Voices blog

As the Curriculum Review nears its conclusion teachers and schools across the nation are being prepared for a critical shift in the formula behind the national curriculum.

The context for the new orders couldn’t be much different from the prescriptive environment when the formula was last written. A Headteacher said to me a few weeks ago “The National Curriculum is an irrelevance to us now”. This wasn’t an opted-out Academy: it was a ‘super-head’ from an Outstanding state comprehensive who recognised that Ofsted had stopped inspecting in relation to the National Curriculum, and so had shifted his priorities accordingly. He still recognised the value of teaching to the inspection, but not to the curriculum.

This indicates that both the formulation and the context of the new curriculum – in a country heading towards a deregulated school environment – will not be the same as the previous prescription. It is expected to look more like a Menu of options with some core elements; the EBacc staples, nestling within a broader dietary mix.

Such ‘staples’ would be the equivalent of the five-a-day fruit and veg that is promoted to ensure a nutritional diet. Once a school has delivered the staples, it chooses the right elements from the menu to satisfy the bias and priorities of its customers: tailoring it to a mix of the parental palate and the child’s nutritional needs.

Deregulation means that each school will be left to create the menu, to market it to parents and validate its nutritional content to Ofsted who will then award its Michelin Guide star rating.

If you’re responding to this metaphor, you’re probably one of the wealthy few who can afford to consider the value of the Michelin stars. Meanwhile – those with less ‘educated palettes’ are looking longingly into the windows of McDonalds… which of course is a massively popular ‘restaurant’, particularly in poorer areas.

McDonalds may be a triumph of marketing formula over substantive merit, but it satisfies a certain section of the population that enjoys the pacifying nature of food more than the nuanced flavours of haute cuisine. An educated palette usually coincides with a life where basic needs have been without question, leaving one to relish its subtleties and higher sensibilities.

But here the metaphor of educational content as ‘menu’ starts to be more revealing. It suggests that we are somehow educated for appreciation: and such an education may not be through teaching, but the satiation of other needs leaving space for development. Put another way, the social and emotional prepares the context for savouring the finer elements of life.

This, for me raises the spectre of the ‘doughnut school’…. Where students can’t access the elements at the core but are satiated on the fat and sugar of the outer ring! In the same way that the menu at McDonalds contains the five-a-day (if you look hard enough) it has, on the other side of the nutritional balance, more fat and sugar than is good for you. But that does keep the customer satisfied… and coming back… and in the system.

So perhaps there needs to be a shift in the metaphor? The curriculum doesn’t need a new menu but a new recipe. Something that keeps ‘broad and balanced’ within the staples and not as a result of the menu choice?

Unlike a Menu, a recipe is a set of ingredients that play off each other in order to create the most satisfying final result. In that sense – we propose that citizenship education is not just another subject – but the subject that brings sense to the rest. It engages the social and emotional into the rest of learning in that it contextualises and generates a substantive assessment of many other subjects. It also gives you the critical facts and understanding of your own context that could otherwise leave core subjects feeling abstract, particularly if other aspects of survival are absent or overwhelm you.

It’s therefore not an optional part of the menu, but an equivalent to the yeast in the dough: the thing that makes the rest rise.

Alternatively – you could say – its dose of reality is the grit in the Oyster: but that’s a whole other biological and culinary metaphor…

This is a horrible posting. I can’t help thinking it though. Yesterday’s tirade against teacher strikes by Michael Gove received such a tiny backlash, certainly in the media, that it’s hard to think that the Unions can pull off a great fight again.

That’s backed up what many pundits believe we’re about to see: the final showdown between the Unions and the country. In this final act, rudely interrupted by the resurgence of a right-leaning Labour Party between the miners’ strikes and now, the government successfully portrays Unionisation as an obsolete facet of the public sector, and shows why it’s time to call that sector a day because it can’t be controlled to the favour of the wider public.

The conclusion is then that it must be privatised (or mutualised) for the greater good.

Should that scenario play out, there could be a dreadful vacuum of mediated workplace relations in the free market. Which is a citizenship issue… If we actually do have (and need) the capability of collectively addressing factors that support social equality but think we’re powerless to do it in relation to the economy, then our national solidarity is undermined.

Over the last 30 years we’ve seen a whole new economic phenomenon that has contributed to inequalities of income: “pre-distribution” of wealth. Formerly taxation was our main form of wealth redistribution – ensuring that wealthier people wouldn’t get excessively well-off whilst poverty went overlooked. But taxation levels have come down such that it no longer has a huge effect (like the 90% of the 60s) in holding back the unfettered wealth of the super rich.

