Newsom (1963)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Contents, Introduction, Principal recommendations

Part 1 Findings
Chapter 1 Education for all
Chapter 2 The pupils, the schools, the problems
Chapter 3 Education in the slums
Chapter 4 Objectives
Chapter 5 Finding approaches
Chapter 6 The school day, homework, extra-curricular activities
Chapter 7 Spiritual and moral development
Chapter 8 The school community
Chapter 9 Going out into the world
Chapter 10 Examinations and assessments
Chapter 11 Building for the future
Chapter 12 The teachers needed

Part 2 The teaching situation
Chapter 13 What should secondary imply?
Chapter 14 An education that makes sense
Chapter 15 Attainments and achievement
Chapter 16 The subjects and the curriculum
Chapter 17 The practical subjects
Chapter 18 Science and mathematics
Chapter 19 The humanities
Chapter 20 School organisation and staff deployment

Part 3 What the survey shows
Chapter 21 The 1961 survey
Chapter 22 The boys and girls
Chapter 23 The work they do
Chapter 24 The men and women who teach them
Chapter 25 The schools they go to

Acknowledgements

Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Sex education
Appendix III Deployment of teachers
Appendix IV Letter to Minister on teacher training
Appendix V Statistical detail

Index

A report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1963
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Chapter 16 The subjects and the curriculum
[pages 124 - 127]

349. What should be taught? We have already made clear the importance that we attach to literacy, numeracy and that part of religious upbringing which falls to the schools. Physical education, too, is something which all growing boys and girls need. The next three chapters are devoted to the various subjects of the curriculum as a whole. Each chapter deals with a broad field of knowledge in each of which boys and girls ought to be getting some experience all the time they are at school. If this report were about all the pupils in secondary schools instead of only half we should still hold that up to the age of sixteen nobody should go without some practical work, some experience in mathematics and science and some in the humanities. And it ought to be a sizeable share of each, not a concession to idealistic theory which sensible folk need not take too seriously. Up to this point we are rigorists. We would like to prescribe this for all pupils in all secondary schools as an obligation.

350. But beyond this point we become permissive. We would neither draw up a fixed table of information, subject by subject, which all pupils should master, nor even prescribe beyond the minimum essentials set out in the preceding paragraph a set list of subjects which all should study. A universal fixed curriculum ought to be ruled out if only because of the wide range both of capacity and of tastes among the pupils with whom we are concerned. At the bottom end of the scale it is a matter of finding a very few things in which the pupils show interest and can make progress and working outwards from them. Near the top of our terms of reference, half way up the whole scale of ability, it is a matter of selecting from a fairly large number of possibilities those that are likely to be most valuable to the individual pupils. The selection will vary from group to group. On the pupils' side, a prime consideration will often be relevance to what they are going to do when they leave school; on the schools' side, the selection is bound to be affected by the strengths and weaknesses of the staff. An historian turned reluctant geographer, or vice versa, is not likely to inspire pupils who take a great deal of rousing at the best of times. Both subjects can, as we shall see later, offer many of the same values. If the head decides that the cobbler had better stick to his last, we shall neither be surprised nor unduly distressed.

351. For our least able pupils, then, 'subjects' hardly come into the field of possibility; for the better ones there is often no compelling educational reason why one should be chosen rather than another. Why, then, should the customary division of the curriculum into certain traditional subjects be retained?

352. First, we have in mind the convenience of readers. We hope that teachers will feel that this part of the report is about the work they actually do in school, that it is really addressed to their teaching problems. They are more likely to do this if they can recognise familiar landmarks, even if some of them are stumbling blocks. It would have been possible, but a little forced, to have used new descriptive terms which avoided subject names. We might have written of verbal and plastic creative work. We have preferred to write 'English' and 'art'; and, we hope, to make it clear in the text that these are concerned with more than grammar and clay and have indeed something important in common.

353. We might have grouped our suggestions round certain methods of teaching instead of round the traditional subjects, and written chapters on projects or assignments. It is not because we think a wise choice of methods unimportant that we did not do this. It is because in our view this might have concealed one of the most important aspects of any discussion of the curriculum - the subject matter that is actually taught. The traditional subject divisions may sometimes seem artificial and restrictive, but at least they have the merit of a certain precision. A boy or a girl can at least come home and say what his lesson was. This has a value which ought not to be sacrificed. Some subjects necessarily stand apart in their own right. Learning a foreign language, for instance, is not really like anything else in the curriculum, and it is almost inevitable that the word French (or German or Spanish as the case may be) should appear on the timetable. Similarly what goes on in the laboratory is almost bound to be labelled 'science', and the gymnasium is naturally the scene of physical education. A good deal of the curriculum is, therefore, almost bound to carry subject names. It seems to us that there are advantages in carrying the practice right through it.

