Broad and Bold

Building a Modern Curriculum

We are forever told that the curriculum needs to be ambitious. Young people need to be literate and numerate. They should excel in important subjects like Science and History. They should love learning for its own sake, but also be prepared for the world of work. They should be financially savvy and digitally responsible. They should be active citizens, living healthy lives.

They should experience success and failure, and build character on playing fields, theatre stages, and in the great outdoors. The sheer number of people with a view on our curriculum is dizzying: parents, teachers, the Government, universities, employers. Each has different priorities for what young people should be taught, and all are legitimate. The result, however, is that children find themselves caught in the crossfire of a fight for time in the school curriculum (which is itself engaged in an ever more challenging competition for young people’s attention in this age of over-stimulating online content).

Faced with this, there is a strategic choice for any government looking at the curriculum, as both main parties are seeking to do during the next Parliament. Either, you create a singular focus on the grounds of efficiency and effectiveness. In doing so, you argue that it’s impossible to include everything or please everyone, and so it’s better to narrow down and concentrate on some key, well-established areas of knowledge.

Or, you choose another route – the one this paper recommends. Here, you argue that learning a broader range of knowledge and skills in different contexts is a better bet for the future. More, in this case, does indeed mean more. Breadth matters, even if there are side effects that have to be managed. After all, what better place to have big ambitions than in the education of young people?