A new national curriculum
provide a unified learning experience. Although this comes naturally to generalist primary school teachers, the new key stage 3 national curriculum explicitly encourages this kind of development in secondary schools also. It might be thought that some secondary school teachers who are deeply committed to their subjects would resist the development of a rebalanced national curriculum, which apparently relegates academic subjects. We know that love of subject is a strong motivation for some people to join the profession and they should not gain the impression that these proposals are an attack on their professionalism. On the contrary, they would enjoy the opportunity to think through anew the rationale for their disciplines in contributing to the national debate on the skills curriculum. The removal of knowledge content from the national curriculum would also enhance their professionalism, by giving them the responsibility to determine which aspects of their subject are most deserving of coverage by their pupils. At heart those teachers who are subject enthusiasts long most to transfer to their pupils their enthusiasm and understanding of their subject. They know that this is not achieved by pupils memorising ‘facts’ for a test, but through active learning experiences that transmit the essence of the subject. To return to an earlier example, the young historian is not a pupil who spends a long time learning a string of historic dates. The young historian understands chronology and enjoys the idea of locating evidence, weighing pieces of evidence, having regard to their sources, and coming to judgments about past events. History is an example of a subject already partly defined in terms of skills such as these, and its assessment attempts to be consistent with this. The skills-based curriculum simply extends the idea by promoting this approach to all subjects.
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