Mastery Curriculum and the Impact of Government Assessment
One school assembly that is always guaranteed to interest primary school pupils is ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes; ‘ handed down through history to serve as a lesson in individuality and how the general population follows the consensus required of trend.
Education has always been rife with paradox; the fashion of the day absolutely guaranteed to be ridiculed to oblivion at some time in the future. Many ancient colleagues (me included) agree that education flows in ten to twenty year cycles, the breakthrough of today, being the scourge of tomorrow. We need to learn more from the graveyard of educational rejects that are frequently regurgitated.
Our recent curricular change looks at the proposition of Mastery; noble in its aspiration to create expectation where clearly there wasn’t enough previously (what an awful lot we are!). Our Asian counterparts perform so much better than ourselves and therefore if we do what they do, all will be well!
Although nobody with a modicum of sanity would ever reject the notion of expecting the best for children in our care, a fundamental shift i.e. raising the bar does not mean that all children will rejoice and follow the Pied Piper. Mastery represents the embodiment of expectation; pupils need a broad curriculum and experience to truly understand what a subject has to offer. I believe it is right that children are not narrowly stretched (as with levels) and over time the educational elephant will advance, but not straight away.
As we wait in anticipation for the DFE to actually define what it means by the actual standard, (delayed…….because they can) I can’t help but think of the future impact of media headlines when the inevitable happens and the standard drops in the summer. Will there be a sudden rush on Forced Academies? (Bordering on being an unfashionable cure just before Christmas) Have they even thought about it yet? Is it a different department that predicts the future impact and media reaction? We shall wait with baited breath.
It does seem odd however that a philosophy that encourages us to:
- assess alongside and with the involvement our children
- adapt to see the global learner.
- be potentially different in every school to respond to need
- encourages us to take account of the different ways pupils display learning
All of a sudden this will stop in its tracks when a child reaches the summer term of year 6. Then what do we do? Give them an isolated out of context test (and they keep adding them) that will label them ‘met/not met national expectation’ with an index linked outcome between 80 and 120….. We will undoubtedly be rebuked should our statistics not match that of the expected standard and its associated outcomes, yet we all know we are measuring a different thing entirely!
By the end of each year our pupils will have a broad experience in each year group of what our country expects. This will have the proposed impact of deeper learning, just like in the schools of our Asian colleagues (If you ignore context of schools and indeed countries it makes sense!)
As always in education a great idea comes along and somewhere inside the political sausage machine it gets warped. It becomes The Emperor’s New Clothes, in this case a lot hinges on the Government’s defined standards. With any luck the Royal Courtiers will pre-empt the outburst from the small boy and display some common sense. We could feasibly avoid the Emperor’s embarrassment before the noble concept of Mastery falls at its first hurdle. As a nation we always want someone or something to blame, you can put your last penny on the fact that, if Mastery is deemed not to be working the Government media machine will shove the hot potato nicely in our direction.