Broad and balanced learning

In James Callaghan's famous Ruskin lecture of 1976, the then Labour Prime Minister signalled his support for ‘a basic curriculum with universal standards’. ¹ But it is was to be a Conservative Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker who would start to turn the Callaghan vision into reality, with the introduction of the National Curriculum for English and Welsh schools. The process was a fraught one, with Margaret Thatcher apparently wanting a curriculum focusing on the basics while her Education Secretary preferred something more ‘broad and balanced’ which covered the humanities and the sciences. But lying behind the discussion about the curriculum was a worry among traditional educationists that something in education had been lost: that the traditions of the old grammar school and learning by rote had been replaced by something less rigorous and certainly less satisfactory. As Callaghan had noted, this was a concern felt by many parents too. ‘There is the unease felt by parents and others about the new informal methods of teaching which seem to produce excellent results when they are in well-qualified hands but are much more dubious when they are not,’ he told his Oxford audience. ‘There is little wrong with the range and diversity of our courses. But is there sufficient thoroughness and depth in those required in after life to make a living?’ This concern persisted and after Baker's curriculum came National Curriculum tests finally introduced in 1995, at ages seven, 11 and 14 in English, mathematics and science (though some of these have subsequently been downgraded in Wales and the tests for seven-year-olds are being made more flexible in England).