Schools Abandoning the National Curriculum

Thanks are due to the friendly teacher who sent us the following morsel from 'Report' (the magazine for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers):

"More than 50 schools have now supplanted the national curriculum in favour of the Royal Society of Art's (RSA) Opening Minds curriculum, which is based on skills and competencies rather than the accumulation of facts and information. The first school involved in the project to report its first benchmark exam results is St John's School and Community College in Wiltshire, where 80% of pupils who began their GCSE double science under the RSA curriculum two years earlier than their peers have achieved grades A*-C compared with 58% in the control group who took their GCSE double science exams as normal in Year 11. Encouraged by these early indications of success, the RSA has launched a series of classroom materials including a resources CD-ROM and a classroom wall poster. To find out more or to order materials go to: The RSA New Curriculum."

Teacher friend comments "This new attempt certainly sets out to deal with what teachers and pupils hate so much about the national curriculum, ie: the endless lists of 'essential facts' which offer little opportunity for creativity".

This person also makes the key point that there is simply no way that ministers can now insist that home educators should follow the national curriculum, given that schools themselves are not following it, and are obviously p****d off with it.