What should we teach our children? Subject specialists read the education secretary's national curriculum plans and respond
*David Priestland: History*
One episode that does not make it on to Michael Gove's depressingly narrow history syllabus is the Chinese Hundred Days' Reform of 1898. The emperor, among other things, ordered changes to the old civil service examination system, with its rote learning of ancient Chinese texts; only foreign knowledge and an outward looking education, the reformers argued, could rescue China from decline. But the change was shortlived. The reactionary Empress Dowager Cixi, egged on by the old exam-crammed elite, staged a coup, and the old system was restored. Within 13 years the Chinese empire had collapsed.
In Gove, we have our own empress dowager. His new history syllabus is very full, encouraging teachers to stress facts and dates over real understanding. And the focus is resolutely insular, as we would expect from our nationalistic education secretary – a real departure from the current syllabus, which shows an interest in parts of the world beyond Britain and introduces children to critical thinking.
Students will have to slog their way through the history of our island nation from the stone age to Thatcher. Seven year-olds will be faced with the "Anglo-Saxon heptarchy" of the early middle ages and "key developments in the reigns of Alfred, Athelstan, Cnut and Edward the Confessor". At 14, they will finally consider "Britain's relations with Europe, the Commonwealth and the wider world" (for Britain is not, of course, part of Europe).
Other parts of the world will feature, but mainly as they relate to the British experience. Children will learn about the "Enlightenment in England" (for these purposes Adam Smith is not Scottish), but Voltaire and Rousseau are worthy of study only insofar as they had an "impact" on the British. China will appear, but mainly as the loser to 19th-century British "gunboat diplomacy and the growth of empire".
We are, therefore, firmly back in the land of the Edwardian bestseller, Our Island Story: A Child's History of England. Children will learn about "Clive of India", General Wolfe's "conquest of Canada", Nelson, Wellington and Pitt. The Tolpuddle martyrs and the welfare state make an appearance, and the Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole has won a stay of execution after Jesse Jackson's protests. But radical figures, like Tom Paine or Robert Owen, have disappeared from view.
Nobody would disagree that children should have a good knowledge of British history. But as future citizens of a multicultural society and open economy in a globalised world, they are being seriously short-changed by these politicised and philistine reforms.
As any historian will tell you, it is a sign of serious decadence when a society becomes obsessed with its past glories. Britain in 2013, like China in 1898, can ill afford to retreat into complacent national chauvinism. And Gove himself could do with a little refresher course on Chinese history: he'll find that a lesson on the empress dowager and the fate of imperial China is worth 10 lessons on Nelson and Wolfe.
David Priestland teaches history at Oxford University and is the author of Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power
*Margaret Reynolds: English*
The draft curriculum offers a good plan for spelling, grammar, sentence construction and form. All of this, developed from the earliest years, will be useful to students who come to study English at university. The problems start when we come to context, and then are worse when we get to content. There is a (nominal) provision for accent and dialect. But essentially most of the English language taught at primary school and beyond presumes norms of "received pronunciation" and the Queen's English. We should all know what that language is. But we should also know that it is in itself a dialect – just as subject to change and interpretation as any other. An unacknowledged ideology is dangerous and exclusive. And in the global economy of the 21st century, English – or one kind of the many "Englishes" that co-exist now – is the language of worldwide business. Recognising the variations within "Englishes" could help young people become more effective and powerful.
As to what children should be reading for Key stages 1, 2 , 3, and 4 in English, my answer is always the same: story, story, story. In the current draft there is one named author (Shakespeare). And there are example themes ("loss" and "heroism"). It looks transparent enough. But this choice of headings suggests that this curriculum is stuck in the 19th century. And a brief nod at Key stage 3 to "seminal world literature, written in English" is not enough.
At university level, my colleagues are, for the most part, happy with the way students spell and, for all the scaremongering in the press about apostrophes, are not distressed by their grammar and punctuation. What bothers us most is that students going on to higher education don't have enough background. They don't know the Greek myths. They are terrible on the folk tales of any land. They have not read the Bible or other sacred texts. Ask them about fairy stories, and the best they can produce is a Disney version. How can they begin to read Angela Carter or Carol Ann Duffy?
