ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the discourses and structures that thread between classroom learning and national policy. Using the English educational system as a case study and warning, the chapter shows how neo-liberal policy approaches have given contradictory messages to a national system by a strategy of marketisation and centralisation with a discourse of collaboration and autonomy. It first surveys the relationship between the legally compulsory curriculum in England and the school-based acts of task design. Next the chapter examines the discourses that have characterised the reform of curriculum and teaching since 2010, with particular reference to power words such as curriculum, pedagogy, prescription, professional autonomy and knowledge. The chapter is a call to teachers to take curriculum design as a moral and political issue of supreme importance to them and their young learners, and treat it as something of daily importance to their work.
