ABSTRACT
Two very different movements can be detected in contemporary patterns of curriculum development and change in England. On the face of it, they are worlds apart, diametrically opposed even. The first concerns the growing involvement of ‘the Centre’, of National Government and the Department of Education and Science (DES) in the direct control, administration and monitoring of the school curriculum. Because of wide media coverage of the host of official educational documents which have marked the state’s long and sustained endeavour to exercise greater control over what is learned and by whom in schools – its attempt to bind schools more firmly in the service of society – this movement has become the best known one to the public at large and the most contentious among professional educators. With the publication of each Green Paper, Yellow Book and curriculum document, the teaching profession – raised on a tradition of school and classroom autonomy – has been voluble in its protests; and academics of different persuasions have registered their own dissatisfactions about the secret activities of the ‘mandarins’ of the DES, 1 about their attempt, with parliamentary government, to control the educational system by much closer regulation of the school curriculum and teacher practice than the broader and looser licensed autonomy that had been granted to teachers during the era of educational and economic expansion. 2 And they have shown themselves to be wary of the ideologically-loaded language in which HMI and DES documents have been couched. 3, 4 Publicly, the centralizing tendency of curriculum change is the most visible and best-known one, and professionally it is certainly the most contentious, occasioning the greatest amount of controversy and dissent.
