1987 to 1995 — The Struggle to Formulate a National Curriculum for Science in England and Wales

Abstract

The 1988 Education Reform Act ushered in a new era in education within Britain. Before this Act, the government had had no recent and direct control over the school curriculum. Now there is a prescribed curriculum in all main subjects, with associated national testing at four stages within the years of compulsory schooling. This article describes the evolution of this policy. The story starts with a sketch of the background to the 1988 legislation. There is then a first account of the formulation of assessment policy, given here because the formulation of the science standards can only be understood in the context of this policy. There then follows an account, with examples, of the three versions of the national curriculum for science which have appeared over the past seven years. In order to understand these more fully, the article then returns to assessment in order to trace the evolution of the policy and practice in this area over the same period of time. The closing section presents some reflections on the issues illustrated by this strange story.The account applies only to England and Wales. Although the word 'national' is used throughout, the legislative arrangements for Scotland and for Northern Ireland are different and are not discussed here.

Developing a Holistic Assessment Stance in Student Teachers

“…Black (1995) , in reviewing the state and status of teacher assessment, identi® es research evidence that indicates that, at least in the early days of N ational Curriculum assessm ent, teachers did not understand the nature of form ative assessm ent. Teachers were designing their own sum mative assessments of pupils, similar to the nationally set sum m ative tests, then called standard assessment tasks (SA Ts) (now called standard tests), rather than using their own on-going formative assessments of pupils.…”

“…The advantage of the system as proposed by the TGAT was that the sam e assessm ent judgements could be used for different purposes. However, it has been argued that the use of teacher assessment data for sum m ative purposes im pairs the form ative role of teacher assessment (Havlen, 1994 ) and has an impact on the approach taken to teaching, with teachers adopting m ore didactic m ethods to prepare pupils for sum mative assessm ent (Black, 1995) . In particular, the pressure on teachers is to focus on teaching the three core subjects of English, m athem atics and science.…”

What Is the Purpose of Learning Science? An Analysis of Policy and Practice in the Primary School

“…Although the Education Reform Act did not provide any specific guidance or rationale for science in primary school it did lead to the formation of a number of policy initiatives which were aimed at raising standards and making schools more accountable (Black, 1995). It could be argued that subsequently this political agenda had a powerful influence on the justification and emergence of primary science, as a core subject within the centralised National Curriculum (DES, 1989) for England and Wales.…”

“…However, it was evident that significant recommendations by the National Curriculum Science Working Party (NCSWP) which included the importance ‘to explore some of the moral dilemmas that scientific discoveries can cause ...’ as well as to ‘have the opportunity to explore the social and historical contexts of scientific discoveries’ (DES, 1987, pp. 16–17) were omitted (Black, 1995).…”

“…In fact Ofsted (1999) noted a tendency for schools to spend more time on revision in science and commented that there was little diagnostic assessment but that teachers frequently monitored progress towards targets and informed parents. This implied that national testing at KS2 placed a greater emphasis on testing performance against national standards (Black, 1995; Donnelly, 1994).…”