When headteacher Patrick Hazelwood suggested last year that his staff scrap the curriculum and start again, he expected a few sideways glances and muted mutterings about his sanity. Why turn one of Britain’s most successful state schools upside down?

The 1,425-pupil St John’s school in Marlborough, Wiltshire, is no struggling inner-city secondary. Last year, it had a 100 per cent pass rate at GCSE, 67.5 per cent with five or more A* to C grades, while 12 of this year’s 300-strong sixth form are expected to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. It is the kind of place, in Mr Hazelwood’s words, where “you can actually teach, you can do the job you were trained to do”. So why change? “The national curriculum is getting in the way of effective teaching and learning,” he says. “We should not see league tables and exam results as the be-all and end-all of education. The national curriculum is stunting our growth, and our children’s growth. We are educating in a model fit for the 1800s, not 2001.”

To his surprise the staff were overwhelmingly positive about his proposal, responding with “such a wealth of enthusiasm” that he immediately asked for volunteers to rewrite the Year 7 curriculum.

“In the 21st century we need to be educating people so they have the ability to learn in many ways,” he explains. “The nature of employment has changed dramatically but the education model we operate was founded on a 1950s philosophy of jobs for life. Now the ability to multi-skill and to use skills in a variety of contexts is so important. We should be teaching our children to learn how to learn, giving them a passion to go on learning for the rest of their lives.”

His words echo a 1999 report from the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA), called Opening Minds. It argues that the explosion of information in our knowledge-based society “challenges a curriculum model centred on the transmission from teacher to pupil of a quantity of information”, and calls for a new form of education that is “competence-led instead of information-led”.

The report’s author, Valerie Bayliss, a former Department for Skills and Education official, says no one believes the school system will be as it now is in 20 years’ time. “We have a curriculum that’s heavily subject-driven, and defined by the information you put into kids’ heads. But in the technological age, a subject-based curriculum cannot stand the load in the long term; it’s going to crack.”

Opening Minds presents an alternative based on the idea of developing “competences” - defined as “the ability to understand and to do” - and suggests a 10-year plan for “long-term strategic change”. While not entirely comfortable with the term “competence”, Ms Bayliss is clear about the implications of her proposals. “They would challenge almost every aspect of the way we run schools now,” says her report.

Opening Minds, which grew out of a previous RSA report called Redefining Work, sets out a “competence framework” of five categories - learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information. Each category includes broad statements of what a student is expected to achieve, such as “have learned to enjoy and love learning for its own sake”, and “understand how to operate in teams” (see box).

St John’s is one of 10 schools piloting the RSA approach. Its new curriculum is designed not to impart information through separate, discretely taught subjects, but to develop children’s competences by teaching themed modules in which the national curriculum’s “subject content” is intertwined.

One in three Year 7 pupils (a total of 85, split into three groups) has been following this “integrated curriculum”, as the school calls it, since September, while the rest are divided into control groups covering conventional subjects. Each of the integrated curriculum groups follows a series of five-week modules under three themes, guided by six teachers rather than the usual 12 or 13 subject-specific staff.

“For the child, this curriculum should be like opening a book,” says Mr Hazelwood. “It should be a continuous story, not one that breaks every hour and then they go and read a different book. This is one where the story makes consistent sense as it evolves.”

One theme, “making the news”, includes cave paintings, runes, hieroglyphics, music, oral stories, Morse code, number patterns, electronic transmitters, sound waves, particle theory, musical notation and satellites - touching on areas that would usually be taught under separate headings such as maths, English, history, geography and science.

English teacher Lyn Quantick was one of the “story” writers. “Part of the thinking behind this is that we are teachers of children rather than teachers of subjects,” she says. “We want to give them the tools to be able to learn, not just in school, but for life.”

Occasionally, there are what Mr Hazelwood calls “footnotes”, discrete lessons aimed at developing specific skills, such as languages, which children will need later on in the story. But, on the whole, the classes fall into no conventional subject category. The relationship between teacher and learner is different too - pupil participation and group collaboration is encouraged while textbooks and note-taking seem almost absent. “The role of the teacher is to act as a reader, a guide through the story,” he says. In this way, says Lyn Quantick, the pupils take more responsibility for their own learning. “We’re saying, ‘Here are the tools. We’re not going to talk, talk, talk at you. We’ll tell you how to go about it, but you get on with it and run with this idea.’ That’s the difference.”

