What areas of the new primary core curriculum are schools most prepared for and where do they feel least confident? Elizabeth Pope looks at the findings from NFER’s latest Teacher Voice survey.

The new national curriculum is upon us. With the majority of frameworks to be rolled out in September 2014, abundant media coverage has seen commentators both criticise and congratulate Michael Gove’s curricular revisions. However, regardless of the controversy surrounding it, the new curriculum is here to stay – and beyond the rhetoric are the teachers and support staff who will be responsible for implementing it.

Since 2008, NFER has conducted regular Teacher Voice surveys about key educational issues (see panel below). Administered to a panel of 5,000 teachers, these surveys provide insight into practitioners’ own perspectives.

In light of the curriculum overhaul, questions in our most recent survey (November 2013) asked how teachers are feeling about introducing the new content into the classroom. We received responses from 750 primary teachers to two sets of questions. The first asked teachers how prepared they personally feel to teach the new national primary curriculum for reading, writing, mathematics and science. The second expanded on the new writing curriculum, asking teachers how difficult they think it will be to assess grammar, punctuation, spelling and writing within the new guidelines.

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