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The aim of this research was to investigate the potential for issue-based civic education. Applying the concept of critical pedagogy to civic education, this article presents the findings of a study conducted in a primary school class in a socio-economically deprived area of the United Kingdom. The analysis of interview and focus group, participant observation and class discussion data suggests that critical, issue-based models of civic education can engage young people in conceptualising their own roles in both politics and civic life more generally. By moving away from a fact-based institutional model of civics such as set out in the National Curriculum, students' interest was also facilitated by the ability to make their own decisions about which issues they most wanted to engage with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Curriculum makes spoken poetry part of what children should know, but dramatically limits what it can do. Thinking of sound as a purely internal dimension of the poem, it ignores the way oral performance brings the context of the room, the person and the situation all into play with the meaning. Orality used to be much more important to English than it is now: Henry Newbolt put it at the centre of his 1921 English Report, arguing that sound and poetry are the primary medium in which children's loves might be formed. It is there for emotional aliveness, not cultural superiority, as Newbolt's critics have charged. But one of the missing contexts for Newbolt and for the curriculum itself is the twentieth-century change towards poets themselves reading. As Yeats, Pound, and Eliot met their audiences, they found that their poems were acquiring new meaning from the situations and places they were being read in. What we see with the oral turn is a space where aesthetic 'form', physical 'context', and social-cultural 'occasion' can briefly merge into one another, because the poem is being briefly inscribed, registered, or overlayed onto all of them. Oral delivery means the poem acquires some of the flavour of the place it is in – meaning that great care has to be taken to make classroom performance into real connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is both limited and dated. Moreover, some work has suggested that NP development is late-occurring and genre-specific, calling into question curricular guidance which specifies teaching from the earliest years and which makes no mention of genre. Analysing 240 texts written by children in England aged six to 16, this study shows that overall complexity develops at a roughly constant rate from primary school onwards. Increases are principally driven by postmodification, especially relative clauses and proposition phrases. By the end of their mandatory education, children make some use of genre distinctions evident in adult writing. However, there are also clear patterns of overuse and underuse of particular NP components. Key distinctive features are examined in context to understand the roles NP components play in writing development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British government's current educational policy for England draws on E.D. Hirsch's writings on 'cultural literacy'. This paper aims to uncover the roots of Hirsch's influential views through a genealogical critique. Hirsch admired the Scottish Enlightenment educator Hugh Blair as a model architect of a hegemonic culture to unite disparate members of a nation. Following Hirsch, the government Department for Education in England called for 'shared appreciation of cultural reference points' and 'a common stock of knowledge on which all can draw and trade'. Consequently, the literature curriculum in England increasingly disenfranchises a significant component of the population in terms of both gender and cultural heritage. Recent 'culture wars' have highlighted the legacy of colonialism and have led educators to decolonise the curriculum and prioritise social justice. Continuing racism within civil society demonstrates the need for a general recognition that cultures are desirably diverse and internally plural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Each year, the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Special Interest Group organises an Invisible College which precedes the annual BERA conference. The day opens with a Scholar Lecture which is delivered by an academic who has made a significant contribution to the field. This paper represents the 2019 Scholar Lecture, which charts the journey of health within physical education over recent decades through to the present day. Whilst the notion of maintaining health through physical education is long standing and contributing to healthy active lifestyles is generally accepted to be a key goal of the subject, it is argued that the road to securing and retaining the position of health within the curriculum has at times been tricky to navigate. There have certainly been many successes en route, but equally some challenges and seemingly even a few obstacles and diversions. Specifically, this paper outlines the journey of health from the 1980s, during which time there was revived interest in health and a significant growth in health-related courses within physical education curricula within and beyond the United Kingdom. This coincided with the introduction of the National Curriculum in England and Wales, as well as with my own doctoral studies and initial physical education practice. Consequently, I highlight key influences and influencers in the area and on my thinking during this period, as well as some of the key developments, outcomes and messages emanating from this early work. Equally, I explore some of the issues and challenges health and health-related learning within physical education have and continue to face. The paper then turns to focus on recent progress and positive developments in the area and concludes with some proposed future directions for research and practice and reflections on the next leg of the journey for health within physical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge