ABSTRACT
Ideology and identity Whilst a good deal of our curriculum study should be conducted, at the school and local level other historical work is required to examine wider initiatives of a national and even global scope. Here I focus on the phenomenon emergent in a number of countries of ‘national curriculum’. My primary evidence is of the emergence of the national curriculum in the United Kingdom (UK)1: I focus on the antecedents to the national curriculum and the arguments and groups through which it has been promoted, the structures, rhetorical, financial and political, which have been established to support it, and finally the content, form, and pedagogical assumptions embedded within it.
