What is a primary education for? How does a curriculum support teachers to enable children become the people they have the potential to be?
These are some of the questions the NCCA has been asking since we celebrated 10 years of the curriculum in primary schools and published Aistear: the Early Childhood Curriculum Framework for all children from birth to six years in Autumn 2009.
There are important differences between Aistear (2009) and the Primary School Curriculum (1999). Both were informed by the research of their time, but these were different times. Aistear has drawn on research and theory in the past decade to highlight e.g., the importance of play and the role of the adult in supporting children’s learning. During the same time, findings from curriculum reviews and research have informed our understanding of children’s lives today and how they learn in primary schools including, e.g., in the areas of reading, writing and oral language and how these elements of language interact for children.
The NCCA’s curriculum reviews have also described teachers’ and children’s successes, challenges and priorities with the curriculum in classrooms. In both reviews, teachers identified lack of time — to cover the full curriculum and to meet the needs of all children—as one of their greatest curriculum challenges(2005; 2008). The experience and evidence we gathered from Ireland and other countries has shown that the overload issue is very real, that it is not unique to our primary school teachers and that it is often an unintended casualty of education change. During the past year, hundreds of teachers have worked with us to re-present the curriculum and to develop the online curriculum planning tool which was recently shortlisted for an eGovernment award.
At the beginning of 2011 we find ourselves facing significant challenges and opportunities in primary education. Our curriculum reviews have shown that primary teachers struggle to implement the curriculum within one school day, week and year which has remained the same length, despite the size of the 1999 curriculum and the many additions to it since 1999. Perhaps in this increasingly layered content-laden curriculum, key aims for children’s learning and development in primary schools have become lost, or at best, difficult to find. Aistear challenges us to respond to these questions and issues, not by adding to the curriculum, but by changing it. The growing consensus concerning children’s literacy makes this a useful starting point for developing the infant curriculum. As we begin this work, we find ourselves simultaneously returning to, and welcoming discussion on the key questions concerning what we want for our primary school children today and what kind of curriculum will achieve those aims.
Back to Primary Developments
Documents to download
Primary School Curriculum: Mapping the Developments (PDF, 109KB)
Curriculum overload in primary schools: An overview of national and international experiences (PDF, 396KB)
Curriculum overload in primary schools: Voices from the Learning Site (PDF, 915 KB)