There is a current fashion for setting so-called "contemporary texts"– that is works published recently – because they are deemed more "relevant" to the lives of the young people taking the exam. I love the writings of Susan Hill and Sebastian Faulkes as much as the next woman. But even those luminaries – I hazard – would like their readers to have read Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse.
So let's be brave in our schools with language, and yes – solidly old-fashioned with literature.
Margaret Reynolds is professor of English at Queen Mary University of London
*Richard Wentworth: Art and design*
This curriculum is well-meant and "decent", as things used to be in the 1950s. It's written with "authority". There is a powerful mood in what is being set out: a polite and constricted sense of the material world and little emphasis on the gorgeousness of the immaterial world.
Becoming familiar, as a child is, with what the world is made of and what it means is an elaborate process. The parts of education we call "cultural" tell us how humans aspire and communicate; how they invent and what they invented in the past. It all pretty much originates in "desire", this space of enabling imagination. Watch the impulses of children – a stream of curiosity, risk, and invention; testing their world, discovering that some marks become "images" while others become letters and pictograms. It's all very complicated and there are people in Whitehall trained to know the science of it all.
Only 150 years ago most of us were illiterate, photography was an infant, drawing and painting were the grownups, and there was sculpture and architecture too. Write your own list – song, dance, oratory? Remember, there was no broadcasting. Make another list (get your children to help) of the forms that interconnect and characterise the way we live now.
A great art education is not a machine for producing artists, it should be a generous system of gardening to cultivate a diversity of achievement and a celebration of the climate the "plants" share. Staying alive involves collaboration and invention. There's no reason why there couldn't be a growing medium called problem solving – you'd get inventors, engineers, poets, philosophers, agronomists, and gardeners too. Designer (with a small d) is a term for anybody who can think through something and resolve it imaginatively. As a rule, artists like to make problems and see if they can solve them. There is no firewall between the pragmatic and the imaginative.
Education makes common ground. Great teaching should show you how to listen to the rain as much as it would introduce you to Mozart. A child who knows that the mug is a cousin of the brick is as much an archaeologist as a chemist as a novelist. Periods of really great education release these energies. They enable, they create confidence, they celebrate.
Richard Wentworth was professor of sculpture at the RCA, 2009-11
*Matt Parker: Maths*
Reading a new maths curriculum is a never an exciting experience; it's apredictable experience. Unlike the other core subjects, where English can change recommended texts and science has new discoveries and updated theories, the core of school mathematics always remains largely unchanged. It's not as if we can replace triangles with harder, more up to date shapes. Five year-olds are still to be taught how to count to 100 (both forwards and backwards) and teenagers to sketch linear and quadratic functions.
With the mantra of "strengthen the qualification" it's hard to see how the maths curriculum could be brought more back to its core. So instead the focus seems to be on the way this content is examined. Gove is still pushing for "comprehensive reforms", and this will involve removing the different ability exam papers pupils now choose between and minimising the use of "examination aids" like calculators. It's like trying to strengthen football by making Premiership and lower division teams all play in the same league and then minimising the wearing of shoes.
More important, teaching the curriculum is only half of a teacher's job – they have to excite and enthuse their students. Students not only need to learn the content but have the inclination and the confidence to use it. This draft itself states that "confidence in numeracy and other mathematical skills is a precondition of success" later in life. As if to provide an example, Gove slips in a lovely bit of selectively presented data: When 54% of people agree with his GCSE plans, they are the "majority of respondents" (page 14), but when 56% do not agree with what he wants to change this larger percentage becomes "a small majority" (page 7).
The new national curriculum wants to prepare young people for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences they will face as active members of society. Making them view mathematics as something they need to endure to pass a difficult exam will not achieve that. I am encouraged when this draft claims that teachers should have the time and space to range beyond the curriculum, but I get very nervous with all the talk of making exams more stretching, removing the incentive to teach anything non-exam focused.
