A single idea nourished for years inside one Oxford-educated mind dominated the workload of a quarter of a million teachers for two years.
In 2014, the national curriculum was updated by the conservative government, spearheaded by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. The primary reason was rigour: there had been, for many years, a sense that the GCSEs were simply too easy. To overcome this, according to Michael Gove, a complete reworking of the curriculum was necessary:
This new national curriculum represents a clear step forward for schools, ensuring that all children have the opportunity to acquire a core of essential knowledge in key subjects. It embodies rigour, high standards and will create coherence in what is taught in schools. It sets out expectations for children that match the curricula used in the world’s most successful school systems.
There were lots of good reasons for increasing the rigour of the old GCSEs, and now that we are living with the full results of Gove’s vision, we can see that there certainly are some students who have benefitted from the changes. Take a student who is particularly dedicated and hard-working, well supported at home, has been engaged throughout their education, and is performing in the top few percent. Such a student has been challenged in a way that previous generations, at the same stage in their school journey, too often weren’t. We are in the curious position now, in fact, that the challenge facing these students as they attempt to pile up as many Grade 9s as they can at GCSE is a greater one than that they will face two years later when they will attempt to collect A*s at A-level.
These small gains have come at the most incredible and ridiculous cost.
When you grow up successful in our school system, good at exams, confident at expressing yourself, it is too easy to mistake your cleverness for a deeper wisdom. It is too easy to assume that your assessment of a situation–in this case the state of UK education–really pinpoints the most critical issue and thus the most beneficial thing to change.
Michael Gove took the perspective of a teenager, one much like he was, wanting more knowledge and challenge at a young age. It seemed simple that teachers could just give this to him: why not ensure he can study eighteen poems in depth? why not make him learn quotes from great literature? why not make him learn to recite twenty physics equations? why not test his mental arithmetic?….
It didn’t seem relevant to Michael Gove that he himself had such little experience of working in the most challenging schools, of working with children with special needs and those suffering from anxiety and depression. He hasn’t attempted to engage children who are less mature than their peers, who seek only immediately pleasures and as yet find it difficult to delay gratification, or whom have no vision of where education can take them. He hasn’t taught a child in the care of social services having been thrown out of home, a child who is learning to cope with the death of a parent or a child who has never known parental love. He hasn’t worked with children who do not and cannot and will not ever really get to grips with the mad and weird idea of gravitational potential energy. It’s even too much to spell it. And why should they ever be able to calculate the gravitational potential energy of a tennis ball weighing 100g when its 10 metres in the air? This is not “essential knowledge” for life.
Michael Gove couldn’t see the whole system, the reality of what human beings are like. A few children will lap up extra rigour, many will simply be blind to it, a significant number will struggle and be weighed down by the heavy blanket of rigour. And behind all of this, teachers have worked tirelessly to create thousands of new lessons to meet new curricula. Across the country, the heavy blanket of rigour.