National strategies to be scrapped

It has been reported today that the Government plans to abandon the national literacy and numeracy strategies from 2011. This significant development, reported to be part of a wide-ranging White Paper, is expected to be formally announced by School Secretary, Ed Balls, next week.

From 2011, schools will be encouraged to work together with other schools to help improve teaching standards and the basic skills of their children. Earlier this month, Mr Balls told a teaching conference: ‘I think the right thing for us to do now is to move away from what has historically been a rather central view of school improvement through national strategies to something which is essentially being commissioned not from the centre but by schools themselves.’

Major changes to the primary curriculum

This latest education policy change follows Sir Jim Rose’s Primary Curriculum Review Report, published earlier this year, where he too proposed major changes to primary education. These included six areas of learning, as well as making ICT central to the curriculum alongside English, maths and personal skills.

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