Naace Conference Blog

Notes of this keynote session:

Mike Rumble took over this session at the last moment.

Listen to the podcast here:

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He says he has a luxurious job, looking into the future. Neil’s presentation was great in setting the future. We need to try and look into see how we are preparing children.

Prime objective of QCA:
“Develop a modern, world-class curriculum that will inspire and challenge all learners and prepare them for the future”

How many pupils are ‘inspired’ and ‘challenged’ by the curriculum. The most important word is ALL.

Curriculum concerns, some people have been concerned with the curriculum for some time. [Mike gave some examples from 1985 and 1931.]

Some curriculum challenges:

the changing power relationship
- to teachers, but with this comes responsibility
- to learners, so they develop their own taxonomy of learning

can the curriculum adjust and keep up?
- learning about ICT
- learning with ICT

will our assessment be relevant?

What if a learner submitted their work to an examination board on CD? Or as an edited documentary on DVD? Are we equipt at the moment to enable the assessment in terms of the subject content?

The curriculum is presently the entire planned learning experience. The Curriculum of the future needs to encompass universal and unique elements. We need to move from THE National Curriculum, to OUR Curriculum. The phrase we need to be using is Contagious professionalism.

We need to change attitudes to ICT. I would love to take John Clare to places, I actually believe he would change.
Technology opens up the possibility of pupils taking an assessment not at the same time.

We might have THE Curriculum or we might have OUR Curriculum.

“It’s not what the technology can do that matters, it’s what you can do with the technology that makes the difference.” Simply introducing the technology does not change things.

Dave Thompson: Had an interesting session on MIS. We are collecting all this data, when the revision of the curriculum is revised in 2008. Are we collecting data that will become redundant?

We must develop a flexible system.

Clare Johnson: I’m interested in the idea of a National Entitlement with a local development. My concern is that the curriculum gets pulled down into the assessment. How is the national system going to cope with the local agenda?

We often undervalue what we ‘value’. we have along way to go. Changes are afoot with multimedia assessment and e-portfolios.

Roger Keeling: I don’t see even in the best schools, being allowed to tear up the curriculum, and the present assessment methods.

We often look at the currculum the wrong way around, the curriculum has to contain these elements, it’s not about what you cannot do.

“There are two groups of schools that are being innovative:

1. those that feel comfortable and prepared to take risks;
2. those that have tried everything and therefore have no choice but to take risks.

The vast majority are in the middle - they follow the QCA Schemes of Work. Heads also express concerns that we have trained teachers not to curriculum innovators. We need to encourage teachers to be creative, and innovative in the curriculum.”