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When Governments Grade their own Curriculum: Flaws in the UK Science Review

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I was taught that a curriculum is a planned set of experiences towards meaningful educational outcomes, with assessment measuring whether students reached them. I was naive. As James Scott argues in ‘Seeing like a State’, a curriculum is really a government tool. And as governments want to measure and control as much as possible, they make things easy for themselves by turning the messy discipline of learning a subject like science into discrete units that can be easily assessed by reliable examinations.

Thus I was no longer surprised when on Tuesday, the government released its interim report for the Curriculum and Assessment Review, shrugged off widespread criticisms of an overcrowded curriculum, and unfit-for-purpose GCSE, and instead asserted that things are basically ‘working well’.

‘Seeing like a State’ also allows me to make sense of government speak. When the report applauds the ‘knowledge-rich approach’ for ‘driving up standards’, what it’s really doing is trying to silence opposition to its policy of overly specifying the curriculum and relying on standardised testing.

Does the report offer a glimmer of hope for reforming the science curriculum? Well, there is a vague promise that “the next phase will conduct closer analysis to diagnose each subject’s specific problems and explore and test a range of solutions.” But don’t get excited. Despite the statistic that 72% of science teachers find the curriculum overloaded, we’re only likely to see minor content changes.

In my previous post, I outlined how we can re-orient the science curriculum to serve students rather than the needs of government. The interim report confirms that the DIY approach is the only way we’ll get meaningful improvements in the short term, and so in following posts, I’ll explore how to do this in more detail.

One response to “When Governments Grade their own Curriculum: Flaws in the UK Science Review”

  1. Nigel Gardner Avatar
    Nigel Gardner

    A really great synopsis. As someone who has spent the last 20 years deep within philosophical international education what you highlight as been an open secret for a long time.

    standardised curricula as metric of policy success is not unique to the UK, but it does have a particular affinity with anglophone models.

    I am also heavily involved in assessment at a system level and having originally started in UK vocational education, I am a little bit obsessed with authentic assessment. Just the numbers should make people in the UK sit up – if around 25% (apols I don’t know the exact number but its around here) of all students get an A equivalent or higher from a view point of robust assessment it suggests the assessment is not an assessment – its rather an organisational success metric. That has been plain since 1982.

    i also work with young educators, often British, who struggle though without the scaffold of prescription that bitwise content mapping ( its not a curriculum) of achievables has created. A situation where no students ever needs to consider the connections between photosynthesis and climate change and food production – one is hardly even considered part of science any more – oh for Nuffield of 1980s.

    there is an answer already there – and for a while it looked like the UK might have had a chance – but sadly International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme is now tinged with the smell of Europeaness. The MYP can be delivered poorly, but where it is developed and considered as a course in scientific inquiry, where year 11 can study the electron in biology, chemistry and physics over a three month unit ( its about gradients) or where system analysis integrates ecology, engineering and computer science or where skelatal muscular systems are taught with units involving mechanics and endothermic/kinetic energy systems then it becomes education for science – not science for box ticking.

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