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Our blog

About this blog

This is The Curriculum Centre blog. Please read the following posts to get an idea of the new ways we are thinking about the curriculum.

Why 21st century skills are not that 21st century.
Why you can’t just Google it.
Why and how we should teach grammar.
The Power of the Humanities
Knowledge and Creativity

We recently featured on an episode of BBC Radio 4′s Analysis programme. You can listen again to the programme here and read a BBC news article on it here.

We’re an organisation who work with schools to improve their curriculum. This blog is a place for us to share some of our thinking, and to respond to topical educational issues.

This blog is mostly written by me, Daisy Christodoulou, and Dr Jo Saxton. Caroline Nash, our Chair, will also post from time to time. Sometimes we’ll feature guest posts too. A few posts have been taken from my personal blog on education, which you can still see here.

You can get in touch with us via our contact details at the top of the page.

Daisy Christodoulou
CEO, The Curriculum Centre

Word Up!

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Jo

The Education Endowment Foundation Funds TCC’s Word and World Project

I often hear teachers talk about wanting to ‘skill up’ their pupils, so that they might become better readers, and thus independent learners. At The Curriculum Centre, naturally, we are committed to achieving the same end. In recent years the tide has turned in England’s primary schools with the power of teaching synthetic phonics consistently and explicitly widely recognised. A full sea-change, one where national literacy rates are sweepingly raised, is still yet to come, however. I wonder, now, whether there is more to the problem of improving literacy than the discrete teaching of phonics; and more, even, than teaching reading strategies. At The Curriculum Centre we are increasingly convinced that the missing piece in the puzzle of achieving consistently, and sustainably high, literacy rates, is related not only to phonics and to strategies, but to vocabulary.

We want to achieve skilled readers by increasing the language at their disposal – to ‘up’ their familiarity with words and the concepts they represent.

For this reason we are delighted to announce that The Curriculum Centre has been awarded a significant grant from The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). The EEF has made the award to enable us to run a year-long pilot, in a range of primary schools, using the teacher and pupil resources we have developed that focus on explicit historical, geographical, scientific and artistic subject matter. Through these subjects we are able to give pupils a kind of universal language which makes so much that can be found in print gain meaning.

Our Word and World programme was inspired by the work of US academics and educationalists Walter Kintsch and E.D. Hirsch Jnr, which has demonstrated that the skill of literacy depends on background knowledge. In terms of language comprehension, reading comprehension, written expression and oracy, this is represented through a broad and rich vocabulary underpinned by understanding. In short, by increasing the word bank that pupils have at their disposal, particularly while their decoding abilities are burgeoning, our Word and World resources work as well for teachers introducing new terms and concepts, as they do for young readers and non-readers mastering them.

We are particularly excited that our programme will benefit from the expertise of Professor Stephen Gorard, thanks to the EEF. Along with his team, Professor Gorard will be helping us work out how best to evaluate the impact of the Word and World scheme.
As the project comes to life in schools beyond the Future Academies group we will post updates here from time to time.

On behalf of all the team here I’d like to single out Kevan Collins and Emily Yeomans of the EEF for supporting our application. I’d also like to thank Sir Peter Lampl and the EEF Trustees who have enabled this pilot through the generosity of their grant.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Teaching and Learning at Berkhamsted – Grammar workshop

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Daisy

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of grammar. A thorough understanding of English grammar transforms a pupil’s ability to use our language powerfully. My respect for the power of grammar came to me only after I had been teaching for a few years, however. When I went into teaching I didn’t expect that I would focus so much on grammar. I became an English teacher because I wanted to read great books with my pupils and get them to have great ideas about them. I still do want to do that; it’s just that I’ve realised grammar is an essential tool in achieving this goal. I explain a bit more about how I arrived at this point of view here. Essentially, my point is that grammar is important not because of some pedantic nit-picking desire for correctness, but because it is bound up with meaning. Rules don’t stifle creativity, rules enable creativity. I’ve made this point before here.

On Saturday I presented a workshop on how teaching grammar explicitly improves the quality of student writing, as well as their understanding of the English language. The workshop was part of the Berkhamsted Teaching and Learning Conference. I gave a few examples of pupil work and showed how improving the sentence structure improves the clarity of analysis. I’ll give one quick and very simple example here (which I didn’t use in the workshop) from a piece of writing about PE:

I did really well with the burpees this time I lacked in the lunges but overall everything was good.

