Standardised curriculum packages raise concerns

The National Education Union (NEU) has released new findings on the impact of a standardised curricula on teachers through their new report, “Are you on slide 8 yet?”.

Standardised curriculum packages (SCPs), are often presented as a solution to teachers’ demanding workloads, and are units, programmes, or packages that are pre-prepared, often by third party providers or centrally by a multi-academy trust, for teachers to follow in teaching.

The research from the report highlights the flaws with SCPs, and show they are not the best course of action. The NEU is publishing this work in the shadow of the government’s ongoing review of curriculum and assessments in England, which the NEU agrees with.

The report critically found that teachers who used SCPs had no less work than teachers who do not, and also have less autonomy in what or how the content is taught.

As SCPs are largely promoted as a tool to reduce teacher workload, NEU calls into question what teacher workload means, and how it cannot be defined as just ‘hours worked’. By taking away curriculum design and lesson planning away from teachers, some may find the quality of their job has declined which doesn’t tackle the workload problem. SCPs might also be responsible for shifting teacher workload elsewhere rather than reducing it, as although teachers spend less time researching learning resources, they might spend more time interpreting and adapting generic materials to suit their students’ needs.

Teachers additionally expressed doubts about SCPs, such as reducing the quality of students’ school experiences, particularly by not catering for students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or pupils that needed challenging. Teachers felt there was a lack of freedom to be able to cater for their students, that SCPs acted as a way of monitoring their work, and that they are a plaster over the much deeper problems of teacher shortages, high staff turnover, and lack of professional development.

More than a third of primary school teachers say they have little or no influence over the content of individual lessons (34 per cent), with 28 per cent saying the same in secondary. The majority of teachers across both secondary and primary schools additionally report that external assessments have a lot of influence over lesson content.

On the report, general secretary of the National Education Union, Daniel Kebede, said: “It is exceptionally worrying to hear the evidence that teachers feel their roles are being undermined and diluted — addressing this must be as essential to curriculum reform, as the contents of then curriculum itself.

“It is essential because professional involvement in curriculum and assessment design is motivating for teachers but also because their involvement is critical to the process of effective learning for all students.

“The links between teacher autonomy and retention are well known — reduced teacher autonomy leads to teachers leaving the profession. The unequivocal, statistically significant evidence in this research, demonstrating that standardised curriculum packages including those of the Oak National Academy are giving teachers less say over what and how things are taught in their own classrooms, must act as a serious warning to policy makers.