ABSTRACT
The primary curriculum is currently (1999) in a curious, unstable and intermediate state. Many of its statutory elements have been suspended at least to the year 2000 to enable schools to concentrate on an ITEMS-based curriculum (ICT, English, mathematics and science). There is a particular drive to implement national literacy and numeracy strategies which constitute central government’s most direct and comprehensive ‘incursion’ into what primary teachers fondly believed to be ‘autonomous territory’ since the era of old-style ‘payment by results’ more than a century ago. A revised National Curriculum is promised for implementation from Autumn 2000. Its broad outlines do not suggest a curriculum fit for a new century (let alone a millennium); compared with the original National Curriculum it promises to be what this paper terms a reduced legal entitlement curriculum, more of a modification than a fundamental review. The latter is necessary in the longer term, as is a changed political climate in which primary teachers’ professionalism and commitment are recognized, not undermined, and in which there is a genuine commitment on all parties to engage in the task of devising a curriculum framework for the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