This is a run-on sentence and it’s a very good example of the problem with run-on sentences. Does ‘this time’ refer to the burpees or the lunges? Or possibly both? This is an important point and it is impossible to tell. ‘This time’ implies that there’s been a change from the previous time. However, we can’t tell if the change is an improvement in the burpees or a regression in the lunges. This is a good example of how incorrect grammar impedes understanding.

There were a couple of really productive discussions which I learned a lot from and which I hope other people gained a lot from too. Most of the people in my workshop were English teachers and it was good to be able to share some of my ideas and see what other people thought of them. I have always felt that I have learnt a lot through looking at pupil work with other teachers and discussing how it could be improved, and that is pretty much what we did in this workshop. Quite a few people made interesting contribution, and I have made contact with quite a few since on Twitter. Thank you.

During the workshop, I did want to get round to sharing some of my favourite quotations about grammar, but I ran out of time. Here they are now. Top of my list is this one by Churchill. He wrote it reflecting on his time learning English at Harrow.

Mr. Somervell–a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great–was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing–namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence–which is a noble thing.

Then there is this excellent one by Ernest Gowers.

 The fault of bad writing is not that it is unscholarly but that it is inefficient. It wastes time: the time of the readers because they have to puzzle over what should be plain, and the time of the writers because they may have to write again to explain their meaning. A job that needed to be done only once has had to be done twice because it was bungled the first time.

Then there is this one from a more unusual source – Terry Leahy. In his recent book about management he praised Ernest Gowers’s book and said that he had used it throughout his career. For him, clear writing is important because

‘trying to express complex thoughts in simple English…is demanding, challenging and takes time.’

There were two other workshop sessions before mine. I went to the English ones run by David Didau and Rosie McColl and was intrigued by a number of their lesson ideas. I liked the way that quite a few pupils turned up at Rosie’s workshop and gave their opinion. David’s workshop mentioned some lessons on Of Mice and Men and Rosie picked out some wonderful and slightly less obvious World War One literature. Whenever I get bogged down with anything to do with education I always try to remember why I wanted to teach English – because of the magic power of great literature. So it was nice to be able to reflect on these poems and extracts during the other parts of the day – parts which, I have to say, were not as inspiring as the workshops. More on this later!

Posted in Literacy | Comments Off

Cambridge Assessment – 21st Century Skills

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Daisy

Two weeks ago I spoke at a Cambridge Assessment event on Teaching and Assessing 21st century Skills. Regular readers of this blog will know my thoughts on 21st century skills, and the speech I gave was rather similar to this blogpost here.  Essentially, 21st century skills are not as new as their name suggests, and they are more dependent on knowledge than their name suggests.  In my speech I noted the way that skills and knowledge are bound up with each other to the extent that what we think of as a skill is actually a large body of very well-organised knowledge that has been securely committed to long-term memory. I used Hirsch’s metaphor of the ‘scrambled egg’ to described this relationship. Hirsch’s very good article on 21st century skills is here.

After the speeches, I remembered one other highly relevant reference which I first discovered in Hirsch. Much discussion about 21st century skills can sound quite magical – there is this very complex skill you want pupils to have, and the hope is that there is a way you can specifically teach this very complex skill. The cognitive scientist Herbert Simon puts it like this.

“The magic of words is such that, when we are unable to explain a phenomenon, we sometimes find a name for it as Moliere’s physician ‘explained’ the effects of opium by its dormitive property. So we ‘explain’ superior problem-solving skill by calling it ‘talent’, ‘intuition’, ‘judgment’ and ‘imagination’. Behind such words, however, there usually lies a reality we must discover if we are to understand expert performance. One label often applied to persons skilful in solving physics and engineering problems is ‘physical intuition’.  A person with good physical intuition can often solve difficult problems rapidly and without much conscious deliberation about a plan of attack. It just ‘occurs to him (or her)’ that applying the principle of conservation of momentum will cause the answer to fall out, or that a term in kinetic energy can be ignored because it will be small in comparison with other terms in an equation. But admitting the reality of physical intuition is simply the prelude to demanding an explanation for it. How does it operate, and how can it be acquired?”

