It’s only after you have left school and, in adulthood, gained a bit of distance, that you can be fully aware of the gaps in your education. History is a prime example. A group of British people together around a table and can probably weave together some kind of cohesive narrative across the centuries. In isolation, however, what you discover is that one person did the Romans, another the Second World War, and a third spent two years on medieval crop rotation. Meaning that as a school leaver, you’ll have a vague idea about how it all fits together, but whole epochs remain shrouded in mystery.
That’s not to say that we should return to rote learning in the kind of system envisaged by Michael Gove. An ability to memorise dates informs little about the intellectual potential of any pupil. It just tells us that they are good at retaining information. But what the history problem does illustrate is that what you learn at school is entirely dependent on where you end up, how good your teachers are, which exam board they are using, and whether your school is well-funded or deprived and stretched for resources.
In an ideal world, the education system would be radically overhauled, to deliver a truly national curriculum; where a child in one county has as much right to learn Spanish as a child in another. Options would not be closed off simply because of the catchment area. Furthermore, an interest in, say, drama, would not preclude a pupil from also studying geography. A greater portfolio of core subjects would not only be available, but would also prevent pupils from being forced to narrow down their options at an age when they don’t yet know who they really are.
As with the French baccalaureate, they would have a range of subjects to choose from based on their strengths, but they would also be required to study a number of key subjects regardless of chosen streams. French students are able to choose from a range of living European languages, regional languages and others such as ancient Greek or Latin. Such options are rarely available to children at state school in Britain.
I would introduce a mandatory reading scheme, where older children spend time each week reading with the 11-year-olds who have just started secondary education. We did this at my school in an attempt to improve literacy and it was a great initiative, helping children grow in confidence. I would also reintroduce the books Gove dispensed with, such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men — books that teach the importance of kindness and tolerance. English would have more of an emphasis on diverse voices and more modern literature.
In science, there would be more practical work (a 2017 Wellcome Trust report found that pupils in deprived areas were much less likely to report having designed and carried out their own experiments), more trips to science museums, and a thorough teaching of evolution. Girls would be encouraged to pursue Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects. Maths would have more of a practical focus on practical applications, such as interest rates on credit cards. Adult skills, as part of an improved personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) curriculum , would teach the ins and outs of a consumer credit agreement, how to do a tax return without having a nervous breakdown, and the implications of credit card debt.
Information technology would be integrated across most subject areas, and pupils would be taught to code. There would be a range of practical workshops in plumbing (everyone should know how to unblock a toilet), design and technology, woodwork, and art and graphics.
Age-appropriate relationship education
For compulsory sex and relationships education (SRE) — and it is essential — but pupils deserve more than just the mechanics. SRE would include importance of respecting boundaries; domestic violence and what a healthy relationship looks like; child marriage; and all the technological advances with which young people are grappling, such as sexting, social media and pornography. It would follow on naturally from the foundations laid in primary school, with pupils from the age of four onwards receiving age-appropriate relationship education, as in the Netherlands — where this contributes to the very low teenage pregnancy rate .
My revamped PSHE would emphasise the need to support those with poor mental health, and would encourage boys to feel able to express their emotions in a non-judgemental space. Because eating disorders, gym addiction and steroid abuse still loom large for many teenagers, body image would be a discussion topic for both sexes, including airbrushing and the role of social media in forming perceptions of what a desirable body looks like. PSHE would also include more cookery and nutrition classes.
In this age of soaring teenage obesity, teaching pupils how to cook from scratch and how to have a healthy diet is a matter of urgency. This would take place in combination with expanded PE classes — without such an emphasis on team sports (those of us who regularly caught the ball with our faces still wince at the memory of hockey, netball or football) and dreaded cross-country. Dance, swimming, yoga, climbing and high-intensity interval training would also feature. In addition, pupils would be encouraged to spend more time outdoors, and there would be greater collaboration with organisations such as forest schools.
Young people have felt alienated from party politics for too long. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn may have reversed that trend, and those of us who work or have worked with young people knew that alienation was not about apathy or lacking passion; young people just felt that institutions of power didn’t have anything to offer them.
Politics and citizenship classes could of course teach the mechanics of power — how laws are made, what first-past-the-post entails, how the justice system works — but it would also teach activism. The aim would be to get pupils discussing the things that matter to them — sexism, racism, homophobia, housing, poverty, the environment — and examine why it is that their voices are so often ignored. There would be an in-built understanding of privilege and social mobility, and pupils would be encouraged to make themselves heard by writing to their MPs, composing speeches, launching their own campaigns and undertaking volunteer work.
The focus of any curriculum should not simply be on attainment and “resilience” — the current buzzword — but on producing confident, well-rounded citizens who feel as though they belong and have value in society. As in France, students would study philosophy, allowing them to enter work or higher education (if they chose to do so) with the ability to construct an argument logically, and critically examine the media that they are presented with (so that attempts to manipulate voters — on the basis of fear of immigration, say — will fall flat).
But most important, continuous assessment, practicals and oral exams would measure achievement, along with written papers. No one would be made to feel that they had been written off or that they were a failure because of their inability to retain and regurgitate facts.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a London-based freelance writer. She co-founded The Vagenda blog and is co-author of The Vagenda: A Zero Tolerance Guide to the Media.