is a key concern at the moment in schools. Advocates of so-called 'knowledge-rich' schooling claim that constructivist models of mind, and a focus on skills education has meant that students are leaving school without core knowledge. Extending this to Religious Education (RE), there are some that have defined the need for a robust knowledge-base as the defining challenge for its future. This way of talking about knowledge, namely in the sense of a 'body of knowledge', is common in educational circles. When used in this sense, knowledge is conceived of as exterior to the knowing subject, and prior to any subject coming to know it. Yet, this is not how knowledge is spoken of in the field of epistemology, where even the most minimally defined position concerns what is known and the knowing subject. I argue that the knowing subject is key to the knowledge acquired in RE, that knowledge of religion cannot be easily conceived of without taking the knowing subject into account. Employing Buber's notion of the I–Thou relation, I characterise knowledge in RE as the result of an engagement with the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on school leaders' implementation of national curricula is scant worldwide. The findings presented in this article derive from a larger study that investigated how a school curriculum leadership team in one Preparatory Year to Year 12 independent Queensland school implemented Australia's first national curriculum. The focus in this article is on the challenges and enablers encountered by members of this team during implementation. A qualitative methodology was employed, whereby a single case study design was used. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of 29 participants, which comprised 28 from the case school and one curriculum officer of a professional association for independent schools. Documents and an online questionnaire were also used, which provided useful insights into the context of the school. The key findings are analysed against Sergiovanni's (1995) model of change process and signify the need for school leaders to consider the interactive nature of the change process in their planning and implementation of large-scale education reform. Such complexity can facilitate or hinder implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores some of the problems that emerge from the imposition of a very narrow conception of the English literary heritage on pupils across England. It considers the role of government and school policy – and of teachers and pupils – in mediating set texts, and the ways in which problematic aspects of these texts are questioned and resisted in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just after the First World War the English Association published The Teaching of English in Schools. It argues that developing children's 'creative spirit' is fundamental to maintaining peace in Europe. Seventy years later, the first National Curriculum promotes a creative, unitary English appropriate for 'a European context'. In contrast, today's national curriculum contains no reference to the role of English in international relations; simultaneously, all references to creativity have disappeared. As Britain struggles to cope with the fallout from Brexit, this paper – written from a hermeneutic perspective – discusses the correlation between how each of the three documents positions English in an international context and how they value creativity. Without wishing to over–simplify complex issues, it questions how to what extent a curriculum might echo or shape national politics. It calls for a new curriculum that embraces a creative, internationalist view of English to inspire communities of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critical policy analysis investigates the opinions and activities of Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs) in England. It uses a critical approach to educational policy to examine the diffuse power structure of SACREs and give voice to those local councils. Using data gathered in an online survey of SACREs, conducted between January and May 2017, it critiques the activities of SACREs and, in identifying what they see as their future role, questions whether the complex, producer-based governance structure of religious education is preferable to a simple, neo-liberal centralised legal settlement. It suggests that those individuals and groups which are successful in surviving in the increasingly competitive, marketised, local RE policy landscape become intrinsic parts of the national neo-liberal solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2015, the British government presented 'the social justice case for an academic curriculum' as the justification for recent radical changes to educational policy. However, this justification failed to account for both the key changes in the newly-revised National Curriculum for Music and the place of music in the National Curriculum as a whole. Through a critical evaluation of the National Curriculum for Music, this study will propose how the place of music could successfully be justified within an education system wholly committed to 'social justice'. Using the 'habit concept' of classical philosophical pragmatism, it will assess how and why music's educational value should be understood not through its 'academic rigour' but through its distinctive, inherently destabilising nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the facts and analysis becoming less important in the National Curriculum in public discourse. It discusses the option of curriculum framework of knowledge while challenged by school inspectors, purpose of power struggle in education including socialisation, qualification or knowledge and subjectification.

The article focuses on the launch of the National Curriculum in England in September 2014 and the purpose of teaching history as a subject. It discusses the weakness in the teaching history curriculum as racial and ethnic diversity is not emphasized in history, as teaching of diversity and the need of a multicultural curriculum in the subject.

