Just teach the thing that we tell you

Posted on 30/09/2025

Teachers are increasingly being required to use ‘standardised curricula’. Patrick Yarker considers a recent National Education Union report into a trend which is corroding professionalism.

A teacher quite literally changes your mind. That’s what learning is. So the nature of what a teacher teaches will always be of concern to those in authority unprepared to trust teachers. Central government has looked to confirm its sway over what is taught in England’s state schools by, for example, establishing a National Curriculum geared to a system of high-stakes public testing, and a coercively inclined school inspectorate.

Of late, ministers have looked to shape what is taught by insisting on the importance of ‘core knowledge’ in a ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’. Edu-business has rubbed its hands at the chance to intensify the commodification of teaching-and-learning. Read Write Inc! Jolly Phonics! Power Maths! Kapow! Where the architecture of over-testing frames educational space, commercial curriculum packages will proliferate. Multi-academy trusts (MATs) cook up their own oven-ready creations: pre-set sequenced lesson plans, ready-made teaching materials, activities, quizzes and PowerPoint slides for use in-house or sometimes for sale. The Oak National Academy (whose genesis and development was traced in FORUM 66.1) does likewise.[1] These off-the-peg but good-to-go plug-and-play bundles have been dubbed ‘standardised curricula’.

Their use in classrooms is growing. In March, the National Education Union (NEU) published an investigative report which weighed up the consequences. Entitled: ‘“Are you on slide 8 yet?”: The impact of standardised curricula on teacher professionalism’, it was produced by a quartet of academic educationalists, including Professor Howard Stevenson who sits on FORUM’s Editorial Board.[2] Over 1600 NEU members were surveyed for the investigation, and some 40 interviewed. A central finding was that:

In the areas of teacher decision-making and exercising professional judgement both primary and secondary teachers [who use standardised curricula] reported reduced autonomy … particularly in relation to control over ‘course content’ and ‘content of individual lessons’. (p2)

This finding is no surprise. Standardised curricula constrain particularly tightly the teacher’s scope for activity, and so reconstruct what it means to teach. They are designed to prevent the exercise of informed judgement in planning lessons, and the performance of pedagogic expertise in teaching them. By repositioning the teacher further from aspects of the role which accord with being an agent of change, and nearer those aligned with being a functionary, they deprofessionalise.

Teachers are agents of change by dint of the consequences of their work in the lives of individuals and hence of society. But standardised curricula necessarily exclude from teaching a dimension the teacher could otherwise make available and which might be thought essential. Namely, a stance towards knowledge and the life of the mind which is inherent with the possibility of critique. A stance that can take a proper distance –questioning, even sceptical – from that content presented as knowledge, and serve as a reminder of the provisionality of knowledge.

It might be hoped teachers could customise standardised curricula, shaping content or form (or both) to their own principled pedagogic ends by selecting, augmenting, rearranging and adapting elements, the better to enable a class to learn. But teachers speak in the NEU report of being denied this scope and required instead to follow exactly the predetermined specifications. To deviate or improvise meets with managerial disapproval, if not prohibition. Standardisation, not individuation, is the watchword. So, expert professional judgement which would extend the understanding, insight and competence of students is dismissed:

We had a walk around while I was teaching, and it’s like, ‘Oh you have to use two adjectives to describe every single noun that you write’ (…) this is what the examiner is after. I’m like, adjectives are like (…) herbs and spices in cooking, you can’t just use all of it all the time, because otherwise it’s overwhelming and you won’t want to eat it. The kids are coming along with it and they’re getting it, and then I got called up for it in a meeting later. It was like, ‘You just teach the thing that we tell you … especially if we’ve got someone from the trust watching’. (p47)

I’ve had recent observations and they come in and go, ‘But you didn’t use the standard, like, five questions’. I go, ‘No, because I was talking to the students’. They’re like, ‘Everybody has to do the same five questions’. (p45)

I took some of the slides out of the PowerPoint, modified them, simplified the language … and I was subjected to a lesson observation where I was absolutely panned for modifying the vocabulary for the needs of the students. (p45)

Decades ago, the curriculum expert Lawrence Stenhouse asserted that there could be no successful curriculum development without teacher development. He wanted to foster a more self-reflective, informed and critical community of practice by enabling teachers not only to think about what happens in their own classrooms but to research it. Today we are seeing the inverse of what Stenhouse hoped for. Standardised curricula are a curriculum development, but a regressive one. They are marked by overly detailed and delimited specification of content, unchangeable sequencing, and repetitive forms of procedure in thrall to rehearsal and recall. They impose a corresponding regression in teaching. One that teachers themselves resist.

Especially in their commercial form, standardised curricula boast they are ‘evidence-based’ or ‘evidence-informed’. They present educational research in entirely the wrong way: as authority to be accepted rather than matter to be questioned. Teachers find themselves overborne by what they are told is ‘the research’, a designation wielded as a guarantee of ‘what works’. Research is misused to trap teachers into compliance, and to confirm the deep falsehood that they have nothing useful to offer the process of curriculum construction.

The NEU report finds wanting the claim often made (not least by proponents of Oak National Academy) that standardised curricula reduce workload. The report illustrates through teachers’ own words the extent and nature of the deprofessionalisation that attends the normalisation of standardised curricula in schools, and the unhappiness and frustration that follow. An inevitable further consequence is the deterioration in quality of the education pupils and students experience. The report questions the view that such curricula better ensure ‘consistency’ for pupils and students, a claim made for the original National Curriculum two generations ago. Since what is taught is never quite what is learned, it is debatable whether consistency should be prioritised as a curricular aim rather than, say, responsiveness, flexibility, engagement, joy … But if by ‘consistency’ is meant more confident, secure and self-reflective teaching across the board, this can only come from improving teachers. And teachers can be helped in their quest to improve not least by fostering discussion, critical reflection and imagination within the community of practice – expert, dedicated, responsible, judicious, trustworthy – which they themselves encompass and engender.

[1] See Patrick Yarker, ‘Free, optional and adaptable’: Oak National Academy and the governing of teachers’ choices’, FORUM, 66 (1), 2024, pp100-114.

[2] Anna Traianou, Howard Stevenson, Sarah Pearce and Jude Brady, ‘Are you on slide 8 yet?’: The impact of standardised curricula on teacher professionalism, NEU, 2025.