Round of 16 – Match 92: Mexico vs England, kick-off 1am – Mexico City, Mexico.
It’s been all over the radio talk show I listen to on my drive to and from work. On the one hand, it’s a cultural event and many football-driven families want to celebrate the event together, to ‘make memories’. On the other hand, a 1am kick-off, + a 90min match, half time, stoppages and post match celebrations is likely to mean the children won’t actually go to bed after the match.
England manager Thomas Tuchel thinks the event is a ‘rarity’ worth staying up for and that the team needs all the support it can get.
Education secretary Bridget Philipson thinks children could still watch it, despite it being late.
Councils think parents should be fined for missed school days, but it’s unclear how this could be enforced during ‘cultural events’ such as this.
Missed school days cause issues for a reason that hasn’t really been mentioned so far. School curriculum are often so fragile that missed days can cause harm to progress and attainment. For example, a curriculum will cover one particular topic, but the assessment will be on a different unrelated topic. Romeo and Juliet might be the focus of the unit, but the assessment will be on creative writing – these are two different bodies of knowledge that are not assessed in the same way, and such divergence from the main unit of study to a separate unrelated assessment is common. Teachers are directed to spend one or two ‘preparation lessons’ to get students ready for an assessment they haven’t been studying for. Inevitably, there have been student absence on these crucial preparatory lessons who arrive the day of the assessment completely unprepared.
A curriculum can also be designed around non-repeating objectives and each unit is seen as a separate, unrelated body of knowledge. For example, a text like Lord Of The Flies makes a natural foundation to stand the principles of ‘theory of mind’. We see Jack, Piggy and Ralph as different representations of the human psyche. This might be delivered in a single lesson and then effectively never revisited, despite its relevance to all texts. It should become part of the studies for Macbeth, Jane Eyre, and An Inspector Calls, but those earlier learning objectives often fail to make it into the curriculum for other texts. A curriculum like this makes every single lesson important, and also risks creating a huge body of knowledge that can never be full learned because of its sheer volume.
When curriculum doesn’t build a clear and limited set of learning objectives which are sequenced for repetition, or when curriculum places very high stakes on individual lessons, the curriculum can be described as fragile and lacking resilience. Every lessons counts because those lessons are not well sequenced, or every lessons counts because the student has no idea which lesson might be pivotal.
This is deeply unfair on students and families that want to take some time off for cultural events but it’s also a systemic problem in the workplace too.
My first job was building turbos for trucks, right on the production line, pressing bearings, C-retainers, seals and turbines into casings. There were always a small number of people around each station on the assembly line so that should one person be off sick (or off for watching a football match), extra hands will be able to take up the slack. Production lines that don’t have this built in extra capacity suffer from small and unexpected shortfalls. A curriculum needs to have this same mindset – of resilience to absence – so that students and families can afford to prioritise other values.
The truth is, missing a day can cause serious harm to progress and attainment, but it shouldn’t do. When individual lessons have such high stakes placed upon them, or learning objectives are not sequenced for repetition, we set up students for failure.
This is one of the benefits of the curriculum in disciplineofenglish.co.uk. It is driven by defining a range of learning objectives and sequencing them to be studied for each module of work (different literature modules for instance). By having them available online, the accessibility of the course is maximized. The aim should not be to force families to choose between school learning and cultural capital, but to allow them to benefit from both.
What should a stable and resilient curriculum look like?
- A curriculum of learning objectives, defined in advance
- A syllabus in which the curriculum is repeated, spaced and tested
- Assessments connected explicitly to the learning curriculum
- Assessments must be used to check off curriculum objectives, not assessment objectives
- Accessible curriculum that does not require in-person attendance
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