The 3Rs…or chocolate? The Rose Report says you can have your cake and eat it too!

I haven’t posted in a while. Christmas in Canada followed by weekly trips since then to Abu Dhabi (from where I post this today) are offered as excuses.  I was going to write something about the state of primary education in Abu Dhabi, but thought I’d share my thoughts with you on the latest government report on primary education instead. 

Last month, Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief inspector, tabled his interim report on the primary curriculum.  I honestly didn’t read the report because, frankly, I’ve been jaded by educational officialdom which usually has a lot to do with jobsworthing and political point-scoring and rather little to do with education.  Working groups, papers, policies, and strategies (God, I hate that last one more than anything) with titles such as Every Child Matters, the Children’s Plan, Time to Talk, EYFS, the National Literacy Strategy and the National Numeracy Strategy  rather bore me with their vapidness.  There is almost never anything cutting edge about them.  If there were, they’d be research papers in peer-reviewed journals, not dust collectors on civil servant desks.  However, sitting at a dinner party in Ottawa over Christmas, something happened which compelled me to download the full Rose Report.  And read it.

My host, a retired senior Canadian diplomat, mentioned that he had read in the Economist that we in England were no longer going to teach proper subjects in primary school, but rather topics or themes as had been done in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s (ie until the last report on the curriculum by Rose and two others, known as the “Three Wise Men”, advocated a shift to individual subjects in their 1992 report.)  He was appalled.  So were the other guests. What kind of educational backwater was I living in, they wondered. (I didn’t want to dig my adopted country further into the ground by telling them we’d only officially returned to phonics teaching two years earlier.)

I had seen some of the attention-grabbing headlines when the Rose Report was released on December 8^th.  The Telegraph shouted “History and geography lessons in primary schools should be scrapped, says report” while Melanie Philips at the Daily Mail condemned the report’s return to topics.  The Times did likewise, saying that topics such as “chocolate” would purport to replace maths, English, science and goodness knows what other of the currently prescribed 14 topics of the primary curriculum.  The chocolate analogy was all over the radio talk shows.  I hadn’t read the Economist article cited by my host so pulled it up.  Lo and behold, it had interpreted the Rose Report in the same way but seemed to applaud the report’s embrace of topics again.

But guess what?  I have now read the report and can only conclude that the reporters for the attention-grabbing headlined articles did not read it because Sir Jim does not advocate doing away with history and geography in favour of chocolate.  I actually think his report makes a lot of sense.  It advocates paring down the prescriptiveness of the current 14 topics to six areas which quite sensibly include all the necessary basics: English, communications and languages; art and design; maths; science and technology; human society and environment; and physical education and wellbeing.  My reading of the report is that individual subjects are to be taught, with cross-curricular comparisons made where possible. This covers the basics while still allowing passionate teachers to go beyond and to make linkages with other subjects. I still remember the sense of excitement I felt when studying the Tudors in history and simultaneously with another teacher studying contemporaneous Shakespeare in English or when seeing the overlap between physics and chemistry when studying them separately.  Studying Latin a year after studying ancient history also connected some dots for me.  Struggling with the concept of significant figures in physics one year made one topic less for me to grapple with in chemistry and maths.  Field trips to the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City at once brought together the geography of Canada I’d learned in Grades 4 through 6 and the history of Canada I’d also been taught.  Geography and history are often, as Sir Jim points out in his addendum following the misinterpration of his report, intimately connected.  In my mind, this balance of subject teaching with cross-curricular connections made where apposite is what an education is all about.

The problem with Sir Jim’s report lies not with the balance he strikes, which is, I think, the right one. Rather, it is with the implementation, and I’m not sure a report alone can do much to improve that. An abundance of interested, intelligent and inspiring teachers could, without further prescription, take care of this.  More of these are what we need more of in our primary schools, not government reports.