Curriculum and Assessment Developments at Key Stages 3 and 4

Activities with student teachers

Clearly, the student teachers can be directed to the relevant web pages to view the National Curriculum (http://curriculum.qca.org.uk/) and it may well be that this is set as a pre-course task to encourage familiarity before beginning their training. However, this may not be the most profitable way to engage student teachers in an active, critical reading of the curriculum.

Within our course, the student teachers are given some historical overview about the development of subject English through the twentieth century, with major landmarks (the Newbolt Report, the Spens Report, the Bullock Report) flagged up, as background to an introduction to the first Cox curriculum. As part of this historical overview, the student teachers are encouraged to question the conflicting ideas about the purpose of English and differing subject philosophies. This then serves as a background for student teachers to engage with the five models of English proposed by Cox: ‘personal growth’; ‘cross-curricular’; ‘adult needs’; ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘cultural analysis’. Working in groups with definitions of these five models (or with statements derived from them – as in the ‘Diamond 9’ activity, Appendix 1), student teachers discuss relative merits and can begin to refine their own ‘model’. In one sense such an activity does show that the original National Curriculum did engage with theoretical arguments about the subject, and made an attempt to embrace them within the Orders.

When approaching the new National Curriculum, it is striking that there is no real unpicking of ‘theory’ underpinning English, and this, in itself, is a point for discussion, for there is clearly a theory at work, albeit implicit. What the new Curriculum does have is a brief statement – just over 150 words – titled ‘The Importance of English’. An activity that has worked well with student teachers is to ask them to write their own statement under this title, and see how they would sum up in 150 words the importance of the subject. Comparing their own pieces to others in the group, and then to the statement that appears in the Curriculum itself can help to develop further those interesting discussions around conflicting views of the subject.

For the first time, the new National Curriculum has separated Key Stage 3 and 4 within the Programmes of Study, with the intention of offering greater support for the planning of continuity and progression across the key stages. As a way for student teachers to explore the extent to which this notion is fulfilled, they can be given – cut up and placed in an envelope - particular parallel statements from the Key Stage 3 and 4 Programmes (perhaps from the Range and Content or Key Processes sections). Student teachers have the task of matching the parallel statements and discussing the extent to which they show continuity and progression. There are many of these parallel statements – here for example are the two dealing with multimodal texts:

With a collection of such statements to link, the student teachers can explore and debate the nature of progression as it is embodied within the Curriculum.

An enduringly contentious issue in the curriculum is the prescribed list of ‘classic’ authors from the English literary heritage. As a way of stimulating debate about the perhaps arbitrary nature of the canon, student teachers can be asked to take part in the National Curriculum ‘Odd One Out’ quiz, Appendix 2), in which each question has the name of three authors, two of whom are in the National Curriculum list, one who isn’t. The student teachers have to ‘guess’ the odd one out. This can lead to interesing discussion and debate as to how these choices are made, by whom, and what their implications might be.

One emerging element of the new National Curriculum it might be useful for the student teachers to consider is the potential for flexible curriculum design and cross-curricular links which are promoted in the guidelines. It may well be that student teachers enter placement schools that are beginnning to experiment with alternative designs for Key Stage 3, perhaps, for example, offering an attempt at an ‘integrated curriculum’ for pupils in the early years of secondary education. With this in mind, students could be directed to the National Curriculum in Action website (http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_7122.aspx) and asked to discuss models suggested there, as well as collecting and feeding back information from placement schools.