Recommendation 34

HM Government Acknowledged

Every state-funded school must offer a broad and balanced curriculum which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils, and prepares them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. The Government wants pupils to leave school prepared, in the widest sense, for adult life and the acquisition of knowledge is the basic building block of education to which all pupils should have fair access. Central to raising standards has been ensuring that all children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, have access to the ‘best that has been thought and said’, as part of their cultural inheritance. This has meant overhauling the so- called skills- or competence-based national curriculum, replacing it with one that makes sure children are taught the essential building blocks of knowledge, providing them with the understanding they need to participate fully in society. The national curriculum reforms focused on restoring knowledge to the heart of the curriculum. Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit from a knowledge-rich approach for two main reasons. Firstly, securing domain-specific knowledge is essential to learning. Pupils start school with differing levels of knowledge depending on their background, meaning those with greater levels of prior knowledge learn more easily than those with limited prior knowledge, and therefore the gap between these two groups widens. Secondly, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to access ‘communal knowledge’ or the ‘cultural commons of the nation’ at home. It is, therefore, important that schools make sure that all pupils have access to this through the delivery of an effectively sequenced knowledge-rich curriculum.