Whenever Civitas are mentioned by the BBC the epithet right-leaning is always added. Odd that. Their latest publication on education, The Corruption of the Curriculum, has a whole bunch of contributors whose academic background and history is with the Living Marxism magazine that went under about seven years ago after being successfully sued for libel by ITN. I listened to the 8.30am report this morning on Today and I’m in complete agreement with them. I’ve watched this corruption of the curriculum slowly gain speed since I began teaching in 1981, and it has always been driven by political interference. That interference is now harsher and more overt than it has ever been, such that we really are in danger of creating a two tier system where the vast majority of children aren’t educated at all, but engineered as functioning workers and complacent citizens. Private schools will go on delivering a wider, richer deeper curriculum, as they have always done because they have the freedom to do so, and their customers demand it.

In my first few years in teaching I had to teach a short ‘O’ level English coursework option to a small group of very low ability, disinterested pupils, and amongst other things, found a contemporary tough short story about skinheads and gang behaviour I thought they might like. I got permission from the exam board to use this story and it worked. The kids loved it and produced some reasonable work. That summer, like everyone teaching that coursework option, I had to attend a moderation meeting where sample scripts from a bunch of schools in that region were exchanged and marked for comparison. Most of the schools present had set their 16 year old pupils Raold Dahl’s Danny Champion of the World a book my nine year old could read now in an evening or two. When they saw the work my pupils had written there was almost uproar and some angry demands were made to the chief moderator for their work to be disallowed on the grounds that the story (which they had not even heard of, never mind read) was inappropriate. I was astonished, firstly at the appallingly low expectation the teachers had of their pupils, and secondly at their extreme envy, anger and resentment. The chief moderator even tried to mollify them until I pointed out to him that I had checked everything beforehand with the exam board, and I not only had their permission but their encouragement. Under the paper thin banner of disadvantage, or inclusion, such teachers actually do nothing to help or educate their pupils, and everything to condemn them to failure and dependence in every sense. That kind of corruption of the curriculum is exactly what the Civitas report is highlighting.