Social justice and the National Curriculum

Abstract

Abstract This paper, first presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference 1 1 This is a revised version of a paper presented to the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association, Newcastle Unversity, September 1989. 1. This is a revised version of a paper presented in the Social Justice Symposium at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association, York University, September 1997. at Newcastle University in September, 1989, reports the results and analysis of documentary research that examined the first four National Curriculum documents to be made public: the TGAT Report and the Mathematics, Science and English Reports. It considers, in particular, the 1988 Education Reform Act's reconceptualization of schooling and the associated process of curriculum reformulation in relation to issues of social justice. First, it explores the historical background and current context of equal opportunities in education noting what has been achieved so far. Then it examines how social justice has been addressed in the 1988 legislation by providing a textual analysis of TGAT, and the Mathematics, Science and English documents. Third, it identifies the assumptions underlying current official thinking in order to explore, finally, the strategies needed to place social justice on the educational agenda of the 1990s. It focuses, in particular, on what have been seen as the two main debates about social justice in British education in the late 1980s ‐those concerning sexual and racial inequality.