Advisor hits out at lesson changes

Planned changes to what primary school children are taught in English, maths and science are too detailed and do not take into account the needs of pupils, according to Prof Andrew Pollard.

He was a member of the expert panel appointed by Mr Gove last year to advise on the review.

Writing on an Institute of Education blog, Prof Pollard said the new curriculum is “constraining” and leaves little room for teachers to exercise their professional judgment. His comments come the day after the Department for Education unveiled new draft curricula for English, maths and science in primary schools. The changes focus on a back-to-basics curriculum, with pupils expected to memorise their times tables up to 12 by age nine, multiply and divide fractions by age 11 and begin to recite poetry at five.

The expert panel published its recommendations in December, and Prof Pollard was not involved in working on the programmes of study published yesterday. In his blogpost, Prof Pollard said Mr Gove’s instructions to the chairman of the expert panel, Tim Oates, were to “trawl the curricula of the world’s highest-performing countries, to collect core knowledge and put it in the right order”.

He said: “I would not deny that subject knowledge is important nor demur from sustained efforts to consider how it should be most appropriately represented in a programme of study.

“And of course, the idea sounds wonderful – yes, let’s sort out, once and for all, when spelling of particular words will be mastered, and the use of apostrophes, and the subjunctive, and so on. So this approach is likely to be very attractive to the public. But the approach is fatally flawed without parallel consideration of the needs of learners.”