Of the 200 pages of the Primary National Curriculum document, 67 are occupied by English and 43 by maths. Compared with the two pages on music and the three for PE and foreign languages, you can soon start to see where the Department for Education’s (DfE) priorities lie.
However, the detail surrounding the English and maths programmes of study is content rather than method-based. Schools still have lots of decisions to make about delivery and the days of government prescribing the format of lessons, which we saw with the literacy and numeracy strategies, are long gone.
The relief that schools can largely choose their own methods should not detract from the fact that children will have to learn more and earlier. A move that not everyone feels comfortable with. For those trained in the theory of “readiness” for some concepts, earlier introduction does not necessarily mean higher standards in the long term.
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