ABSTRACT
Both internationally and across the UK, teachers in classrooms have varying degrees of opportunity to make their own decisions about what to teach pupils and also how to teach it. Some countries have legally required national curricula, with close prescriptions of content, modes of teaching and forms of assessment. There may be less flexibility for decision-making at school or classroom level about how to implement the curriculum in such countries compared with the greater freedom elsewhere. However, as Wragg notes, even in those countries which have a prescriptive national curriculum it is impossible for central government to prescribe every detail of a school’s curriculum (Wragg et al. 1998, p. 23). Teachers often still have the opportunity to make decisions which may have a profound effect on the quality of pupil learning. Schools’ and teachers’ autonomy over curricular decision-making is a particularly important issue where students experience difficulties in learning such as in the acquisition of literacy. It is crucial, therefore, that all those associated with the literacy learning of students of school age are fully conversant with the detail of requirements of their own national curriculum context and the room for manoeuvre there is within it to respond appropriately to individual students’ learning needs:
One important element of the craft skills of teaching…is the ability to pick ways through a curriculum, even a prescribed one, via as imaginative and challenging routes as possible.
