The school curriculum: A basis for partnership

Prediction is impossible because circumstances alter and the pace of change is accelerating. We must not therefore be surprised, as we look at the programmes, strategies and aspirations of our predecessors to find them unsuccessful, poorly implemented or simply unfulfilled. We still await some of the aspirations of the 1943 White Paper Educational Reconstruction, and perhaps Better Schools (1985)2 will suffer a similar fate. On a shorter time span, what seems a watershed to a Secretary of State at Sheffield in 19843 at the beginning of a Parliament may look increasingly like a catastrophe. One recurrent theme in the educational debate is partnership. We need a set of principles to govern the continuing development of educational partnership in the school curriculum, the breadth of which partnership is promoted, I think, by HMI's definition in Curriculum 5-16.4 In the first part of this paper I want to note the context of partnership by examining massive social changes that have been taking place since 1945, the changes in government interest in 'the secret garden' in the past twenty years, and the general concern about the public service and professionalism in the modern state. In the second part I want to draw these remarks together to indicate how they affect an educational partnership but I shall focus particularly on two of the many relevant matters, namely the school and the local community and teacher professionalism. I shall end by sketching out the principles for partnership which we might seek to follow.