Who Overstuffed The Primary Curriculum? 

(And What We Can Do To Slim It Down)

Aidan Severs

Aidan Severs explores how teachers can slim down an overstuffed primary curriculum by revisiting its original intentions and reclaiming professional judgement.

When Becky Francis shared emerging themes from the government’s curriculum review, it was reported that ‘Teachers feel “disempowered and deprofessionalised by overstipulation and the challenge to cover content” in the curriculum’ (https://schoolsweek.co.uk/becky-francis-reveals-emerging-themes-from-curriculum-review/). She also shared that “frequent complaints” include that the curriculum is “overprescribed and overstuffed”.

It’s a complaint we’ve heard for years and teachers have now finally been given their chance to have a say. However, it could be some time until the consultation actually translates into any real change. If we want to get the curriculum right for the children who we’re currently teaching, we might need to make our own changes now.

So who overprescribed and overstuffed the primary national curriculum? Was it its creators? Or was it someone else? And is there anything we can do about it?

When the national curriculum was introduced in 2014, a sentence caught my eye. It said, ‘There is time and space in the school day and in each week, term and year to range beyond the national curriculum specifications.’ (p6)

Newly charged with the responsibility of rolling out a new school curriculum that covered the national curriculum, I continued to read the 200 pages of the primary curriculum. My immediate thought was ‘How? How will there be any extra time once we’ve taught all this?’

When you break it down into pages of statutory content to be covered, it looks like this:

• English: approx 38 pages
• Maths: approx 22 pages
• Science: approx 11 pages
• Design & Technology: 2.5 pages
• Geography: 2 pages
• History: >2 pages
• PE: >2 pages
• Computing: 1 page
• Language: 1 page
• Music: >1 page
• Art & Design: >1 page

The national curriculum also states the requirement to teach PSHE and RE, although content is not given for these.

The above is of course a very rough way to determine how much content is stipulated, but it serves a purpose. By looking at the number of pages of statutory content, we can easily begin to see where the problem of an overstuffed curriculum lies.

The core subjects, English, Maths and Science, make up the bulk of the document, with English statutory content almost doubling that of maths, and quadrupling that of science. English and maths might just be overloaded by the curriculum’s creators, and we really could do with a national change there, but what about the other subjects?

At a recent event Becky Francis said that ‘when looking at the national curriculum, some specifications did not seem overloaded. Others, by contrast, were “under-prescribed”, leading to content overload in the classroom as teachers try to fill in the gaps, she suggested’ (https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/curriculum-panel-ask-why-teachers-face-content-overload). Now, this is a brave thing to say, but I happen to agree.

Typically we spend around 45% of the school timetable teaching maths and English (based on a day of 5.5 hours, with lessons of 1 hour for maths, 1 hour for writing and 30 minutes for reading per day). About 73% of the statutory content outlined in the national curriculum document is maths and English content. We then spend about 55% of the time teaching the remaining 27% of the content. If we were to change the timetable to reflect the curriculum content, we’d be teaching around 4 hours of maths and English a day. But we don’t do this because, as the national curriculum exhorts us, we want to ‘offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based’. We also hope that we can get through all that content, and do a pretty good job of doing so on the whole.

But on the flip side, our foundation subject curricula have been bloated to match the amount of time we give over to those subjects. In fact, in many schools they’ve been inflated beyond what can be properly covered in that time too. But it’s not just schools who have opted to write their own curriculum, its publishers and organisations who have written and published curricula too. In my current role as a consultant, I’m seeing that we’ve got past the stage of schools writing or co-opting a curriculum, and leaders are now trying to trim it down to make it manageable.

Let’s take KS2 history as an example of where and how this inflation happens.

The national curriculum says that ‘pupils should be taught about changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age’.

Immediately, and I’ve been guilty of this too, curriculum writers think: this has to be a whole unit that lasts 6-8 weeks, with at least 1 hour of content for each week. You see, not only are we slaves to the timetable, we’re also controlled by the calendar.

So, does that objective really need to become a whole unit which takes up hours of time?

There’s a little sentence that helps us here: ‘teachers should combine overview and depth studies to help pupils understand both the long arc of development and the complexity of specific aspects of the content’ (p190)

So, we are expected to teach overviews in order to teach the general changes over long periods of time. With regards to the objective in question, that could be taught in one lesson. By identifying and categorising key characteristics of each of the stone, bronze and iron ages, children could very quickly be taught how things changed, for example:

However, depth studies are also required. A further lesson or two could be given over to this, perhaps in this example, examining in greater detail one of the ages, or one of the strands where change can be seen over time. However, there is no specific requirement to do a depth study for each period in history, so as long as you have ensured that over the course of a child’s primary career they have completed a number of depth studies, you might choose not to complete one in each unit.

It could be argued that this approach doesn’t allow pupils to ‘gain a coherent knowledge’, however, stripped of all the flab of a bloated curriculum, I’d argue that coherency is more attainable. When a curriculum goes into too much depth, it can be difficult for novices in that subject to understand key points, instead they get too bogged down in the details.

Now whilst maths and English might be hard to prune back right now, I believe that we can take a step back to reassess how we plan for and teach the other subjects. Of course we should still teach them, keeping the curriculum broad, and giving time over to them – teachers love teaching these subjects, and children love learning them. But, we can trim the excess ourselves.

The key approach to this is doing what I did in the example above, and going back to look at the wording of the national curriculum, particularly the wording that surrounds the objectives. As Mary Myatt so succinctly put it: ‘it’s important to pause and consider the bigger picture from the purpose statements for each of the subjects’ (https://marymyatt.substack.com/p/content-overload).

If we return to the language of the purpose and aims, and read that through a ‘lens of less’, there are many ways in which we can take the load off ourselves.