We need more confident, enthusiastic mathematics teachers. We should not be making teachers use their time in class to scare students about a looming exam. Otherwise young people will endure that exam, looking forward to never using maths again. Maths which they will need to use again. For everything from organising finances and problem solving to deciphering the statistics in government papers on mathematics education reform.
Matt Parker is based at Queen Mary's maths department, University of London
*Yvonne Baker: Science*
Young people need to understand that the discipline is always under review, with endless opportunity for them to make a contribution. So will Gove's curriculum enable this? It depends. When viewed, as the consultation framework suggests, as a "core knowledge around which teachers can develop exciting and stimulating lessons", it will be used by good schools and teachers as a starting point, not the destination. We know from the many great teachers we work with through the Science Learning Centres that they will tailor teaching to their students, bringing facts and concepts to life through practical work, stretching the most able, and enabling those who are struggling to understand science in ways that are meaningful to them. They will make use of appropriate support, such as bringing today's scientists into the classroom alongside learning about the (largely) historical ones the document mentions. They will use contemporary as well as historical resources, such as from the National Stem Centre eLibrary, to show how scientific ideas develop and, in many cases, still have far to go.
The concern is those schools and teachers who, for whatever reason, are unable to do this. The danger is that those who are insecure or lack confidence in their own subject knowledge will simply "teach to the list" rather than using it as a springboard. Many primary teachers have not studied science in depth since they themselves left school. We therefore have much to do to ensure that they have appropriate support to teach confidently and correctly.
For KS3, the draft curriculum presented is less well developed and, despite the document stating the importance of the transition from primary to secondary, does not yet show clear progression from KS2. It is pleasing to see passing reference to the "big challenges" that science needs to address – such as food security – but these are scant. It is also interesting that the word "engineering" appears in the document only twice, and not at all in the section on science – as a chemical engineer, that seems to me rather remiss.
I was also somewhat surprised to see that the section on art and design begins by saying these subjects "embody the highest form of human creativity". Doesn't splitting the atom or mapping the human genome, or finding a cure for cancer embody a similarly high form of creativity, and shouldn't we be helping young people understand that?
Yvonne Baker is CEO of Myscience and a former CEO of Stemnet
*Chris Hamnett: Geography*
The American satirist Ambrose Bierce said: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." A bit unfair, but without systematic knowledge of geography, pupils live in a one-dimensional, world with no sense of place. China, Mali and Algeria are just names on the news. Without a knowledge of geography pupils will have only a rudimentary understanding, if that, of where places are, how the world varies physically, economically and socially, and the processes that generate these differences. It is therefore good news that the government intends that geography will retain its compulsory status between the ages of five and 14. What is worrying, however, is the proposed policy change to introduce a new main target measure based on eight subjects at GCSE, making it possible for pupils not to study either geography or history at GCSE.
The curriculum's vision for geography is to "inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people", and to equip them with "knowledge of diverse places, people, resources and environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth's key physical and human processes". This is a commendable overall statement.
The key issue is how this broad vision is fleshed out. The proposals have a number of good features. The first is improved locational knowledge – where countries, climatic zones and vegetation belts are. Second, there is a better balance between physical and human geography, bringing more environment back in. Third, it provides a sound understanding of the how and why of geography. In other words it will deal with the social, economic and environmental processes that help explain why environments, places and societies are different and how they are changing. As part of this it puts understanding of processes back into the context of countries, linking thematic processes and places together. Well taught, this can provide a much-needed and sound basis for later study, at GCSE and A-level, for some of the key geographical challenges that face our world.
But much of this will prove irrelevant if the government pushes ahead with its plans to water down the EBacc measure, effectively making geography (and history) optional at GCSE. We could easily see a generation of students who do not know anything about climate change, have no idea why deforestation is a problem or how and why the rise of the BRICS will challenge the west.
