In my previous header, I referred to teacher shortages, and noted they are about to get much worse. This is an explanation of that remark and why I think it’s Phillipson’s fault.

At this moment, the National Curriculum is an optional thing for academy schools and trusts. This is actually good news. The reason I say that is because the last review of the curriculum was so content-heavy that it was literally impossible to deliver it properly, as I noted in my then employer’s submission to the consultation. This was not a coincidence. The idea was, in fact, to make it so bad it would drive schools towards academy status. And it worked.

Now we have a review, and following that review, the aim is to make every school follow the National Curriculum, possibly including private schools (see my last comment on Phillipson trying to pick fights with the ISC). Unfortunately, we already have a number of problems.

One problem is that there have been noises about ‘diversity’ within the curriculum. I’m always distrustful of that word because it means so many things, some of them quite worrying. On principle, I have always refused to teach Alan Turing’s life as an object of gay martyrdom for the simple reason that I don’t think it’s appropriate to hold up as a hero a man who solicited teenage boys for sex and offered them money for it. Whatever other achievements he had, that cuts clean across everything I’m teaching adolescents about stranger danger. Should I also, when teaching about ‘diversity,’ make clear the roles of the Arabs and the Africans in the slave trade? Or should I mention the role of Islam in the violent subjugation of the Sikhs and Hindus of India? Mention these things and people who champion diversity tend to get agitated.* But they are an example of diversity.

That however is only one problem of three, and the least serious one. The second problem, and one I really am worried about, is that so far the ‘diversity’ agenda is, inter alia, one hobby horse that’s already being ridden off into the sunset as people try to jam more content into an already overstuffed curriculum. The original primary curriculum for maths (for example) had so much content it left little room for primaries to teach history. Yet the history content alone could easily have filled 20 teaching hours a week. The two are mathematically incompatible. If more content is put in and made compulsory, things will get bad. This is compounded by the fact that preparing new curriculum resources is a heavy burden. With teachers already quitting over unreasonable workloads, if this idea is followed through on we will need those 6,500 teachers Phillipson blethers on about just to stand still, if a country that recruited just 62% of the trainee teachers required for 2025 entry can even do so.

But the most worrying of them all is the list of those doing this review. A list is here. There are twelve members but only one of them is a serving teacher. Now, this may be partly because serving teachers have better things to do with their time than listen to a bunch of pompous third rate tossers at the DfE witter on displaying their ignorance. But the fact that six of them are in effect associated directly with the DfE in one capacity or another and the rest are outsiders whose experience is out of date doesn’t inspire confidence that they will know what they’re talking about.

More worrying still, three of them – Ian Bauckham, Cassie Buchanan and Jon Hutchinson – are closely associated with Oak National Academy. What is Oak National Academy, I hear you cry? Well, it began as a well-intentioned attempt by the Reach Foundation to make online resources available during the pandemic to schools that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make them available for themselves. In 2022 it was taken over by the government and bunged £45 million to keep it running. The fact that it is now so closely entwined with the curriculum review suggests the government intends to make its resources map the curriculum, rather than the other way around. The small problem is that its resources, in my fields at least, are shit. I looked at some made by (coincidentally) Jon Hutchinson for Year 8, and the team I was leading all agreed that they were totally unsuitable for our lessons because the language used was A-level standard. It should be noted Oak is already under pressure from educational publishers who have succeeded in taking its role in the government to judicial review. Watching those two duke it out, I must admit, is the one funny thing I see at the moment.

So, when I look at the curriculum review I see no good and plenty of bad. There are likely to be major squalls ahead over it.

And the real irony of course is that in demanding absolute obedience to a prescriptive system in London, the review will be stifling any genuine sense of diversity within the curriculum by assuming a comprehensive school in Bradford has the same curriculum needs as a grammar school in Canterbury. Which I can assure you, is not correct.

*I should note this is not the case with PB’s bete noire David Lammy, who takes the sensible and undoubtedly correct view that all countries and cultures have shameful episodes in their past and pretending one race or country is magically better than others for racial reasons is just silly whether the person doing it is white, black or orange with pink spots like Donald Trump.

Y Doethur

Y Doethur has taught in three universities, four schools, and worked for two exam boards. He now runs a highly successful tutoring business based in Staffordshire with a clientele on five continents. He would respectfully advise everyone to remember he hates the DfE with a passion, but that his hatred is entirely rational and based on their stupidity and incompetence.