Introduction

This book is being written at a time when new forms of school governance in England are providing schools with the freedom to develop their own curriculum, and within these new structures, some contrasting approaches are emerging. For example, School 21 in Newham London, which opened in September 2012, organises its curriculum around five vital thinking skills for the 21st century: disciplined mind, creating mind, respectful mind, reflective mind and connecting mind. By contrast, the West London Free School, which opened in September 2011, focuses on traditional subjects, with all students in the first three years of secondary school studying Latin. But is the contrast as stark as it appears? These schools have only recently opened and so it is probably too early to say, but in a recent project, we also found contrasts in the curriculum on offer in secondary schools, with some secondary heads arguing for a skills-based curriculum, and others arguing for the importance of subjects, as illustrated by the following quotes:

These quotes come from a project (the Transition Project) that investigated issues related to the transition from primary to secondary school and it had not been the intention to investigate differences between skills-based and subjects-based curricula. However, as the quotes illustrate, we found that schools expressed very different perspectives about the curriculum at the beginning of secondary school.