Many of the discussions I hear about 21st century skills fall prey to this weakness. They make skills sound like they are rather magical and wonderful properties, but they don’t fully explain how they work and how people acquire them. Fortunately, the CA discussion was much more grounded in reality. There was an excellent summary of the often vague concept of 21st century skills at the start, and Simon Lebus made the point that 21st century skills will need a much more robust concept definition if we are to formally assess them.

I also particularly liked what Darren Northcott, from NASUWT, had to say.  A lot of the talk about 21st century skills is about their economic necessity. But Darren made the point that we shouldn’t just think in terms of economic effectiveness; there is a democratic and moral imperative to education too. Even if it were economically inefficient to teach everyone to read, for example, we should still do it because it’s the right thing to do and because universal literacy is vital for democracy to function properly. This democratic imperative is one of the major inspirations of E.D. Hirsch and his Core Knowledge Curriculum. It’s also an important inspiration for Darren’s US union counterparts at the American Federation of Teachers. 

Posted in E.D. Hirsch and Core Knowledge, Skills and knowledge | Comments Off

The benefits of languages on cognition

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Briony

At the end of February, I attended a conference on MFL teaching, held at Wellington College. It was an interesting conference and many ideas were posed as to how to improve teaching, and take up of MFL at GCSE and A-Level.

For me, one of the most thought-provoking talks was given by Professor Antonella Sorace from the University of Edinburgh. Prof. Sorace has conducted extensive research into bilingualism and spoke specifically on the benefits that bilingualism can bring, not only in the field of additional language learning, but in cognition as a whole.

Firstly, it is important to recognise the meaning of ‘bilingual’ – Prof. Sorace uses it to mean someone who has native ability in one language, their ‘preferred’ language and near-native ability in another. Another point on bilingualism Prof. Sorace is keen to clarify is the myth that natural bilingualism can only be attained by children who learn two (or more) languages from birth. This window for creating bilingual children is much longer, she says, lasting until children reach puberty. (It should also be noted that with hard work, adult learners of second languages can also attain bilingualism, but this is not achieved in the same natural way that children become bilingual.)

It is easy to see how becoming bilingual aids acquisition of additional languages – being bilingual gives children an intuitive understanding of languages and enables them to separate different languages from a young age – but aside from language learning, what other benefits does bilingualism bring?

Bilingual children, research has shown, have a better understanding of other people’s perspectives. This is illustrated with the following story:

‘Ted has a chocolate bar. He puts the chocolate bar in the cupboard in the kitchen and leaves the room. After Ted has left the room, James enters the kitchen and moves the chocolate bar to the fridge. Ted enters the room to fetch his chocolate bar, where does he look?’

Most children aged 4 – 6 will answer in the fridge. This is because young children find it difficult to understand that other people see the world differently to them. However, bilingual children fare much better at the above ‘test’ due to their better appreciation of different perspectives.

Bilingual children (who are proficient readers) are also much better at tests like the one below, where you have to say the colour of the word. Reading becomes such an automatic process that it’s very difficult for most adults to suppress the reflex to read the word first, which slows us up! Bilinguals, however, who are used to having to suppress one set of grammar, vocabulary and syntax on a daily basis, are much better at suppressing the instinct to read which makes them faster at tests of these kinds.

Languages and cognition

But of course, what’s important here is not the speed at which one can complete tests such as the one above, but it’s what the test represents – mental agility and flexibility. Bilinguals, research suggests have greater mental flexibility and agility, they find it easier to switch their attention between tasks and to learn new skills.

Bilingualism is a noble goal for a linguist of any age. From September 2014, all children will have to learn a language form the age of seven. Surely, this can only be considered a positive move.

Posted in Cognitive psychology | Comments Off

How to learn to remember

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Briony

As a student of languages it was always clear that I needed to instinctively know how to say things or I wouldn’t really be able to converse in my chosen subject. I needed to get to the point where I wouldn’t have to think to read or talk in another language. The University of Virginia’s Dan Willingham, cognitive psychologist, has some useful things to contribute on this. Practical things, which work as well for the student who needs to recall her times tables, as they do for the language student, indeed any learner. His techniques explain the relationship between rote learning, recall and thought.

