English in the National Curriculum: a simple redraft or a major rewrite?

Abstract

The national curriculum for English is about to be rewritten again, having only been looked at four years ago. According to the chair of the expert group on the new national curriculum this is because the curricula of the past had become too baggy. Although he was not specifically looking at the English curriculum this too is being examined. This article considers the main areas that they will be attending to in the revisions – phonics, the canon and Standard English. It argues that these are the areas that the Tory governments looked at before when they first tried to rewrite the national curriculum and that the reasons are ideological rather than pragmatic. It compares the writing of this curriculum with other countries and looks at how they have framed the debates about what should be in their curricula.