Although it’s premature to judge an experiment that’s due to last for another two years, the early signs from the children are positive. “Some of them say it’s like grown-up primary school, which to me is an excellent reflection on what we’ve done,” says Kath Pollard, principal tutor for Year 7. “More children feel valued because their opinions and comments are all relevant; it’s not about being right or wrong.”

The programme, which has the full support of parents and governors, has also helped to reinvigorate the teachers. “It’s like a rebirth,” says Max More, director of the lower school site. “You are looking at yourself as a teacher all over again. You’re delivering your teaching in a fresh way because you’re forced to.”

The RSA’s head of education, Lesley James, says this enthusiasm is reflected in other pilot schools. “The teachers like it because it allows them to think imaginatively and creatively about the curriculum.”

Few of the other pilot schools have been as radical as St John’s, however. One has applied the integrated approach only to mathematics, physics and chemistry, while another has used a competence-led course specifically for pupils who have difficulty with the conventional curriculum.

Castle Rock school in Coalville, Leicestershire, has focused on the “relating to people” competences to shape its citizenship curriculum for all Year 7 and 8 pupils. “One of the big attractions of the RSA framework is that it fitted with our citizenship and PSHE courses,” says deputy head Lorraine Allen. “For some of our students it is more important that they develop as people than achieve certain SATs scores.”

But while she fully supports the RSA’s approach, she echoes some of the programme’s critics when she says the school is too tightly constrained by the national curriculum to introduce it more widely.

Education consultant Malcolm Brigg, a former national education adviser, says this is what makes the RSA’s 10-year plan unrealistic. “In principle it is an excellent concept,” he says. “We’ve moved right away from looking at the whole person in national education policy and gone down a blinkered, subject-driven view. But we must be realistic. The Government is geared to a narrow agenda and will be for some time.”

He was involved in promoting the Pathways to a Working Life scheme between 1993 and 1996, which he describes as “a bit of a halfway house”, and is the main architect of the recently piloted, DfES-funded Towards Improving Learning and Employability (Tile) programme, which he claims promotes the same qualities as the RSA “but shows how the current national curriculum can support them”.

“In principle, I totally support the RSA,” says Mr Brigg. “It’s just that the Government’s approach is unlikely to change.”

Lesley James sees things slightly differently. “If the DfES wanted, it could be done - but it does require major political will,” she says. Indeed, she believes the RSA framework fits the ethos of the recent White Paper, with its emphasis on diversity and developing schools’ identities.

But it’s noticeable that most of the pilot schools are already relatively successful in conventional terms, and that most have only tried the competence-led approach with the younger year groups. Lesley James recognises that that’s as far as some of them may go. “Maybe if they work on competences for a couple of years that’s enough, so when pupils get to GCSEs the qualities are there anyway.”

But she is keen to “keep in sight the bigger vision of Opening Minds”, while Valerie Bayliss believes citizenship courses and initiatives such as Tile show that official thinking is moving in their direction. In truth, of course, policy-makers will remain unpersuaded unless the crucial question of how to measure a child’s competences and assess a school’s ability to teach them is answered. And that whole area is still being tested and evaluated. “People are frightened of it because they think it’s subjective,” says Ms Bayliss. “It’s about professional judgment really, but so are GCSEs, and at least we’ll be measuring what is valued not valuing what can be measured.”

A conference to discuss the RSA’s project, called Opening Minds, Increasing Opportunities: the future of the school curriculum will be held in the Great Room at the RSA on November 12. For more details contact Lesley James on 020 7451 6862 or lesley.james@rsa.org.uk.The first 100 TES readers to contact Lesley James will receive a free conference pack containing previously unseen documents and letters from the RSA’s archive, which provide resource material for a 21st-century curriculum

COMPETENCE REGISTER

The RSA curriculum consists of five broad “competences”:

* Learning: how to learn, taking account of preferred learning styles; students explore and reach an understanding of their own creative talents * Citizenship: students develop an understanding of ethics and values and understand cultural and community diversity * Relating to people: how to operate in teams and how to develop other people’s abilities * Managing situations: what is meant by managing change? How to manage risk and uncertainty * Managing information: students develop a range of techniques for accessing, evaluating and differentiating information