In his article ‘What will improve a student’s memory‘[1], Willingham offers a three-stage approach to learning and committing information to memory. The first stage concerns strategies to commit information to memory, the second to avoid forgetting them which leads to the final stage of reliably ascertaining whether you have committed a fact to memory or not. The strategy Willingham outlines is one that is stimulating and that brings results at test time and helps to ensure long-term fact memorisation.

Willingham argues that memories are a residue of thought; to borrow his phrase “memory is as thinking does”[2]. We will remember things we have thought about (for more on this, read a previous post by Daisy here). People often remember seemingly odd features of a trip or visit, such as what someone was wearing at the time or what the weather was like over the details of what happened on the trip. This is because it’s what they thought about at the time. The challenge, therefore, is to think about what we are learning, which is not as easy as it might sound.

Reading through notes or using flash cards may create familiarity with the material; however, familiarity is not the same a memory. We need to force our brains to think about meaning in order to create memory. One way of doing this, suggests Willingham’s article, is to ask ourselves ‘why?’ after each sentence or each section of text. Another way is to reformat or summarise the text. In doing this, we are forced to think about what is said, what the key points are and how they might be sequenced – in essence the text’s meaning. Doing this creates thought about the material and thus, memory of it.

Once we’ve committed facts to memory, how do we ensure we don’t forget them? I’d always thought that forgetting facts I’d previously learnt was just a process that occurred naturally with the passing of time. Willingham’s article has forced me to reconsider this. He would suggest that a correlation between time and memory does not necessarily exist; rather that if one has forgotten something it’s more likely that the cue to pull the information out of the recesses of one’s memory was a poor one. Good cues are the triggers to memory retrieval. The problem comes when cues are not distinctive enough. When speaking French, I often find that when I come to use a word I don’t immediately know, I first recall the Arabic translation and then the French. This is because the memory cues I have to recall the translation are ambiguous – they relate to both the French and the Arabic translation. Distinctive cues are crucial to memory recall.

When it comes to being sure we have memorised something there are, again, certain strategies we can use to revise material and test ourselves. Studies have shown that we often think we know more than we do. One way to overcome this is to keep on studying the material even when we think we have memorised it. Further research indicates that studying facts over a long period of time, for example 10 minutes every day for 10 days, is more effective than studying for 1 hour and 40 minutes on one day[3]. Therefore, studying for tests needs to start early, happen often and continue even when we are sure we know it.

Pupils and students often feel frustrated when their test marks do not reflect the hours of study they have put in. Equally frustrating is the lack of longevity in the memory of information learnt for a test. I have often found that the end of an exam for which I was studying signalled the loss of my supposed memory of the facts that I wanted to remember not only for the test, but for the long term, so I didn’t have to spend time before the next test re-learning what I thought I had already learnt. Dan Willingham’s strategies offer a fresh approach to those who want to maximise retention and memory – a very tempting prospect for those who want to see measurable results from their efforts.


[1] Willigham, D, What Will Improve a Student’s Memory, http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter0809/willingham.pdf

[2] Willingham, D, Students remember what they think about, http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/summer2003/willingham.cfm

[3] Willingham, D, Allocating Study Time, http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/summer2002/willingham.cfm

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Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Seminar

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Daisy

Last Thursday The Curriculum Centre hosted a seminar about implementing a knowledge-based curriculum. It was hosted by Bill Watkin of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. Caroline Nash, our chair, spoke about the challenges and opportunities we have faced in introducing this curriculum at Pimlico. Jo Saxton, Director of Education at Future Academies and co-founder of The Curriculum Centre, spoke about the rationale for our curriculum and explained why we think it is necessary. Jerry Collins, the Principal at Pimlico Academy, spoke specifically about his experiences of teaching the new history curriculum.  I spoke about the grammar curriculum we’ve implemented and how we aim for every pupil to get a solid understanding of the sentence.

Knowledge of grammar is sometimes derided as being an obstacle to fluent expression, but in actual fact, good grammatical knowledge enables fluent expression. I introduced our approach to teaching grammar and also shared a quotation from Winston Churchill.  Churchill was no child prodigy. In fact, like many of the denizens of our public schools, he wasn’t very smart.  Even compared to other public schoolboys, he struggled. He was kept back to repeat a year three times at Harrow. Here’s what he said about his time at school:

By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell–a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great–was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing–namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence – which is a noble thing.