Chris Hamnet is professor of geography at King's College London
*Nick Byrne: Languages*
In 2006 the Observer published a letter signed by 50 directors of university language centres asking the government to consider making a foreign language compulsory again for 14 to 16 year-olds. The previous decision had been a disaster and many language departments were drastically downsized. If a subject is not compulsory, then it is a matter of choice, and if it's simply a matter of choice, then it's no longer a priority. A later government introduced the magic word "entitlement", but by that time departments had shrunk, budgets had been re-allocated, and the damage had been done. Fast forward to 2013. Languages are still only compulsory at primary school, and in secondary schools, now the EBacc is on ice, language learning between 14 and 16 will only be optional.
In the latest proposals there is a curious lack of energy and vision. I would have expected a really strong opening statement which placed language learning in a clear framework with a stronger rationale inspired by both the academic benefits of language learning – it can change the way children think, and the whole range of practical benefits – employability, intercultural awareness and a flexible mindset.
The good points – regarding the importance of structure and grammar – are communicated in a grumpily disjointed way. This is a pity. The emphasis on traditionally taught languages – French, German, Italian and Spanish, and the inclusion of Mandarin – misses the opportunity of maximising the existing linguistic potential of children who speak languages not on the official list. There is no mention of Arabic, let alone England's "second language", Polish – and no idea of building on the languages of the emerging economies, such as Brazil, India or Russia, which could harness the capabilities of many of our own communities. What is missing is a clear vision of why languages are important, and why all children should keep on learning until they are 16. Independent schools and most academies realise this. There is no feeling of belonging to a European, let alone global community, and no real mention of the transferable skills gained through language learning.
University language centres are hugely successful in attracting English students who want to catch up on lost opportunities, particularly when faced with international students who already have at least two languages at their disposal. So many of the existing language skills of our children pass unnoticed, under-expoited and undervalued. The multilingual school playground is too often seen as a deficit model, where people tend to see the cost rather than the value of languages. It is sad the new curriculum does not harness this potential with energy, clarity and enthusiasm.
Nick Byrne is director of the LSE Language Centre Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.
*David Priestland: History*
One episode that does not make it on to Michael Gove's depressingly narrow history syllabus is the Chinese Hundred Days' Reform of 1898. The emperor, among other things, ordered changes to the old civil service examination system, with its rote learning of ancient Chinese texts; only foreign knowledge and an outward looking education, the reformers argued, could rescue China from decline. But the change was shortlived. The reactionary Empress Dowager Cixi, egged on by the old exam-crammed elite, staged a coup, and the old system was restored. Within 13 years the Chinese empire had collapsed.
In Gove, we have our own empress dowager. His new history syllabus is very full, encouraging teachers to stress facts and dates over real understanding. And the focus is resolutely insular, as we would expect from our nationalistic education secretary – a real departure from the current syllabus, which shows an interest in parts of the world beyond Britain and introduces children to critical thinking.
Students will have to slog their way through the history of our island nation from the stone age to Thatcher. Seven year-olds will be faced with the "Anglo-Saxon heptarchy" of the early middle ages and "key developments in the reigns of Alfred, Athelstan, Cnut and Edward the Confessor". At 14, they will finally consider "Britain's relations with Europe, the Commonwealth and the wider world" (for Britain is not, of course, part of Europe).
Other parts of the world will feature, but mainly as they relate to the British experience. Children will learn about the "Enlightenment in England" (for these purposes Adam Smith is not Scottish), but Voltaire and Rousseau are worthy of study only insofar as they had an "impact" on the British. China will appear, but mainly as the loser to 19th-century British "gunboat diplomacy and the growth of empire".
We are, therefore, firmly back in the land of the Edwardian bestseller, Our Island Story: A Child's History of England. Children will learn about "Clive of India", General Wolfe's "conquest of Canada", Nelson, Wellington and Pitt. The Tolpuddle martyrs and the welfare state make an appearance, and the Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole has won a stay of execution after Jesse Jackson's protests. But radical figures, like Tom Paine or Robert Owen, have disappeared from view.
