ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some whole school approaches to improving learning. It also addresses a key current question for the curriculum – what is the right balance between thinking skills and subject knowledge. There are tensions within formal education between imparting wide knowledge and the development of skills for handling that knowledge. In the primary school sector, both can be squeezed out of the curriculum by a focus on basic skills such as literacy and numeracy. The chapter describes an explicit attempt to develop young children's reasoning, and the results both in terms of pupils' apparent cognitive abilities and their basic skills. The Core Knowledge curriculum may be more promising for younger children. Philosophy for Children (P4C) was developed in 1970 with the establishment of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC). Assessment for learning (AfL) is a kind of formative assessment and one of the strategies advocated for use in the classroom.