‘Drill’, or guided practice, is another teaching activity that often gets a bad name- you will often see it parodied as ‘drill and kill’. But done right it can be a very effective teaching technique that allows pupils to master difficult and fundamental concepts such as the sentence.

After our speeches we discussed these and many other issues, and it was heartening to hear from school leaders who shared our vision and were introducing similar curriculums and practice in their schools.

Posted in Innovation, Literacy | Comments Off

Levelling the Playing-Field

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Caroline

In his new book Education, Education, Education, Andrew Adonis writes “No school can be better than its teachers. The best education systems in the world recruit their teachers from the top third of graduates. Transforming teacher recruitment is the most urgent priority for England to build a world-class education system”. The importance of teacher recruitment has been well documented. Indeed a whole section of the 2007 Mckinsey report, written in conjunction with the OECD, was entitled “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”.

I would like to take this a step further and state that no school can be better than its curriculum. The efforts of even the most brilliant, the most highly qualified teachers can be dissipated, lost even, in schools with poor curricula. We have seen this particularly with the Teach First Programme: some of the most wonderful graduates have been recruited, with superb subject knowledge, but once in the classroom current teaching, assessment and inspection conventions mean that their specialist knowledge takes second place to their role as facilitators of experience. Pupil-led learning and progression of skills are given precedence and the teacher’s role as expert is diminished.

Most of us have memories of being lucky enough to have had a teacher who really sparked our curiosity, who inspired us to love a particular subject, who helped us engage with difficult subject matter. Perhaps some of us had even more than this – a range of different teachers who inspired us in a range of different subjects. This is of course the ideal. But what of the child who isn’t lucky enough to experience that, the child who, through no fault of his own, is never taught by such a teacher? This lack of equity within our education system has gone on for too long. We must try to redress the balance, to level the playing field once again.

I firmly believe that consistency is the key to equity and progress for all. And consistency comes from a coherent curriculum, both on paper and in the classroom, a curriculum that provides a wealth of in depth teacher resources and assessment materials, and regular, specific, teacher training and support. This type of curriculum mitigates against weaker teachers and encourages more teachers to become great teachers by re-engaging with their subject.

Being a great teacher depends upon what you know and how you use it. The what and the how are inextricably linked. There has been endless discussion in recent years about the how of teaching, with scant attention paid to the what. I believe that the what must come first and predicate the how, that  a coherent, foundational body of knowledge within each subject is the central component of a good curriculum, that this knowledge is worth studying for its own sake, and that all children have the right  to receive this knowledge.

Our curriculum provides this and it gives our students the chance to develop a real love of learning. It is stimulating and challenging. It takes our students beyond their own world and shows them a new and bigger world. It gives them the opportunity to become culturally literate young adults. It levels the playing field once and for all. What could be better than that?

Posted in Classroom practice, Innovation | Comments Off

The Limits of Knowledge

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Jo

On Monday Daisy and I made it through the snow to address a group of Headteachers at the annual conference of The Prince’s Teaching Institute (PTI) in Crewe. We had been invited by Chris Pope, the co-director of the PTI, to talk to the group about ‘developing a knowledge curriculum’, and the Pimlico Academy example in particular.

It was refreshing to hear the delegates sum up all that was presented during the ‘knowledge’ session with phrases like “knowledge is intellectual nutrition”, “there is a moral purpose behind knowledge…it enables people to become curious, to question…it develops humility (as the more you know the more you realise you don’t know”. Dame Delia Smith, Head of Ark Academy in Brent, summarised the discussion of those in her group using something I had said, that all pupils should have access to the foundational knowledge to take them to the next steps in their learning.

Dr Gavin Alexander, a Senior Lecturer in English at Cambridge University, opened the session at which Daisy and I spoke. He was charged with discussing epistemology, the academic and philosophical examination of knowledge. Gavin explained how difficult it is to achieve a simple definition of knowledge. He pointed out how even the Oxford English Dictionary’s offering is complex. I’m not sure which edition of the OED he quoted, but it was certainly a complex sentence, and it was tautological in that the words knowledge and know were part of the statement! Gavin supplemented the OED’s rather opaque words with various ‘senses’ in which knowledge can be understood from a philosophical point of view. My favourite, and the one which seems most applicable to the classroom was the sense in which knowledge is that which is justifiably considered true due to evidence. In short, what do I know, and how do I know it?