Nobody would disagree that children should have a good knowledge of British history. But as future citizens of a multicultural society and open economy in a globalised world, they are being seriously short-changed by these politicised and philistine reforms.
As any historian will tell you, it is a sign of serious decadence when a society becomes obsessed with its past glories. Britain in 2013, like China in 1898, can ill afford to retreat into complacent national chauvinism. And Gove himself could do with a little refresher course on Chinese history: he'll find that a lesson on the empress dowager and the fate of imperial China is worth 10 lessons on Nelson and Wolfe.
David Priestland teaches history at Oxford University and is the author of Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power
*Margaret Reynolds: English*
The draft curriculum offers a good plan for spelling, grammar, sentence construction and form. All of this, developed from the earliest years, will be useful to students who come to study English at university. The problems start when we come to context, and then are worse when we get to content. There is a (nominal) provision for accent and dialect. But essentially most of the English language taught at primary school and beyond presumes norms of "received pronunciation" and the Queen's English. We should all know what that language is. But we should also know that it is in itself a dialect – just as subject to change and interpretation as any other. An unacknowledged ideology is dangerous and exclusive. And in the global economy of the 21st century, English – or one kind of the many "Englishes" that co-exist now – is the language of worldwide business. Recognising the variations within "Englishes" could help young people become more effective and powerful.
As to what children should be reading for Key stages 1, 2 , 3, and 4 in English, my answer is always the same: story, story, story. In the current draft there is one named author (Shakespeare). And there are example themes ("loss" and "heroism"). It looks transparent enough. But this choice of headings suggests that this curriculum is stuck in the 19th century. And a brief nod at Key stage 3 to "seminal world literature, written in English" is not enough.
At university level, my colleagues are, for the most part, happy with the way students spell and, for all the scaremongering in the press about apostrophes, are not distressed by their grammar and punctuation. What bothers us most is that students going on to higher education don't have enough background. They don't know the Greek myths. They are terrible on the folk tales of any land. They have not read the Bible or other sacred texts. Ask them about fairy stories, and the best they can produce is a Disney version. How can they begin to read Angela Carter or Carol Ann Duffy?
There is a current fashion for setting so-called "contemporary texts"– that is works published recently – because they are deemed more "relevant" to the lives of the young people taking the exam. I love the writings of Susan Hill and Sebastian Faulkes as much as the next woman. But even those luminaries – I hazard – would like their readers to have read Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse.
So let's be brave in our schools with language, and yes – solidly old-fashioned with literature.
Margaret Reynolds is professor of English at Queen Mary University of London
*Richard Wentworth: Art and design*
This curriculum is well-meant and "decent", as things used to be in the 1950s. It's written with "authority". There is a powerful mood in what is being set out: a polite and constricted sense of the material world and little emphasis on the gorgeousness of the immaterial world.
Becoming familiar, as a child is, with what the world is made of and what it means is an elaborate process. The parts of education we call "cultural" tell us how humans aspire and communicate; how they invent and what they invented in the past. It all pretty much originates in "desire", this space of enabling imagination. Watch the impulses of children – a stream of curiosity, risk, and invention; testing their world, discovering that some marks become "images" while others become letters and pictograms. It's all very complicated and there are people in Whitehall trained to know the science of it all.
Only 150 years ago most of us were illiterate, photography was an infant, drawing and painting were the grownups, and there was sculpture and architecture too. Write your own list – song, dance, oratory? Remember, there was no broadcasting. Make another list (get your children to help) of the forms that interconnect and characterise the way we live now.
A great art education is not a machine for producing artists, it should be a generous system of gardening to cultivate a diversity of achievement and a celebration of the climate the "plants" share. Staying alive involves collaboration and invention. There's no reason why there couldn't be a growing medium called problem solving – you'd get inventors, engineers, poets, philosophers, agronomists, and gardeners too. Designer (with a small d) is a term for anybody who can think through something and resolve it imaginatively. As a rule, artists like to make problems and see if they can solve them. There is no firewall between the pragmatic and the imaginative.
