A three thirds curriculum - a vision for education in England

Contents

1. A conversation starter

2. A three thirds curriculum - national, local ad hyper-local

   1. Third 1: A National Curriculum

   2. Third 2: A Local Curriculum
   3. Third 3: A Hyper-local Curriculum

3. Pedagogy, assessment and accountability in a three-thirds education system

4. Conclusion - keep it light
   1. An invitation

5. References

A conversation starter

Despite the education system being so clearly unfit for purpose, the environmental sector continues – in the main – to only make humble calls for schools to be incrementally ‘greened’ and tends to focus more on the fabric of the buildings and grounds than on the teaching and learning that goes on in and around them. Doing this may win us some minor reforms, but these will not be enough; ‘winning slowly is the same as losing’ as Bill McKibben famously observed.² We need to be bold. The education system is on the cusp of change,³ that change needs to be a transformation. The new era of education needs to meet the critical nature of the moment we are living through and prepare the ground for a better future. An education system revolution is needed.

In essence, what we are calling for is a resurgence and deepening of democracy. Presented here is a provocation. It is a brief sketch - a vision - of a lightly instrumentalised and greatly decentralised education system. We present it as an antidote to today’s increasingly centralised and instrumentalised situation,⁴ and as one possible alternative future that lies beyond today’s education system inflection point.

Our vision is of an education system that is vastly more democratic. It will afford far greater levels of autonomy to teachers, learners, and the communities they are embedded in, while still having a National curriculum, albeit a less suffocating and centrally controlled one.

This vision is Global Action Plan’s; it is tentative – a conversation starter and an example of the sort of ‘first mate’⁵ effort we argue environmentalists need to pursue to help shift the Overton window on education. Our vision has been developed following extensive desk research and a series of in-depth conversations with teachers, students, academics, parents, and colleagues in the UK sustainability education sector.* In sketching this vision, our aim is to propose an education system that differs significantly from what exists currently in England. However, what we are proposing is still – we hope – realistic and appealing across the political spectrum.

* This work was made possible by JJ Charitable Trust who funded GAP’s ‘Reorientating the English Education System’ project in 2022/23.

A three thirds curriculum – national, local, and hyper-local

History shows us that in education, slow revolutions stand a far better chance of success than those that are rushed or enforced.⁶ We therefore do not expect the vision proposed here to become a reality overnight. Its realisation will and should take time as new era of education emerges. The question of how to start and run that revolution will be explored at a later date, we have our own thoughts on tactics and theories of change, but we intend to collaborate towards an answer with those organisations and people who want the education system to go on a journey of change that looks something like this:

Global Action Plan’s vision of a new education system for England deviates significantly from what currently exists; it is more locally and personally controlled and only lightly instrumentalised. We have a vision of an education system that splits responsibility for what is taught in schools more equally, so that (i) the State, (ii) the local community, and (iii) teachers and learners all have a meaningful say over what is taught in schools.

Under this new arrangement, a third of what is taught in our schools would be generated at a national level, the local community would decide a further third, with the remaining third decided by teachers and learners, with learners having greater decision-making power as they age.

There would therefore be a National Curriculum, a Local Curriculum, and a Hyper-local Curriculum. Schools would devote an equal amount of time to the teaching of all three. All three curricula would be created through democratic processes.

Third 1: A National Curriculum

To design the National Curriculum, we propose the use of a national Citizen’s Assembly held once every ten years. This Citizen’s Assembly would bring together a nationally representative sample of England’s citizens, selected via sortition, who deliberate over a period of at least six months. The assembly would be given the responsibility for recommending to Government what children are taught for a third of school life. They would be asked to choose topics and skills that they feel are essential – things that shouldn’t be left to chance. The national government would use these recommendations to formulate and legally enshrine the National Curriculum. A qualification like the proposed ‘Advanced British Standard’ might emerge from this.⁷

Third 2: A Local Curriculum

At a local level, we propose the use of similar processes of deliberative democracy that involves parents and guardians, children and young people, businesspeople, politicians and other public servants, third sector employees, academics, and educators from within the boundaries of, for example, a local authority who would be selected by sortition and make recommendations on a Local Curriculum in that would be ratified and enshrined in law by the Local Authority. A Citizen’s Assembly on the Local Curriculum would take the National Curriculum into consideration, but ask ‘what’s missing?’ It might also ask questions like: ‘What should young people living here know about their local area?’ ‘What knowhow do young people who live here need?’ And ‘what should young people living here know about the wider world?’ Again, it would take place once a decade, and commence once the national Citizen’s Assembly has concluded.

