Of course the Lords are right in recognising that “one size doesn’t fit all” for the secondary curriculum. However, such generalisations easily mask as much as they reveal. We have a divided and unequal education system in which, as your editorial (12 December) pointed out, a third of pupils in England do not obtain a pass in maths and English and, one could add, often give up a science and a foreign language.
It is also true, as the House of Lords committee states, that the Ebacc is too narrow. Any national curriculum should encourage access beyond the traditional academic subjects. However, the damage caused by educational inequality will not be remedied by replacing the Ebacc with art and other practical subjects. This is to treat the curriculum in isolation from the inadequate resources of state-funded schools as the main cause of low achievement and disaffection.
The reason why most pupils in private fee-paying schools do well in a range of academic subjects as well as having good opportunities to develop their artistic, sporting and practical skills is not because such schools value diversity but because they have access to resources – material and human – that make such goals possible for all their pupils.
Our educational problems are not primarily the result of failing to recognise the diversity of pupils. They are the result of the poor resources of state-funded schools and the failure of successive governments to learn from the past. The Lords committee mirrors the equally mistaken but no less well-intentioned 1963 report Half Our Future, by Sir John Newsom, and the similar recommendations of the 2011 Demos thinktank report The Forgotten Half.
Michael Young
Emeritus professor of sociology of curriculum, Institute of Education, University College London
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