Teacher autonomy: will the Curriculum Review restore our profession?

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This is the fourth blog in my series on the Curriculum and Assessment Review. You can find the rest HERE. In this short blog I want to explore an aspect of the review I was really excited about - the promise to restore teachers' professional autonomy. This is important not only because teachers need to be able to make moral and ethical choices in classrooms, but also because a lack of autonomy has been wreaking havoc with teacher recruitment and retention. The past decade has seen a significant reduction in teacher autonomy, and lots of concerns about this from the profession, so anything to buck this trend would be welcome.

What Does the Report Mean by Teacher Autonomy?
For too long now, teachers have been increasingly controlled by external pressures, reducing both their efficacy and enjoyment of teaching. But even a cursory reading of the scope of this principle reveals the internal contradictions. While the report suggests the importance of teachers as ‘curriculum makers’ (p50), shifting the focus away from the previous obsession with separating teachers from the process of curriculum making, the description of the quality seems to be very different from the label. The authors suggest that the best thing for teacher autonomy is to have a ‘a rich and well-specified national curriculum’ (p50), presumably running on the line that the best kind of freedom is less freedom. The professional freedom therefore seems to fall under a heading of freedoms to deliver in novel ways, rather than being part of an iterative process of curriculum reform and development. Indeed, ‘curriculum makers’ in this content is defined as the process of ‘interpreting and transforming the content in the national curriculum to ‘author’ instructional events with students in the classroom’ (p50) and ‘unpacking and interpreting content to unlock its educational potential’ (p50). This is about as far from the concept of teacher as ‘curriculum maker’ as I can imagine. ‘Curriculum interpreter’ potentially, but even that feels generous. That the curriculum principle itself was not recognised as a contradiction by the authors is something of a mystery: ‘The refreshed national curriculum should ensure the professional autonomy of teachers is maintained, making sure that greater specificity does not substantially restrict teachers’ flexibility to choose lesson content and how to teach it’ (p50). Once again, the conclusions here feel like they are a result of an uncritical adherence to the ‘knowledge-rich’ approach of the previous reforms, with their focus on close specification and uniformity across contexts. 
 
The slightly ominous note about turning the national curriculum into a ‘digital product’ (p53) raises still further concerns about the desire to overly specify curriculum content, and reduce teacher freedoms to choose curricular focuses. Almost all Primary schools have cross curricular planning on multiple scales to ensure coherence. The challenge they mostly face is one of limited time and resource to develop expertise across the school. Meanwhile, in secondary, attempts to create connections across subjects are important but cannot be done easily without heavily restricting content choices to ensure coherence. Ironically this would mark a significant reversal of the previous reform’s emphasis on schools being able to set their own curricular directions. On a very cynical level, it also feels like an opportunity for a company to make a lot of money producing a tool to show these connections, or for Oak Academy and it’s extremely problematic (an autonomy reducing) AI tool to make greater inroads into schools… Without wishing to sound like a Luddite, it was not hard to see connections on older paper copies of the National Curriculum, however creating huge tables of cross curricular links did very little to generate meaningful cross-curricularity in the 10 years this was emphasised under New Labour. 

Thanks for reading. If you would like to comment, please do drop me a line here: Alex Ford (@apf102.bsky.social) — Bluesky. To return to the rest of the blog click HERE.