Ministers accused of cowardice over curriculum reform
The government’s refusal to accept the Tomlinson review of education was one of the “worst examples of political cowardice,” Ed Davey said today.
The Lib Dems are the only party to support the idea of a diploma replacing A-levels and GCSEs but their education spokesman insisted they must keep pushing for this.
“We are the only party arguing for curriculum reform, but we have so many allies, across teaching unions and business. We must not be afraid to take this on,” Mr Davey said.
Changing the curriculum was vital if students were no longer to be taught as if they were a “sausage machine”, he said, which was why the Lib Dem manifesto calls for an end to testing at 11 to allow teachers more flexibility at a primary level.
While literacy and numeracy were vital, Mr Davey said, so were the other “basic skills” such as giving the ability of children to express themselves, verbally as well as through art and music.
However, he would not scrap all testing, but would instead introduce “functional tests” which primary school pupils could take whenever they were ready.
“We do not want children to lose out – we can’t allow any of them to slip through the net,” he told a fringe meeting at the Lib Dems annual conference in Blackpool.
The main issue was to move towards a more individualised curriculum, Mr Davey said, that would stretch the brightest students and allow the less academic pupils to study subjects that interested them.
And the diploma proposed by the Tomlinson review would deliver this, he said, while at the same giving students the core skills necessary for the workplace.
“It is a great umbrella for vocational and academic qualifications,” he added.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) is firmly in favour of curriculum reform, and assistant secretary John Bangs told the same meeting that it was vital teachers be given the flexibility to do their job.
Rather than making teachers simply “delivery agents” for what national government thinks should be taught, a curriculum should be more of a framework, a “scaffolding around which teachers can be motivated”, he said.
A new organisation set up to represent the views of students is also keen to see reform. Danielle deBruin, spokeswoman for the England Secondary Students’ Association (ESSA), insisted that pupils must have a say in what they learn.
Having a choice of subjects to study, whether vocational or academic, could empower students, she said – after all, they were the end users of any changes that were made.
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