The ‘what do I know, and how do I know it’ sense of knowledge, in turn, makes sense of both classroom experience and also the teacher’s role as informed questioner and assessor. Teachers demonstrate the validity of the knowledge they expose pupils to by showing them the evidence of it; in History this might be a cuneiform tablet or a document, in English it may be a text. Furthermore, teachers can demonstrate validity indirectly, by enabling their pupils to experience the reality of something through practical work or experimentation, as they might do in the sciences, for example. When teaching is led by knowledge, assessments serve as more than indicators of recall and retention, they can reveal understanding through the pupils’ ability to justify back to the teacher the validity of what they have been taught or experienced, using evidence. This is certainly how we approach assessment here at The Curriculum Centre. We use recall tests to ensure readiness for more complex, analytical tasks, like extended writing. We help teachers measure not simply what pupils recall, but how they use what they know; and it is here that knowledge and skills are inseparable.

While Gavin elucidated some of the complexities of epistemology, I talked about the power of knowledge to transform both classrooms and lives. For me we should spend less time going round in circles with various definitions of knowledge, we should concern ourselves primarily with what knowledge does. Do we need to know the precise composition of the air we breathe to ‘know’ that it gives us energy and life? In the state of Massachusetts in the US, the literacy of children across the state has been boosted by knowledge. A concerted and consistent effort to teach more general knowledge achieved this; not generic reading strategies. The ‘Massachusetts Miracle’ as this has become known, demonstrates what knowledge can do; namely, that knowledge begets knowledge.
So while Gavin is right that for an academic knowledge is complex and ill defined, that does not conflict with teaching pupils in schools about specifics and how to do defined things, things with known outcomes. Indeed, I would argue that it is our job as educators to give pupils as many fixed points, solid foundations, on which further learning can be built. We make choices (and if we don’t they are made for us by the government, or publishers, or the media), not so that we confine pupils to whatever it is that we already know, but so that we empower them to go further than even we can. This is why a coherent, sequenced, content-led curriculum, like TCC’s is important; it continues to give pupils the ‘intellectual nutrition’ they need until such a time as they develop the ability to ask and answer questions which do not undermine all they have learned, but extend it.

An everyday classroom example of the necessity to start with something fixed in school education, even when in academia it is less absolute is measuring. Few would argue that measuring should not be taught; that it isn’t useful for maths, for science, cookery, sewing. It is a basic skill of benefit in education and in life. Measuring is something pupils generally begin to practice formally in Year 1. But can you imagine where we would be if we told our youngest pupils that while the piece of string we have asked them to measure appears to equate to 5cm on the ruler we’ve also given them, that actually no one can ever really know how long the string is, because the more precisely you try to measure it the longer it actually becomes? Oh, and by the way, that ruler won’t really help you achieve an accurate answer because at atomic level it is effectively mobile!

The point of implementing a knowledge-led curriculum is not to create a static education, it is not to fixate on conventional canons; utterly the opposite. What is important, what is empowering to pupils, is that content choices are made. The most effective way to give pupils the chance of one day advancing human understanding, of developing new knowledge themselves, is to introduce them to that which is already known in a consistent, sequenced and cumulative manner. Knowing the extent and limits of existing knowledge is the starting point for innovation. To break the rules, you must first know what the rules are. For too long, the limits of knowledge – be they a politicians, a union’s, an academic’s – have been the reason to avoid teaching it at all. But if you look at the evidence of what knowledge can do you find not that it is limited, but that with knowledge, education has the power to be limitless.

Posted in Assessment, Classroom practice, Skills and knowledge, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Complementary Colours

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Caroline

Throughout most of our history, human beings have known that handing down knowledge from one generation to the next was absolutely vital for their survival. This may no longer strictly be the case in the modern world, but I would still argue that a good reservoir of knowledge can enrich life immeasurably.

