THE TELEGRAPH: It is always attractive when someone dismantles a dictatorship. The National Curriculum was a dictatorship. The Government's announcement that up to 25 per cent more flexibility and choice will be built in to it is, on balance, a change in principle to be welcomed. The same curriculum that works for a school in a leafy suburb is not always suited to a school in a run-down estate in an area of urban blight. It makes sense to define a core of learning while at the same time make the curriculum capable of adapting to different or local circumstances.
What the changes do nothing to recognise or to remedy is the fact that secondary education is in deep crisis. Initiative after initiative has been bolted on over the years so that our educational system resembles a lumbering Soyuz space station to which people have been adding modules since the dawn of space exploration.
There are 18 different types of maintained secondary school designated in Britain, a laughable dog's dinner replicated nowhere else in the world. Physics teachers are an extinct species, chemistry and modern languages teachers heading the same way. Only 40 per cent of maths teachers hold a degree in maths or equivalent. Curriculum reforms miss the point (more) By Martin Stephen
Mark Alexander
