The speech by Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, at the Festival of Education at Wellington College on 23 June this year was especially welcome in opening up an important discussion on the school curriculum.

This will not be the first time that the inspectorate has played a pivotal role in curriculum development in England. Thirty years ago, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) published a series of 17 booklets on curriculum, affectionately known as “raspberry ripples” because of their red and pink covers.

They were an important bridge between Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s 1976 speech at Ruskin College, which opened up the “secret garden” of the curriculum to public debate, and the national curriculum launch in 1988.

As a new chief inspector, Ms Spielman wants Ofsted to increase its research capability and make better use of the evidence it garners from thousands of individual inspections each year.

No other organisation has the breadth or depth of evidence on what happens in schools and it is culpable that Ofsted has not previously made better use of this material for the improvement of the system.

Far too much inspection evidence has been used solely to judge the performance of individual schools, and Ms Spielman is determined that Ofsted should no longer waste this unique collection of information, but should use it to contribute to the improvement of the system as a whole by aggregating, analysing and publishing thematic inspection data.

It was particularly welcome that the chief inspector opened up the issue of the extent to which some schools ”lose sight of the real substance of education … the curriculum”.

“To understand the substance of education,” she said, “we have to understand the objectives. Because education should be about broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilisation.”

The purpose of education

Ms Spielman rightly criticised some schools for losing sight of the purpose of education in a dash for grades that puts the interests of schools ahead of the interests of the children in them.

Government performance indicators are, of course, the main driver for this behaviour by schools, but the Ofsted inspection framework has been a constraining factor in the minds of many school leaders, whose jobs are on the line if the school data does not look good.

She wondered how often school leaders ask the question: “What is the body of knowledge that we want to give to young people?”

In my role as chair of Whole Education - a network of schools that is developing ways of giving all young people an entitlement to a fully rounded education - I have long encouraged school leaders to ask: “What curriculum does a young person need in order to thrive in life, work and further learning in the 21st century?” 

In the context of my work on pupil premium, I add the question: “And what curriculum does most for disadvantaged young people?”

The Whole Education summer conference on the same day as the chief inspector’s speech was a celebration of good practice in network schools, from the breadth of work in the arts at William Ellis School in Camden and the Keys Federation in Wigan, to the opportunities for student leadership at the Spinney Primary School in Cambridgeshire, the Swale Academies Trust in Kent and Northfield School in Stockton-on-Tees.

When the national curriculum started in 1988, it coincided with the start of national testing at 7, 11 and 14. Soon afterwards, Ofsted began its regular inspections of schools and the three pillars of the centralisation of government education policy were in place.

Schools quickly became more defensive, with the accountability hoops through which they were now expected to jump creating pressures to conform to a narrow curriculum and concentrate, sometimes to the exclusion of almost everything else, on what would produce good results in tests and inspections.

The roots of this centralisation can be traced to Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech, although the HMI Curriculum Matters series, published between 1984 and 1989, was a remarkable contribution to the so-called “Great Debate” on the nature and purpose of education.

Just as Ms Spielman is concerned at the narrowness of the curriculum in some schools, HMI in the 1980s was particularly worried about the narrow subject choices of many young people at age 14.

Sixteen of the booklets were subject-focused, but Curriculum Matters 2, entitled The Curriculum from 5 to 16, merits revisiting 32 years after its publication.

It (correctly, in my view) defined a school’s curriculum as “all those activities designed … to promote the intellectual, personal, social and physical development of its pupils, including the formal timetabled lessons, the informal extracurricular programme and features which embodied the ethos and values of the school”.

The curriculum framework proposed by HMI in the paper had eight areas of learning and experience: aesthetic and creative; human and social; linguistic and literary; mathematical; moral; physical; scientific; spiritual; and technological - as exemplified subject by subject in the other 16 booklets.

The paper discussed the four elements of learning - “the knowledge, concepts, skills and attitudes which schools should seek to develop in their pupils”.

It went on to discuss the desirable characteristics of the school curriculum - breadth, balance, relevance, differentiation, progression and continuity, and assessment.

As a curriculum planner and new headteacher in the 1980s, these papers were hugely influential for me at the time, and I still have them on my bookshelf.

They remain as readable and stimulating today as they were when they were written. Drawing on the evidence of inspection, they carried authority and they opened up discussion, too.

It is profoundly to be hoped that the inspectorate in 2017 uses the database of inspection evidence as wisely as its predecessors did 30 years ago, stimulating school leaders and teachers to become curriculum planners again - to stop looking up to the government to be told what to do and to start looking out to the evidence from Ofsted and academic research.

They should also look at the enormous amount of good practice already taking place in other schools, providing children and young people with a fully rounded education that is in the finest tradition of this country and runs counter to the prevailing domination of narrow performance measures.

John Dunford is chair of Whole Education, a former secondary head, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and national pupil premium champion. He tweets as @johndunford

For more Tes columns by John, visit his back catalogue.

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