In September Pimlico Primary will open its doors to sixty reception-age pupils. As sponsor and chair of governors, what is my educational vision? I think, really, it is quite simple. I would like our pupils to know things: things that they won’t necessarily discover for themselves.

If you were to give a young child a paint box, a brush, water and paper and ask them to paint a picture, what would they discover? That water makes the paint wet, that the brush can only hold so much paint and that you need to keep dipping it back into the paint box, that the paint box soon gets in a mess and that the paper is soon filled up with a muddy puddle. Compare and contrast this with teaching a child about primary and secondary colours and how to mix them, explaining the colour wheel and showing how the use of complementary colours can enliven a painting. How much more a child would discover and how much more harmonious the painting would be.

In this way a child would come to understand why London buses stand out so clearly against the tree-lined streets in summer, why terracotta roofs sing against an azure sky, why NYC taxi cabs bring the city to life in the purple glow of evening.

This is a tiny sample of what I would like our pupils to understand and appreciate, a tiny part of a rich reservoir of knowledge that they can build up and a firm foundation on which to build their understanding of the world.

Posted in Skills and knowledge | Comments Off

Rigour makes creativity possible

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Daisy

I’m a big fan of Michael Morpurgo’s work. I have read Private Peaceful with several year 7 classes and always have difficulty not crying at the end of it. About 5 years or so ago I also took a group of sixth form students to a wonderful seminar he did about the First World War poets. It was incredibly moving.  Morpurgo’s work has helped a lot of children love reading. That’s an amazing achievement.

I was disappointed, therefore, to see what he had to say a couple of weeks ago about teaching spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Morpurgo said that ‘it is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn’t inhibit the creative flow’ and that such an approach will, ‘if we’re not careful…deaden children’s enjoyment of literature.’

I would have thought that a writer with such a wonderful facility for words would have understood the importance of spelling, punctuation and grammar – but perhaps this is an example of what ED Hirsch calls the ‘oxygen of cultural literacy’. For great writers like Morpurgo, the knowledge of the correct rules of writing are so well embedded that they are taken for granted. It’s interesting that Morpurgo says his own education was full of copying and testing. He says that this put him off words and writing for years, but it’s hard for me, looking at his career, to say that this education really inhibited his creativity. Morpurgo’s books seem to me to be a positive advertisement for his education, just as Shakespeare’s school curriculum shows us that rigour enables creativity. 17% of English school leavers are functionally illiterate. Their voices and experiences are valuable and important. But their chances of being able to turn their experiences into creative written pieces and get them published are very slim, and are always likely to be slim. They are the people whose creativity has been inhibited by their education, not Morpurgo.

The idea that by focusing on things such as spelling you inhibit the creative flow is a classic false dichotomy. Focusing on spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn’t inhibit the creative flow. It enables the creative flow. Telling pupils not to worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn’t liberate them from these constraints. It actually traps them: it traps them in a world where they cannot be understood.

In fact, I would reject the idea that correct spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting are constraints. Incorrect spelling, punctuation and grammar are the real constraints. The rules of standard English don’t constrain; they liberate. It’s by having standard rules that we can understand people who died long before we were born, and that we can communicate with people who will be born long after we are dead. When you think about it, that’s pretty amazing. It’s as well at this point to remember that writing is an invention. I have great difficulty in explaining this to year 7 pupils who are studying ancient civilisations. It is odd to think that writing is an invention, because even to young children it seems natural. It doesn’t help, of course, that reading and writing are so similar to speaking and listening, which truly are natural.[i] But writing is a human invention, and one of the great human inventions. Alan Bennett puts it well:

‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.’

‘As if a hand has come out, and taken yours.’ That’s the magical feeling, the connection between you and someone long dead, that you get from reading. Correct spelling, punctuation and grammar allow all of this magic to happen. They’re not opposed to this magic. They enable it. Without them, Morpurgo wouldn’t be able to tell his wonderful stories, I wouldn’t be able to read them to my class and the human creative spark we all have would be hugely diminished.


[i]  Incidentally, I think this is one of the reasons why ‘whole word’ methods of teaching read seem so persuasive – they play on the very real fact that we do pick up speaking and listening through exposure to it, and make the false assumption that we can pick up reading and writing in the same way.

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