NATIONAL CURRICULUM 20 YEAR REPORT

A report by the House of Commons Select Committee for Children Schools and Families considered the National Curriculum after twenty years, utilising evidence from a wide range of sources in order to answer the question "do we now have the National Curriculum that we need and, if not, what should be done?".

The Committee concluded that the implementation of the National Curriculum and the guidance from the strategies have "turned schooling into "a franchise operation more dependent on a recipe handed down by Government rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers".

The Committee made 32 recommendations including the following:

• the National Curriculum should be slimmed down and a cap placed on the amount of teaching time that it can account for
• the National Strategies should be discontinued in their current form
• the freedoms that Academies enjoy in relation to the National Curriculum - being only required to follow the curriculum for the core subjects of English, maths, science and ICT - should be extended to all schools.
• the independence of the QCDA (Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency) should be guaranteed by a requirement to report to Parliament through the Select Committee.

More of this article can be found here: http://www.ttrb.ac.uk//viewArticle2.aspx?contentId=15376