It’s said to be a dynamic curriculum.
“Its purpose in any society is to meet the needs of the community by equipping its children and young people with the necessary skills and knowledge to be valuable contributors,” said the President of ESC, Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen.
“As part of the curriculum’s evolution, considerable work to flesh out the essential knowledge that learners should acquire to help them develop the skills described in the Bailiwick Curriculum has taken place.”
The curriculum ‘or the way it is being interpreted in schools’ has come under scrutiny by Deputy Gavin St Pier, who used several Ofsted comments as a jumping off point for a number of probing questions.
Pictured: Deputy St Pier has asked questions about the island’s curriculum.
Deputy St Pier pulled out several extracts from recent Ofsted reports into the island’s schools, many of which refer to issues with teachers implementing the curriculum and students missing key knowledge as a result.
He asked if the curriculum needs to be revisited, and suggested if the Committee doesn’t think it should “how does the Committee explain the consistent findings of inadequacy in relation to the local curriculum?”
Deputy Dudley-Owen began her response with criticism of the term ‘inadequate’:
“No, the Committee does not agree with either premise and notes with a degree of disappointment that the above extracts from Ofsted’s inspection reports for our schools have been taken out of context…
“It is important that each short report is considered in the round rather than being selective in the information used to interpret Ofsted’s findings, and the Committee welcomes the opportunity to provide detailed information to explain the inspection framework for our States maintained settings.
“Ofsted uses a four-point scale for all evaluations: grade 1: excellent (in England this grade is ‘outstanding’); grade 2: good; grade 3: requires improvement; and grade 4: inadequate. Due to this it is inaccurate and unhelpful to state that there have been “consistent findings of inadequacy in relation to the local curriculum” following Ofsted inspections, because ‘inadequacy’ has a very specific meaning in this context.
“The reports referred to above show that the ‘Quality of Education’ (which arises from the curriculum delivered) in the majority of our schools/settings that have been inspected, has been objectively judged by Ofsted as ‘good’.”
Deputy St Pier asks several further questions of ESC and there is a more comprehensive answer to the query about curriculum ONLINE.
In response to ESC’s answers, Deputy St Pier said:
“These are a very comprehensive set of responses that will need some time to properly digest. I will though be interested in feedback from those in the teaching frontline.
“However, I’m a little surprised, for example, that there is has been no mention of the need to buy-in curricula to fill in some of the gaps, but these are matters which can be explored further in due course, if necessary.”