In England educators have been concerned about ensuring equality and diversity in education due to ever-diversifying school populations, who find themselves positioned as outsiders to England’s National Curriculum. This article explores the accessibility and limitations of the curriculum from the perspective of ten secondary school teachers in nine different subjects in inner city state schools. We begin by examining the participants’ goals and aims when enacting the curriculum to make it accessible to all students. However, the prescriptive nature of the curriculum in most subjects makes this task challenging. We then examine how participants perceived that they enabled students’ access to the curriculum and the challenges encountered. We focus on art and English to highlight the different spaces to enact equality and diversity within the curriculum. In the nonprescriptive art curriculum, teachers choose their own resources and themes, allowing for greater creativity and cultural inclusivity. In contrast, in the English curriculum, teachers find the process of equalising and diversifying the curriculum difficult, particularly at Key Stage 4, due to the high status of the subject. To conclude, we argue that the more prescriptive a curriculum subject is, the more difficult it is to make it equal, diverse and inclusive of everyone.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.