354. A subject name is not only a signpost to the pupil of what a lesson will be about, it also provides a similar reminder to the teacher. It marks out in intelligible shorthand the kind of contribution he is to make to the educational programme. It also links this contribution with his own adult field of knowledge. He speaks with more conviction in this field. When he is on his own ground his pupils should feel that this lesson is not just textbook stuff.

355. Many of the abler of the pupils we have in mind will be candidates for the new Certificate of Secondary Education. This necessarily involves the examination of subject matter which is at least roughly comparable from school to school. And this in turn involves the fixing of certain limits within which the teaching will take place. It seems almost inevitable that most of these comparable areas for examination will bear the conventional subject names however unconventional the methods of examining may be, and we hope will be. But, though the conventional subject names will remain, this does not mean that the syllabus of what is actually taught should be the poor relation of a grammar school course. The teacher needs to ask himself what his subject has actually meant to him, and then think what it can mean to our boys and girls. He must undertake a radical enquiry into his own education and then plan with a free mind the best thing for his pupils, remembering that virtually none of them will carry their education as far as he has, and that most of them will stop doing anything about his subject, whatever it is, as soon as they leave school. At fourteen or fifteen he was only a third of the way through his education; they are near the end of theirs. This involves a thorough reconsideration subject by subject of what should be taught. The three following chapters have some suggestions to make about this; the general policy behind the new Certificate of Secondary Education is designed to make such a review easy.

356. This new examination is to be a subject and not a group examination, that is to say it is to be an examination in which regulations will neither prescribe the minimum number of subjects candidates can offer nor insist on certain combinations of subjects. Each subject is a unit on its own. These then are counters out of which a whole curriculum is composed in different patterns for different pupils. (1) This conception seems to us important when we are considering the needs of the pupils we have in mind. Their school week can profitably be varied not only by turning from one subject to another, but by recognising in the timetable the different rhythm of work which is appropriate for different subjects. Hitherto their school day has been composed of a succession of thirty-five to forty minute periods varied by an occasional double period for a practical subject. By the age of fourteen, however, we think that boys and girls can well concentrate for longer than an hour and a half at a time when the nature of the work in hand makes this natural. This is often so in the practical subjects, for which longer continuous periods are often worthwhile at this age both in their own right and as a useful step towards acclimatisation to the longer and less varied working day of industry and commerce. But any such change should only apply to a proportion of the school week. The span of attention to classroom subjects which pupils of below average ability can manage is short. Some subjects, too, like learning a foreign language, require short but frequent lessons rather than a few long ones.

357. In Chapter 20 we shall be discussing two possible ways of providing different patterns of curriculum for different groups of pupils - the method of grouped courses, usually with a vocational bias, and the method of options between subjects. In both methods subjects play an important role as the basic unit out of which the whole programme of work is assembled. Some basic unit of known content there must be if chaos is to be avoided: the traditional subjects of the curriculum, enriched as necessary by newcomers, seem to be suitable for this purpose. They are good servants, but bad masters.

358. They are bad masters if they keep themselves to themselves. They ought to support one another, to approach similar situations from entirely different angles. If one approach gets no response from a boy or girl, another may suddenly make things clear. This is one reason why we have not given separate chapters to each subject, but grouped them together in three broad fields of experience. But the various subjects should not only support each other within the field of the humanities or of mathematics and science, but there should be a good deal of cross-reference between the fields. Thus the question of hire purchase is one that may be (and should be) considered both in the field of mathematics and of the humanities. The two teachers should be aware of each other's plans and see that their pupils realise the connection.

359. The subjects are bad masters also if they think of themselves as the sole arbiters of school time. There are some important things to learn which belong to a good many disciplines but which do not bulk large enough in any one to be quite sure of a place. Room must be found for them, and this will not happen unless a member of the staff is made responsible for seeing that this happens. High on any such list of topics would be health education, which may serve as an illustration. Its biological foundations belong to science, its practice and its proof lies to a great extent in the hands of the physical education department: its moral implications to the humanities; its references to home surroundings - a difficult point where smoking is concerned - belong to the head in his dealings with parents; and its setting in a school that is clean and whose equipment makes cleanliness easy belongs to the head in his relation with his governors and his administrative staff. This might be thought an exhaustive catalogue, but it includes as yet neither the school doctor nor the school nurse who speak with an authority on these matters that is often more acceptable to boys and girls than that of their teachers. Then, too, a school in which the housecraft department felt that it had no concern with health education would be sadly lacking in imagination. There is no doubt of the importance of this aspect of education to the boys and girls with whom we are concerned. No teacher would deny this. But each one of all those we have listed may well believe that somebody else is attending to it. And each has enough to do in his own department anyhow. What is everybody's business can easily be nobody's business.

Footnote

(1) The composition of the timetable in the schools in the sample is described in Chapter 22.