LP Hartley’s dictum that, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”[1] is a good guide to everything except education. To be sure, trying to explain our curriculum to anyone familiar with other countries’ systems brings home just how different ours is - but it also confirms just how much we are prefigured by our past.

The English curriculum, like the constitution, doesn’t actually exist - at least not in a coherent or codified form that a foreigner would understand. That said, the “constitution” can be constructed out of a sequence of acts of parliament, court judgments and conventions.

Try doing that with curriculum and you end up with something with more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

The absence of a single codified set of directives is a good thing, insofar as it gives schools room for manoeuvre. The National Curriculum was designed to be smaller than the curriculum as experienced by pupils - it isn’t the totality of what is taught. The National Curriculum is not a curriculum at all - it is intended to be a framework of standards. Further, independent schools and academies have the freedom to ignore it. By its very design, it is neither national nor a curriculum.

The silo of sixth form

More remarkable still, our non-national non-curriculum stops short of the end of formal education. What then takes its place is an invitation to create a curriculum out of pre-formed lego bricks called A levels. The size of these bricks is fixed, but there any direction ends. Should I take three or four? Should I do AS along the way? If I do three, should I do an EPQ as well?

I’m not suggesting that some bureaucrat - or worse, politician - should issue a one-size-fits-all directive as to what should be taught in the sixth form. But if we ask ourselves why we do what we do, the answer is that we do it because we always have, and because of what EP Thompson called “the peculiarities of the English”[2]. As to the siloed shapelessness of the sixth-form curriculum, it’s like that because the English prefer empiricism to theorising - and have always been suspicious of continental totalising tendencies. The idea of an all-embracing baccalaureate, abitur or maturità has never taken root. In place of a coherent sixth-form curriculum framework, we have a set of exam courses.

This might be a testimony to what historian Gareth Stedman Jones once called the “leathery strength of English individualism”[3]. It avoids top-down political control, true, but it loses any sense of the big picture” of what the sixth form is “for”. And it doesn’t empower schools or students: it abrogates control to universities, narrowing the focus to the study of a few subjects and discounting the non-examinable curriculum. It puts serious obstacles in the way of developing a fully liberal education. Far from leaving room for schools to create the curriculum, the result is a narrowing to what is easily examined and a relegation of those aspects of education that cannot be reduced to a test.