Education makes common ground. Great teaching should show you how to listen to the rain as much as it would introduce you to Mozart. A child who knows that the mug is a cousin of the brick is as much an archaeologist as a chemist as a novelist. Periods of really great education release these energies. They enable, they create confidence, they celebrate.
Richard Wentworth was professor of sculpture at the RCA, 2009-11
*Matt Parker: Maths*
Reading a new maths curriculum is a never an exciting experience; it's apredictable experience. Unlike the other core subjects, where English can change recommended texts and science has new discoveries and updated theories, the core of school mathematics always remains largely unchanged. It's not as if we can replace triangles with harder, more up to date shapes. Five year-olds are still to be taught how to count to 100 (both forwards and backwards) and teenagers to sketch linear and quadratic functions.
With the mantra of "strengthen the qualification" it's hard to see how the maths curriculum could be brought more back to its core. So instead the focus seems to be on the way this content is examined. Gove is still pushing for "comprehensive reforms", and this will involve removing the different ability exam papers pupils now choose between and minimising the use of "examination aids" like calculators. It's like trying to strengthen football by making Premiership and lower division teams all play in the same league and then minimising the wearing of shoes.
More important, teaching the curriculum is only half of a teacher's job – they have to excite and enthuse their students. Students not only need to learn the content but have the inclination and the confidence to use it. This draft itself states that "confidence in numeracy and other mathematical skills is a precondition of success" later in life. As if to provide an example, Gove slips in a lovely bit of selectively presented data: When 54% of people agree with his GCSE plans, they are the "majority of respondents" (page 14), but when 56% do not agree with what he wants to change this larger percentage becomes "a small majority" (page 7).
The new national curriculum wants to prepare young people for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences they will face as active members of society. Making them view mathematics as something they need to endure to pass a difficult exam will not achieve that. I am encouraged when this draft claims that teachers should have the time and space to range beyond the curriculum, but I get very nervous with all the talk of making exams more stretching, removing the incentive to teach anything non-exam focused.
We need more confident, enthusiastic mathematics teachers. We should not be making teachers use their time in class to scare students about a looming exam. Otherwise young people will endure that exam, looking forward to never using maths again. Maths which they will need to use again. For everything from organising finances and problem solving to deciphering the statistics in government papers on mathematics education reform.
Matt Parker is based at Queen Mary's maths department, University of London
*Yvonne Baker: Science*
Young people need to understand that the discipline is always under review, with endless opportunity for them to make a contribution. So will Gove's curriculum enable this? It depends. When viewed, as the consultation framework suggests, as a "core knowledge around which teachers can develop exciting and stimulating lessons", it will be used by good schools and teachers as a starting point, not the destination. We know from the many great teachers we work with through the Science Learning Centres that they will tailor teaching to their students, bringing facts and concepts to life through practical work, stretching the most able, and enabling those who are struggling to understand science in ways that are meaningful to them. They will make use of appropriate support, such as bringing today's scientists into the classroom alongside learning about the (largely) historical ones the document mentions. They will use contemporary as well as historical resources, such as from the National Stem Centre eLibrary, to show how scientific ideas develop and, in many cases, still have far to go.
The concern is those schools and teachers who, for whatever reason, are unable to do this. The danger is that those who are insecure or lack confidence in their own subject knowledge will simply "teach to the list" rather than using it as a springboard. Many primary teachers have not studied science in depth since they themselves left school. We therefore have much to do to ensure that they have appropriate support to teach confidently and correctly.
For KS3, the draft curriculum presented is less well developed and, despite the document stating the importance of the transition from primary to secondary, does not yet show clear progression from KS2. It is pleasing to see passing reference to the "big challenges" that science needs to address – such as food security – but these are scant. It is also interesting that the word "engineering" appears in the document only twice, and not at all in the section on science – as a chemical engineer, that seems to me rather remiss.