The addition of computing to England's National Curriculum was welcomed as a much‐needed modernization of the country's digital skills curriculum, replacing a poorly regarded ICT program of study with an industry‐supported scheme of computer science, robotics and computational thinking. This paper will demonstrate how teachers have acted as gatekeepers to block a curriculum that they view as narrow, difficult to teach and in conflict with their beliefs and practices as educational professionals. Extensive qualitative data were collected through classroom observations, teacher and student interviews and student artifact creation in four state‐maintained primary school classrooms to explore how teachers acted agentically to minimize or altogether reject a legally mandated curriculum that clashed with their local, professional knowledge. Analysis of this data was supported by official documents and personal accounts of the creation of the computing program of study, which highlight a discourse of economic anxiety and post‐imperialist nostalgia on the part of the curriculum's designers. This study will illuminate the significant influence that teachers wield as gatekeepers for subject content, with the ability to reject digital technology curricula even when it is supported by industry and mandated by law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018 it is 30 years since the Educational Reform Act of 1988 introduced a National Curriculum to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This article questions whether this policy became something to be celebrated, commemorated or ignored. The National Curriculum for history has proved contentious in media and academic circles, but the focus has been on documentation over lived experience. In contrast, this research used an oral history approach to explore how 13 history teachers perceived, experienced and enacted the National Curriculum in their own classrooms between 1991 and 2011. The findings show this period could be closely identified with increased prescription in the history classroom and, as a corollary, a potential loss of teacher autonomy. The National Curriculum played some part in that process but, after the initial shock, was not perceived as a restrictive force. Changing responses to the National Curriculum over four programmes of study illuminate changing experiences of history teaching from 1991 to 2011, a period fraught with developments in national educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the challenges faced teaching the promotion of 'British values', especially for trainee teachers. The advancement of these 'British values' as set out by the Department for Education is confusing, contradictory, and appear to exclude a sizeable minority of pupils of minority backgrounds from the current historical narrative of Britain as delineated by the National Curriculum (2013). Moreover, there is little advice for new teachers on what these 'values' really mean or how they should be taught within schools, despite forming part of the standards required to achieve QTS. The author not only examines this confusion but provides the perspective of a former academic who has moved into secondary teaching, and their reaction to the teaching of History in schools and concerns regarding the History Curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a critique of current approaches to the teaching and assessment of writing in schools in the UK. Successive government initiatives, most particularly the latest (impoverished) version of the English curriculum, are seen as having led to a situation in which pupils are taught in a way that does not improve the quality of their writing, and often results in writing which is inflated and unconvincing. The national curriculum and assessment scheme for writing prioritises form over content; it makes grammatical complexity and ostentatious vocabulary the success criteria for assessment, to the detriment of children's writing and learning, and of teachers' practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study investigates writing feedback practices and their relationship to the grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPS) objectives in the 2014 National Curriculum for England, with a particular focus on grammatical metalanguage. Our data is composed of authentic examples of children's writing in three classes at one primary school in the North-West of England over the course of almost a year. We investigate how primary-stage GPS objectives are reflected in the feedback practices of both children and teachers, and how children respond to this feedback. The findings indicate that, despite evidence of good feedback practice and useful knowledge of grammatical metalanguage among teachers and children, there is a tendency for feedback to be conducted at the surface level with a focus on metalinguistic features, sometimes at the expense of content-related concerns. We hypothesise that this is largely because of the focus on test preparation and the need to provide evidence of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the assertion that good reading comprehension is, in part, reliant on what the Primary National Curriculum terms “knowledge of the world”. Drawing on academic literature rather than first-hand observation, the article explores how the phrase “knowledge of the world” may be interpreted and enacted by teachers, questioning the interplay between knowledge, pedagogy and power. Following the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, debate has circled around those who have felt marginalised by mainstream elements of society, including the political and educational systems. In the light of this, the article proposes that this is a key moment for UK schools to review the way in which the curriculum is translated and made meaningful to pupils. Teachers - by repositioning themselves in relation to the knowledge content of the curriculum, their pupils and their families - are uniquely situated to act as agents for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are sound educational and examining reasons for the use of coursework assessment and practical assessment of student work by teachers in schools for purposes of reporting examination grades. Coursework and practical work test a range of different curriculum goals to final papers and increase the validity and reliability of the result. However, the use of coursework and practical work in tests and examinations has been a matter of constant political as well as educational debate in England over the last 30 years. The paper reviews these debates and developments and argues that as accountability pressures increase, the evidence base for published results is becoming narrower and less valid as the system moves back to wholly end-of-course testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that narrative knowledge (or ‘storyknowing’) is marginalized within the English school system, because it is misunderstood and often not recognized as knowledge. We track the changing status of storytelling through some key moments in recent educational history, particularly focusing on its gradual erosion during the progressive era, the onset of the National Curriculum (despite the impact of the National Oracy Project), and the post-2000 period with its conflicting drives towards compliance and creativity. To understand the consequences of this marginalization, we build up a picture of the value of narrative knowledge, drawing firstly on the body of theorists who have investigated narrative. We then look to our long-term practice research with three groups of ‘low-ability’ 11–14-year-old pupils, in particular their own observations on storytelling made during a focus group. Both sources lead us to challenge the currently dominant perception that pupils listening