ABSTRACT
School-based curriculum evaluation may be focused mainly on improving the way things are taught. But it also needs to scan the balance, the relevance, the continuity and the fairness of what is taught. In practice teachers continually review and change the curriculum. As part of the development of the course, the Schools Council Curriculum in Action team worked with teachers, and finished with questions. A most useful document is the Schools Council's The Practical Curriculum. This is written as a set of problems rather than as a prescription, and each chapter ends with a checklist to help teachers question their own arrangements. In cost-effective terms the linking of the primary to the secondary school curriculum might have been more rewarding. Secondary school teachers of mathematics in particular complained that they had to spend a year bringing the children from all the different primary schools up to the same starting line before moving on to the secondary curriculum.
