Education in the United Kingdom by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134125609
Publisher: David Fulton Publishers

The National Curriculum and the Education Act 1988

The Education Act 1988 is best remembered as the legislation that introduced the National Curriculum. For the area of SEN it was doubly important because it enshrined in legislation for the first time the right of all children, irrespective of ability, to a broad, balanced, differentiated curriculum, including the National Curriculum. The Act also, however, makes provision for modification or even exemption from the National Curriculum for some children with SEN, implying that entitlement was used as a relative term, and that far from genuinely positive legislation there was, as in the past, a deficit attitude towards SEN.

Much has been written about the inadequacies of the National Curriculum as a curriculum for all. Dyson sums up many of these criticisms:

Despite the rhetoric of ‘breadth, relevance and differentiation’, it is difficult to imagine how it could have been more narrowly conceived and retrospectively academic, more exclusive in its emphasis and more inaccessible in its demands. What children were entitled to, therefore, was not participation in meaningful educational experiences so much as confinement within a rigid and inappropriate hierarchy of knowledge. (Dyson 1997: 154)

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