<\/p>\n The result was a timetable that has steadily been swept clean of extracurricular activities. The arts, music, crafts skills and physical education have been neglected. Familiarity with the world beyond school is ignored. Ofsted ruled all with grades, league tables and humiliation.<\/p>\n The reformers refer to what must have been the largest survey of what today\u2019s parents, pupils and employers \u2013 not politicians \u2013 want from the nation\u2019s schools. It had some 7,000 submissions, surely the first time education\u2019s true users have been granted a say. Above all, their answer was: give us relevance, an education for life, not a test score.<\/p>\n Parents wanted children to be given a knowledge of money, law and legal rights, politics and voting, and skill at finding a job and working with others. Only a third of school leavers could recall a single lesson about money that they found useful. What they did remember was \u201ca high volume\u201d of lessons about grammatical concepts such as fronted adverbials. They craved a knowledge of the real world and creativity, and were denied both. The singer Ed Sheeran and a cohort of fellow artists have welcomed the suggestion that music and other arts should now become compulsory.<\/p>\n At last, an education report has placed a stress on oracy. Gove\u2019s schools were for reading, writing, remembering and shutting up. Today\u2019s children, whose screen addiction leaves ever less time for conversation, need help in expressing themselves clearly. In particular they should know how to articulate their opinions, \u201clistening to others\u2019 points of view, and agreeing and disagreeing respectfully\u201d. I never thought to see that in an education document.<\/p>\n It is not dumbing down to demand that children grapple critically with the digital revolution. The report says they must be taught to confront \u201conline harms or misinformation\u201d. They must learn self-defence against a daily bombardment of misinformation from social media and artificial intelligence. This should surely be compulsory.<\/p>\n The report is rightly insistent that teenagers should learn about the community in which they live, about its institutions and their own role as engaged citizens. If they are about to vote at 16, they must study politics, to learn \u201cto step confidently into adulthood\u201d. Gove has dismissed such talk as \u201ca rigour-free potpourri of currently fashionable SW1 preoccupations\u201d. He would clearly rephrase Marie Antoinette: let the poor stick to rioting.<\/p>\n It is good to see teachers offered \u201cprofessional autonomy\u201d. The curriculum should be a framework, not a recipe of specific ingredients. The teacher\u2019s task is to bring \u201cthe curriculum to life \u2026 to reflect their students\u2019 lives and experiences.\u201d It is not to be subservient to an education establishment fanatically resistant to change.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sadly, the report pays obedience to the maths cult, which retains its lock on school progress. It is like Latin in smart schools in the old days. Beyond arithmetic, maths has become a badge of pedagogic irrelevance. I am told the GCSE maths requirement for most technical courses is now a serious barrier to skilled labour training. It is a social segregator. A teacher tells me that, with calculators, all the maths 99% of school leavers need can be taught to them in a day.<\/p>\n The only gaping hole in the report is its final preference for \u201cevolution not revolution\u201d. Its stress on citizenship, computing and creativity demands much school time. Yet it offers hardly any. It lacks the guts to abolish GSCEs and it preserves narrow A-levels in a capitulation to university specialism. All it can suggest is a mere 10% cut in hours devoted to exams. That will not do. As long as British schoolchildren remain shackled and enslaved to exams, all other reform will be meaningless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Schooling in Britain today is where medicine was in the days of bleeding and leeches. It is trapped in the past, between teachers wedded to their subjects and politicians obsessed with tests. Doctors generally know if they have cured you, lawyers know if you are found not guilty. Educators have only exams to measure their<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32696,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[700,2456,257,5668,916,1085,334,3965,6130,3426],"class_list":{"0":"post-32695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-curriculum","9":"tag-englands","10":"tag-isnt","11":"tag-jenkins","12":"tag-radical","13":"tag-review","14":"tag-school","15":"tag-simon","16":"tag-verdict","17":"tag-woke"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}