Every few years a school is asked to take on something new. Financial literacy, road safety, digital citizenship, mindfulness, sustainability, coding, character education. Each is defensible on its own, and each arrives with an argument nobody wants to be seen opposing. Almost nothing is ever removed to make room, and the school year does not get any longer.
The outcry when society runs into difficulty is that schools will fix it. Subjects once taught at home now arrive in the timetable, and the curriculum grows by accumulation while the hours stay where they were.
The arithmetic nobody does before approving a programme
A secondary student in most international schools receives somewhere near a thousand hours of teaching a year. A programme that takes one period a week for thirty-eight weeks consumes about thirty hours of that, which is close to a week of school, and three such programmes cost a month.
That cost is never presented at the point of decision, where each programme is approved on its own merits by somebody who is not looking at what the year group has already given up, and the hour has to come from somewhere. It comes out of mathematics, or out of the time a teacher had for the students who had not understood the first explanation.
Asking the question in hours produces better decisions, and since almost every programme is worthwhile, the useful question is what the school will stop doing in order to teach it.
Teachers feel it as spinning plates
Teaching can feel like starting and maintaining one spinning plate on a stick, and then another and another. Eventually there are so many plates that a teacher is racing between them, keeping each one going until it reaches the wobbling point, and sometimes not getting there in time.
Curriculum accounts for only some of the plates, and the rest are the record-keeping, the reporting and the evidence-gathering that accumulate in the same way and for the same reason. Bureaucracy is burying teachers, and every hour a teacher spends demonstrating that learning happened is an hour not spent on the learning itself. GSE has written separately on how schools lose teaching hours.
The second cause is testing everything
Extra subjects are the visible cause, and a less visible one does more damage. Most syllabi were never designed for the testing of every measurable outcome they contain, and where a school tests at that level of detail, teachers respond rationally by teaching to it.
What follows is over-teaching of fine detail at the expense of the thinking the subject exists to develop. Content gets covered instead of understood, since coverage is what the assessment rewards. The clutter here is inside a subject and not between subjects, and it is harder to see.
Content is a vehicle and not the destination
The argument against cutting is always that the content is needed. GSE’s experience across the schools it manages points the other way. Where teachers have removed content that was memorised, recited or given back in an examination, the learning has rarely stopped with it.
That is the most useful thing GSE can say about the cluttered curriculum. Content is the vehicle a student travels in towards a destination beyond it. What a school is trying to produce is a young person who can think, apply what they know to something unfamiliar, and keep learning after they leave. Several routes reach that destination, so the particular facts carried along the way matter less than teachers fear.
It also resolves an argument that has run for twenty years. A school can strip its syllabi down to what is essential, hold a firm line on literacy and numeracy, and still give students real choice in how they learn, because the choice operates inside the content and not instead of it. Fewer things, taught properly, with room for a student to go further where the subject interests them.
Back to basics does not mean backwards.
Greg Parry, Co-Founder and CEO, GSE
Core knowledge applied in real contexts is the condition for everything else a school offers, since a student who cannot read fluently cannot reach any of it.
International schools carry more of this than most
In the markets GSE works in the clutter is partly built in. Most schools delivering a British or American curriculum also carry host-country requirements for language, national studies and religious education, and those are not optional. Some markets add mandated hours in physical education or civics.
On top of that sits everything parents expect from a school charging international fees, which is a co-curricular programme, competitive sport, performance, service and university counselling. Families choose the school partly for those things, and together they leave a narrower academic timetable than the equivalent school at home.
The consequence is that an international school has less room for discretionary additions than most, and generally less awareness of it. Writing down the hours already committed, before anybody proposes something new, is where a school starts.
Owners add to the curriculum too
Programmes also get added for commercial reasons, which makes this more than an educational failure. A prospectus with more features looks stronger against a competitor, and a new offering gives the marketing team something to announce.
The difficulty is that a school of that kind ends up doing many things thinly, when what attracts and keeps families is a small number of things done visibly well. An owner who understands this stops asking what else the school can offer and starts asking what it intends to be known for.
How to take something out
Removing is harder than adding, since every programme has somebody who introduced it and somebody who values it. Schools that manage it tend to rely on a rule, a test and a review.
The rule is that nothing enters the timetable without something leaving it, with the hours stated on both sides. The test is one the school applies to any proposal, and a school with a working vision and mission already has it, since the guiding questions that decide whether an idea gets a green light will also decide whether it earns its hours. The review matters because programmes survive by inertia, and without a date in the calendar nobody ever proposes their removal.
When something does come out, the reaction is usually quieter than expected. A programme that nobody can explain the purpose of is rarely missed, and the hour it returns is spent on something the school chose deliberately.
Read next
- Learning Time Is Sacred. Protecting the hour, once the school has decided what it is for.
- Give Teachers Back Their Schools. Who should be deciding how a subject is taught.
- The Signature School Experience. Doing a few things visibly well.
- Vision and Mission Integrity. The questions that decide what earns its place.
Part of GSE’s What We Believe collection.
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