ABSTRACT
In December 1986 Kenneth Baker, the newly appointed Secretary of State, announced in a television interview (ITV, Weekend World) that, if the Conservatives were returned for a third term in the election that was widely anticipated would be held in the first part of the following year, he would introduce a ‘national core curriculum’. At the North of England Education Conference in the following month he drew comparisons between the English system and those in European countries (particularly in West Germany and France) (Baker, 1993, p. 165). They, he said, had ‘tended to centralise and standardise. We have gone for confusion and variety…. The school curriculum has been left to individual schools and teachers’ (DES, 1987e). Later that month he said to the Society of Chief Education Officers,
we should now move quickly to a national curriculum…our school curriculum is not as good as it could be and needs to be…we need to move nearer to the kind of arrangements which other European countries operate with success.
