The Children, Schools and Families select committee released its National Curriculum Inquiry report and recommendations today. It’s based on a series of evidence submitted by about 50 organisations/individuals and a number of oral witness committee meetings to address the questions of whether we even need a National Curriculum, and, if so, in what form.

It recommends putting a cap on the mount of time spent on the prescribed (”franchise model”) National Curriculum (at 50%) so that there is plenty of time in school for non-curricular activities defined, designed, and presented by teachers themselves. It recommends increased “empowerment” for “de-skilled” staff, and an emphasis on teachers’ professional innovation in curriculum design and planning.

Although this will get the column inches (and its rubbishing of the primary Rose Review probably more so), there are some other important recommendations.

Firstly, it suggests the need for mechanisms to ensure teachers can access and understand research about teaching and learning. In our field, research in ICT will be important.

Secondly, it suggests that if teachers are to be empowered as curriculum planners, then they need to understand the “theory” of curriculum. This is quite significant, because teacher training has been pretty “theory-lite” in recent years. I don’t imagine the select committeee has it in mind for teachers to plough through Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze and Guattari–though Foucault’s stuff in Discipline and Punish on schools as part of the “carceral” apparatus of the state will resonate for many–but it does seem important to me that teachers do engage with the dominant theories not only of teaching but of knowledge in our era. If using ICT within a curriculum, it’s important to recognise how knowledge is constructed, circulated, and contested, since ICT allows claims to “knowing” to be made by almost anyone.

The lead article in MIT’s new International Journal of Learning Media, for example, calls our era the “postmodern digital age” and shows how it is characterised by “increased skepticism and contestation of what constitutes ‘truth’” (p.6). This has major ramifications for curriculum-making: “educators will likely grapple with questions about what is true, and what is worth teaching and learning more and more, both now and in the future” (p.7).

My guess is English and media trainee teachers brought up on an undergraduate diet of literary theory will buy all of that; so too poststructuralist/human geographers and historiographers; maybe even young scientists interested in science in the media and the public. But what other disciplinary theories might trainee teachers access? And what theories of human development, of democratic rights, of economics, of sociology and psychology and neurology…?

What might be the effects of teachers planning 50% of the curriculum themselves if theory is let loose in their training? “Postmodernist pedagogy”? “Socially constructed curricula”? “Sokal Science”?

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