I was also somewhat surprised to see that the section on art and design begins by saying these subjects "embody the highest form of human creativity". Doesn't splitting the atom or mapping the human genome, or finding a cure for cancer embody a similarly high form of creativity, and shouldn't we be helping young people understand that?
Yvonne Baker is CEO of Myscience and a former CEO of Stemnet
*Chris Hamnett: Geography*
The American satirist Ambrose Bierce said: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." A bit unfair, but without systematic knowledge of geography, pupils live in a one-dimensional, world with no sense of place. China, Mali and Algeria are just names on the news. Without a knowledge of geography pupils will have only a rudimentary understanding, if that, of where places are, how the world varies physically, economically and socially, and the processes that generate these differences. It is therefore good news that the government intends that geography will retain its compulsory status between the ages of five and 14. What is worrying, however, is the proposed policy change to introduce a new main target measure based on eight subjects at GCSE, making it possible for pupils not to study either geography or history at GCSE.
The curriculum's vision for geography is to "inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people", and to equip them with "knowledge of diverse places, people, resources and environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth's key physical and human processes". This is a commendable overall statement.
The key issue is how this broad vision is fleshed out. The proposals have a number of good features. The first is improved locational knowledge – where countries, climatic zones and vegetation belts are. Second, there is a better balance between physical and human geography, bringing more environment back in. Third, it provides a sound understanding of the how and why of geography. In other words it will deal with the social, economic and environmental processes that help explain why environments, places and societies are different and how they are changing. As part of this it puts understanding of processes back into the context of countries, linking thematic processes and places together. Well taught, this can provide a much-needed and sound basis for later study, at GCSE and A-level, for some of the key geographical challenges that face our world.
But much of this will prove irrelevant if the government pushes ahead with its plans to water down the EBacc measure, effectively making geography (and history) optional at GCSE. We could easily see a generation of students who do not know anything about climate change, have no idea why deforestation is a problem or how and why the rise of the BRICS will challenge the west.
Chris Hamnet is professor of geography at King's College London
*Nick Byrne: Languages*
In 2006 the Observer published a letter signed by 50 directors of university language centres asking the government to consider making a foreign language compulsory again for 14 to 16 year-olds. The previous decision had been a disaster and many language departments were drastically downsized. If a subject is not compulsory, then it is a matter of choice, and if it's simply a matter of choice, then it's no longer a priority. A later government introduced the magic word "entitlement", but by that time departments had shrunk, budgets had been re-allocated, and the damage had been done. Fast forward to 2013. Languages are still only compulsory at primary school, and in secondary schools, now the EBacc is on ice, language learning between 14 and 16 will only be optional.
In the latest proposals there is a curious lack of energy and vision. I would have expected a really strong opening statement which placed language learning in a clear framework with a stronger rationale inspired by both the academic benefits of language learning – it can change the way children think, and the whole range of practical benefits – employability, intercultural awareness and a flexible mindset.
The good points – regarding the importance of structure and grammar – are communicated in a grumpily disjointed way. This is a pity. The emphasis on traditionally taught languages – French, German, Italian and Spanish, and the inclusion of Mandarin – misses the opportunity of maximising the existing linguistic potential of children who speak languages not on the official list. There is no mention of Arabic, let alone England's "second language", Polish – and no idea of building on the languages of the emerging economies, such as Brazil, India or Russia, which could harness the capabilities of many of our own communities. What is missing is a clear vision of why languages are important, and why all children should keep on learning until they are 16. Independent schools and most academies realise this. There is no feeling of belonging to a European, let alone global community, and no real mention of the transferable skills gained through language learning.
University language centres are hugely successful in attracting English students who want to catch up on lost opportunities, particularly when faced with international students who already have at least two languages at their disposal. So many of the existing language skills of our children pass unnoticed, under-expoited and undervalued. The multilingual school playground is too often seen as a deficit model, where people tend to see the cost rather than the value of languages. It is sad the new curriculum does not harness this potential with energy, clarity and enthusiasm.
Nick Byrne is director of the LSE Language Centre Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.