Instead we’ve been taught that participating in a global economy means we have to enable the super rich to enjoy their success or they’ll no longer stay in this country and make money for us.

So lowering taxation saw RE-distribution going down as taxes dropped to a ceiling at 40%. But what we’ve had at the same time is an increase in the PRE-distribution of wealth. By that I mean that the gap between lower paid workers and highest paid has increased to something like 20 fold. So instead of the managers earning 3 times as much as other workers, they can earn 25 times as much, before bonuses. Their income has been PRE-distributed without being subsequently RE-distributed anything like as much.

And there’s nothing we can do about that is there? The market is having its way, and we’re powerless against the market… what is the outcome of such social powerlessness?

The stats are overwhelming on the shocking effects of this inequality. The disparity causes physical and emotional suffering and erodes belief in justice while leaving in place the kind of envy that feeds disenchantment and a shadow economy. That builds ghettoes.

Labour has been consistently criticised for not halting this growth in inequality in its time in government, and on its watch the gap between lowest and highest salary levels actually increased through this Pre-distribution of wealth. There seemed to be no political tool to tackle this. No mechanism for “wage justice” other than the Unions.

‘In the old days’ these were seen to be issues for Unions to resolve. They were the civil society organisations that represented the breadth of the workforce and insisted that the whole of the company should benefit from its success, not a disproportionate number of managers over basic grade workers: not such a high differential across the company. The government would encourage this – implicitly supporting fairness in the workplace as contributing to social stability. It could still do this through the Office for Civil Society.

Perhaps this is the reason that some people believe that citizenship should be taught as part of History. There used to be ways to turn this around, to avoid that disparity of Pre-distribution. If those things become history, these just could be the good old days.

Alternatively – we teach the problem, and ask students to consider what options they’d prefer? What will Wage Justice mean in 20 years time?

Last night the students protests down Whitehall nearly made me late for an appearance on a panel discussing the Big Society at the RSA. The stress!

I say that with intentional irony. We were so civilised and reflective. Presumably so was the Royal Variety Performance with Kylie and Take That. It’s just that mayhem was going on at all-stations-in-between. I wonder what would have happened if it was Nick Clegg and David Cameron in the Rolls Royce instead of Their Royal Highnesses Charles and Camilla? I presume they would have been advised not to head up that particular street…

Putting aside any comment on the events in Whitehall (if you don’t mind) I can’t help thinking how important the role of student protests is to democracy. It’s the same the world over. There’s the democracy of ‘the streets’ and the democracy of ‘the chamber’. The former is pent up frustration trying to find influence; the latter is people of influence penting-down their discourse in order to stay ‘civilised’.

On the panel I was making the point that one my fears about the Big Society idea as it is emerging in practice is that it is predicated on a small authoritarian government on one side and a highly localised benevolent social activism at the other. I was saying that I thought that ‘all-stations-in-between’ were being stripped out (often in the name of cost-savings) which has to be dangerous to the sense of our shared ownership of society. My examples would be intermediary institutions such as the National Audit Office who give us some sense of whether citizens have it the same across the country. There is similarly a lot of talk of the importance of local government but not much of regional.

My all-stations-in-between point was really about how we monitor the ways we join up. If we’re not watching carefully we might lose the democratic connections that maintain the quality of our shared lives. I wonder if students have made those connections because they are one body who can grasp some of the conceptual principles and values that underlie strong democracies (not ‘Big Societies’) and so arrive united and ready to demonstrate their pent up frustrations? They already have a form of network and on this occasion their self-interest was propelling and in a few places out of order.

But meanwhile, at all-stations-in-between, during an unprecedented era of contiguous inequality in our country, a couple in a Rolls Royce, the figureheads of democracy, were making their way towards an angry and disillusioned mob…

I wonder who, between the localism of Westminster and the localism of the Royal Variety Performance, was monitoring all-stations-in-between?

PS Please join our Democratic Life Campaign to protect the future of citizenship education in England!!

Act Global is run jointly by the Citizenship Foundation and Relief International UK. The project engages young people in global citizenship and supports them in taking action on poverty-related issues.

Act Global offers teachers support in delivering the global dimension in schools through a dedicated teacher networkg. The network provides access to resources, including lesson plans. During October half term, we will be adding a new unit of work on the issue of sustainability. Each lesson includes a media-rich PowerPoint.

To become a member and access resources and support visit www.teachactglobal.org.

It was with great disappointment and regret that the Citizenship Foundation learned that the Department for Education, which funds The Youth of Today, would be cutting the schools part of the programme, which we have been delivering. All we know about the Government’s decision is that they are taking ‘a different approach to schools’, which necessitates concluding the Citizenship Foundation’s work as part of The Youth of Today consortium. (more…)