Friday, September 14, 2007
Does the national curriculum do it for you?
QCA commissioned NFER to report on pupil views and experiences of the national curriculum, to inform curriculum reform. The result is a summary and review of 257 separate UK research studies, spanning fifteen years and including thousands of children across all key stages.
Ensuring student voice is heard is now established practice and policy in both primary and secondary education in the UK. Schools increasingly use school councils and pupil forums to help make decisions, job applicants are no longer surprised to be interviewed by pupils and OFSTED now asks pupils about their school experience and reports inspection findings back to them.
It was in this climate that QCA commissioned NFER to report on pupil views and experiences of the national curriculum, to inform curriculum reform. The result is a summary and review of 257 separate UK research studies, spanning fifteen years and including thousands of children across all key stages.
Relevant to the new secondary curriculum to be implemented from September 2008, the findings revealed children enjoy the curriculum less as they get older and confirmed the familiar year eight ‘dip’ in motivation.
Common themes to emerge were the aspects of the curriculum which gave learners control, responsibility and autonomy were more popular with the pupils. The government has identified personalised learning as the way to achieve this and the new curriculum explicitly requires increased flexibility and personalisation by schools. The report summarises, "Pupils appreciated when able to work in their preferred way in order to put a stamp of identity on their work." Meeting the chosen learning styles of all the individual children in a class or school and allowing them to change according to other factors such as subject is impossible without personalised learning and personalised assessment.
The report also concluded "pupils recommend greater individual feedback, especially at key stage four". The Personalisation by Pieces framework allows for a totally open, flexible and evolving choice of work styles and its use of technology and peer assessment allows all the different ways of working to be individually assessed.
Bringing all the findings of the hundreds of studies together the report concludes pupils are telling us they learn best when the curriculum is practical, challenging, gives responsibility and is rooted in their reality.
Personalisation by pieces works from a pedagogical and a practical point of view.
And the pupils are asking for it....
To read more Pippa Lord (2005) Pupils’ views of the curriculum
Also find out more on the QCA website.