to a whole narrative are in a passive role. Indeed, we provide evidence that reasserting the value of storyknowing may restore aspects of agency, autonomy and knowledge creation to both teachers and pupils which may not be afforded by overtly ‘active’ learning strategies. We conclude by considering the conditions in which storyknowing, as characterized by the pupils and theorists, might flourish within schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of the debates surrounding the publication of a new National Curriculum for history in England. The draft curriculum was published in February 2013 and was withdrawn just 6 months later in the face of considerable opposition. This paper offers a tentative explanation for this example of a rare phenomenon: effective resistance to curriculum change. Using a socio-cognitive approach to discourse analysis, the paper explores the context models of the two antagonists in the contestation: new right traditionalism and social realism. While both context models are viewed as coherent, it is suggested that critics of the draft prevailed because they more fully comprehended the context model of their opponents and were prepared to adapt their strategy accordingly. The paper takes an analytical narrative approach to the contestation. Resistance to the draft is presented in two phases: an initial phase in which criticism was diffuse, instinctive and political; and a more effective mature phase in which opposition united around a depoliticised disciplinary defence of the subject in social realist terms. It is argued that this deft shift went unnoticed by Education Secretary, Michael Gove, rendering ineffective his attacks on his critics as ‘Marxists’ and ‘progressives’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today, the role to be played by school in the life of a child is crucial. It is because in the name of right to education, a child has to learn almost all the skills and knowledge from school as he/she has to attain school at the earliest. Along with the recognition of education as the fundamental right of every child, providing access to educational facilities to every child from the age of 6 year to 14 years is an important task of every state. School should provide a space where children enjoy every right of learning that is 'right to learn in one's mother tongue', 'right to learn in one's habitat', 'observed that schools in many cases became an isolated space where children always find a gap between what they do at home and what they are asked to do at school. One of the important reasons for this gap is that schools fail to recognize the habitat and languages specially that belong to the children of minority groups.1 To respond to the multilingual character India has adopted Three Language Formula (TLF), National Curriculum Framework 2005(NCF-05) suggests implementation of TLF in letter and spirit. TLF is implemented in North East India, but there is confusion in the designation of first language and the second language. The paper is an attempt to address this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the contents within the issue including articles on topics such as synthetic phonics, the epistemology of subject English, and a comparative analysis of primary English teaching in the national curricula of England and Australia.

In this article, I confine myself to the situation in England that offers a paradigm example of one of the fundamental tensions besetting teaching and assessing writing: the stranglehold of an individualistic view of writing development as opposed to a more socio-cultural perspective. Examining the uses of summative assessment for accountability purposes and the exclusion of students' multimodal text knowledge and experience, I propose a descriptive framework that can support formative assessment. It encompasses the English national curriculum programmes of study for writing and the associated assessment criteria as well as the features of multimodal texts. Two case studies exemplify using the framework to analyse the writing of students whose accomplishments cannot be fully given value by the current assessment and accountability regime. Finally, I suggest that professional development and respect for professionalism are needed to give teachers the means to reconcile some of the tensions between the urge to teach creatively and imaginatively and their responsibility to their students to cover curricular requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chilled Food Association has teamed up with a leading science teacher and author to develop hands-on activities to bridge between traditional science teaching and food science. Each activity is linked to the science National Curriculum in England, as well as the GCSE specifications in science and food science. The suite of activities explores sustainability in packaging, while using food to model science concepts as well as completing low-cost, low-risk alternatives to more traditional science experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'boundary-work' is used to refer to the constant effort to draw and re-draw the boundary of science; it has long been portrayed as constructed by the stakeholders of science to demarcate science from non-science to establish the authority of science. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews were carried out with students from one university in England, originally to explore their views about genetically modified ( GM) food. However, the distinctive repertoires adopted by students of natural science as opposed to humanities and social sciences were striking. As a result, the focus of this study shifted to examine the discourse students adopted to talk about a controversial scientific topic, using GM food as a case study. This paper shows that the boundary between scientific and non-scientific academic disciplines is heavily ingrained in university students' discourse and it is collectively constructed by both actors that are included in, and excluded from, the institution of science. The innate authority assigned to the institution of science is found to have deepened the gap between scientific and non-scientific disciplines. In this study, science disciplines were portrayed as coherent and consistent, following similar scientific methods and philosophy whereas humanities and social sciences disciplines were merely considered as 'non-science' disciplines. Hence, this paper suggests the wide scope of science should be better recognised and acknowledged in the education system. Finally, this paper demonstrates that people's role in relation to the institution of science has an impact on their discourse about and, perhaps subsequently, their views towards, science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an evaluation of an internet-based reading programme called Accelerated Reader (AR), which is widely used in UK schools and worldwide. AR is a whole-group reading management and monitoring programme that aims to stimulate the habit of independent reading among primary and secondary age pupils. The evaluation involved 349 pupils in Year 7 who had not achieved secure National Curriculum Level 4 in their Key Stage 2 results for English, randomised to two groups. The intervention group of 166 pupils was exposed to AR for 20 weeks, after which they recorded higher literacy scores in the New Group Reading Test (NGRT) post-test than the control group of 183 pupils (“effect” size of +0.24). The schools led the organisation and implementation of the intervention, and also conducted most elements of the evaluation, with advice from an expert external evaluation team. The process evaluation suggests that these schools were very capable of conducting evaluations of their own practice, given appropriate guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]