Third 3: A Hyper-local Curriculum

At a Hyper-local level, teachers and learners would be given the freedom and statutory responsibility by the national government to decide what is taught and learned for the remaining third of a young person’s time at school. This creates an opportunity for teachers to teach things they are highly knowledgeable and/or skilled at. It also gives young people the opportunity to let their natural curiosity guide their learning, enabling them to dive deep into topics that interest them as individuals, or as a group. With the close support of their teachers, they will also have a big say in how they learn, for example through projects and inquiries, but equally by reading books and articles, watching and listening to documentaries and films, playing games, volunteering, shadowing professionals, or by travelling and exploring. The personal curriculum would create much needed space for self-directed learning,* and help students to develop as independent learners, and agentic world-makers.^†

* For an insight into school’s that facilitate self-directed learning see: Abrams, A. (2018) When School Is Based on What Kids Want to Learn, Yes!

† See ‘Preparing for uncertainty?’ in this collection.

Pedagogy, assessment and accountability in a three-thirds education system

In this new education system, a school might split each day in three, National Curriculum in the morning session, Local in the two hours before lunch, with the afternoon given over to each child’s personal – Hyper-local – Curriculum. Equally, a school might want to split the curricula over a week, or month, so that entire days or weeks are given over to National, Local and Hyper-local learning. Alternatively, schools may choose to mix delivery by blending National and Local together. Not all learning would need to happen in a classroom, or even at school, students could study at home, in the community, or in the wider world. Which brings us onto pedagogy.

The how of teaching would be decided by teachers across all three thirds, they would be well trained, have full pedagogic autonomy, and given adequate time to prepare.*

* Time to prepare is critical. In surveys, teachers consistently cite ‘lack of time’ as one of the main reasons they are unable to develop new resources, or cover a wider range of topics at school. Ensuring all teachers are well trained, and have adequate time to prepare would also guard against the exacerbation of existing inequalities in education.

They would not be under pressure to follow any specific education philosophy, or set of resources. Assessment would be designed and conducted by teachers for the Local and Hyper-local thirds, with the State responsible for the National third. The current model that, by design, creates winners and losers, would be abandoned in favour of an assessment system that allows all young people to ‘win’ at National, Local and Hyper-local levels.

In lieu of an OFSTED type body, schools would be accountable to each other at, for example, local authority level, the emphasis would be on collaboration, rather than competition, and the local authority as a whole would be reviewed periodically by the State, which would also facilitate collaboration between local authorities.  

Conclusion

This is about power. Specifically, it is about where power resides in the education system and the benefits of redistributing it. Power has become disastrously centralised over the last four decades. Those who seek to control and instrumentalise education have sought to impose their view of what education should be. We can either accept the power structures that currently exist and seek to become, or influence, those who hold positions of power. Or, we can seek to undo and remake these power structures so that they secure the freedoms that we need teachers and learners to have. The education system is on the cusp of change, this is the time to think and act big.

An invitation

Global Action Plan invites you to join us in a First Mate Environmentalism effort to take us from a time between education worlds, to a new era for education in England. We are on the cusp of change, we need to soften up the existing system, amplify the calls and proposals of our allies, shift the Overton Window, and leverage the climate and ecological crisis. We need to be active in shaping and making calls for an education system revolution in England.

We do not wish to achieve what’s possible within the current power structures because what’s needed is not possible within those structures. We want to change the power structures, so that the changes that are needed become possible and something akin to the vision laid out above becomes real.

• If you want to be a First Mate Environmentalist, we want to meet you.

• If you believe that greater autonomy for teachers and learners is a goal worth striving for, for its own sake, we want to meet you.

• If you believe that greater autonomy for teachers and learners will lead to more and better environmental and sustainability education and action, we want to meet you.

• If you believe that school curricula should be more democratically designed and delivered, we want to meet you.

• If you believe that we are on the cusp of a new era, we want to meet you.

• If you like our vision of a ‘three thirds curriculum’, we want to meet you.

Please join us. 

If you'd like to talk to us more about the opportunities for change in the education system, please get in touch: [email protected]

References

1. Bowles, S., and Gintis, H. (1976) School in Capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Basic Books, New York, USA. [Cited by Coffield, F. and Williamson, B. (2011) From Exam Factories to Communities of Discovery, IoE, University of London, UK.]

2. McKibben, B. (2017) Winning slowly is the same as losing, Rolling Stone

3. Global Action Plan (2024) On the cusp of change

4. Global Action Plan (2024) Power, Purpose, and Preparation in the English education system

5. Global Action Plan (2024) First Mate Environmentalism

6. Cuban, L. (1993) How teachers taught: Constancy and change in American classrooms, 1880-1990 (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press

7. Department for Education (2023) The Advanced British Standard: Everything you need to know, The Education Hub