The government’s curriculum and assessment panel will investigate why teachers are facing an overload of content in the classroom, the panel’s chair said today.
Professor Becky Francis told a curriculum and assessment review webinar event on Thursday afternoon that concern about the volume of content has come out “absolutely consistently” across the regional roadshows that have been held.
She said: “There is no doubt that those on the ground in the classroom are experiencing an overload of content,” adding that this had come up in conversations with teachers, young people and parents.
Professor Francis said the job of the panel was to navigate the complexity of why this was happening.
Some areas more ‘overloaded’ than others
She told the event that when looking at the national curriculum, some specifications did not seem overloaded. Others, by contrast, were “under-prescribed”, leading to content overload in the classroom as teachers try to fill in the gaps, she suggested
Under-prescribed areas seemed “to be leading to a burgeoning of content, as schools, trusts and teachers try to imagine, perhaps, what Ofsted would like to see or what their trust is looking for, or even just an accumulation of practice and topics on the ground over time”.
She told the event that the panel would explore to what extent the issue of content overload is caused by under-prescription in the national curriculum and what other factors could be driving it.
In its submission to the review, the AQA exam board warned that the curriculum has become “too crowded”, and that students and teachers want “updated and slimmed-down content”.
The NAHT school leaders’ union issued a similar warning about the national curriculum and qualification specifications, and said the review provides an opportunity for these to be streamlined.
Most teachers ‘don’t want radical change’
During a question and answer session, Professor Francis was also asked why she had said the review would be about delivering “evolution not revolution”.
She said: “There are, of course, many people across the country that would like radical change to the curriculum and indeed assessment practices, but actually that is not the dominant feedback we have heard across the country and particularly from the teaching profession.”
There had been “relief” - which she described as “very strong” - about the “evolution and not revolution approach”.
She added: “Whatever one believes about the necessity or desirability of radical change, capacity on the ground at present is very limited and there is widespread recognition of that.”
Professor Francis struck a cautious note when asked about the role of digital technology in the future of assessments.
She told the event that innovative technology provided opportunities but also potential dangers, including in terms of inequalities in provision and access to infrastructure and devices.
“The other challenge that we face is that there are many digital approaches which show promise but they are really still in the early stages or on the horizon,” she said. “On adaptive forms of assessment, for example, we don’t yet know what that would play out like in practice.”
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