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By Root 2896 0

monitoring of the national curriculum by the recruitment of 800 extra LEA Inspectors, who themselves would be monitored and controlled by the HMI, which would doubtless have to be expanded as well. I noted: ‘it is utterly ridiculous. The results will come through in the tests and exams.’ I stressed to the DES that all of these proposals would alienate teachers, hold back individual initiative at school level and centralize education to an unacceptable degree. The Cabinet sub-committee which I chaired to oversee the education reforms decided that all of the core and foundation subjects taken together should absorb no more than 70 per cent of the curriculum. But, at Ken Baker’s insistence, I agreed that this figure should not be publicly released — presumably it would have caused offence with the education bureaucrats who were by now ambitiously planning how each hour of school time should properly be spent.

The next problem arose from the report by the ‘Task Group on Assessment and Testing’ which we had established in July 1987 to advise on the practical considerations which would govern assessment, including testing, within the national curriculum. Ken Baker warmly welcomed the report. Whether he had read it properly I do not know: if he had it says much for his stamina. Certainly I had no opportunity to do so before agreeing to its publication, having simply been presented with this weighty, jargon-filled document in my overnight box with a deadline for publication the following day. The fact that it was then welcomed by the Labour Party, the National Union of Teachers and the Times Educational Supplement was enough to confirm for me that its approach was suspect. It proposed an elaborate and complex system of assessment — teacher-dominated and uncosted. It adopted the ‘diagnostic’ view of tests, placed the emphasis on teachers doing their own assessment and was written in an inpenetrable educationalist jargon. I minuted out my concerns to Ken Baker but by now, of course, it had been published and was already the subject of consultation.

In July 1988 I received the Mathematics National Curriculum papers. It was a small mountain. A complicated array of ‘levels’, ‘attainment targets’ and ‘profile components’ based on ‘tasks’ which pupils were expected to perform was surely not what teachers required. In commenting, I stressed the need for greater clarity, simplicity and a more practical approach.

Then in October I read the first report of the National Curriculum English Working Group. This too I found disappointing, as I had the earlier Kingman Committee Report on the teaching of English language — and for the same reasons. Although there was acceptance of a place for Standard English, the traditional learning of grammar and learning by heart, which I considered vital for memory training, seemed to find no favour. Unsatisfactory as all this seemed to me, the fact that many critics considered the direction of these recommendations to be controversial demonstrated just how far things had deteriorated in many classrooms. Moreover, the final report of the English Working Group responded to the criticism made of its first report and gave at least some more emphasis to grammar and spelling.

Perhaps the hardest battle I fought on the national curriculum was about history. Though not an historian myself, I had a very clear — and I had naively imagined uncontroversial — idea of what history was. History is an account of what happened in the past. Learning history, therefore, requires knowledge of events. It is impossible to make sense of such events without absorbing sufficient factual information and without being able to place matters in a clear chronological framework — which means knowing dates. No amount of imaginative sympathy for historical characters or situations can be a substitute for the initially tedious but ultimately rewarding business of memorizing what actually happened. I was, therefore, very concerned when in December 1988 I received Ken Baker’s written proposals for the teaching of history and the composition