Small is Beautiful: Part One

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Solomon Kingsnorth

9 min readAug 24, 2018

“Whenever something is wrong, something is too big.” Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations
“Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

Here’s a 60-second summary of this post, for those in a hurry:

The aim of any curriculum should be for every child to master every objective with as close to 100% fluency as possible.
The bloated size of the current primary curriculum in core subjects is holding children back from mastery and fluency.
Getting 45%-49% of the questions wrong in the new SATs tests is the ‘expected standard’ at the end of KS2, one that I find to be very low indeed.
The past three years of SATs results confirm that very few children have achieved anything close to mastery of the maths curriculum, despite 90% of them attending a ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ primary school. For all the stats, see my Twitter thread here.
The size of the curriculum is not compatible with the research from cognitive psychology, which demands time for frequent revision/retrieval of previously learned content, interleaved practice and breaking new knowledge down into smaller steps.
In Key Stage 2, there are 3.8 school days for every maths objective in the KS2 curriculum. This 3.8 days does not account for INSET days, trips, sports days, nativity rehearsals, book weeks, workshops, residentials etc…
The curriculum in core subjects has become turgid and should be significantly reduced to ensure that as close to all children as possible leave with exceptional levels of fluency and automacity, primarily in number.
Not all objectives are equal. I believe that at least 50% of the statutory maths curriculum should be culled. Schools who want to do more than this are and will always be free to do so.
I sense that many teachers have become attached to our arbitrary curriculum and will probably balk at this suggestion. This brings to mind the words of Rory Stewart MP, discussing British intervention in foreign wars: “The question is not ‘What ought we to do?’ but ‘What can we do?’”. Anyone who thinks the current setup leads to mastery has had the wool well and truly pulled over their eyes.
When the size of the curriculum reaches unworkable levels, so does everything else: assessment trackers, pounds spent on consultants, job dissatisfaction, cheating. The list goes on…
My meagre solution: strip the curriculum back to an essential core of knowledge and give the power of time back to teachers to ensure that as many children as humanly possible reach at least 85–95% fluency across the curriculum (a level reached by only 23% of children in 2017. TWENTY-THREE PERCENT. Let that sink in for a moment 😱). Let’s send true masters up to secondary school, ready to sail into the mathematical horizon confidently and optimistically.
At the moment, we are leaving them with a ramshackle foundation of knowledge that’s a mile wide but only an inch deep.

Full version (with a proposed new maths curriculum and thoughts on reading) below for the bravehearted among you:

Put on your evil scientist hat for a moment.

In front of you is a panel with 3 sliders that move between left and right, like so:

I’m going to put you in control of the primary curriculum in England — yours to do what you like with. However, you can only touch the buttons that I tell you to…

For the moment, let’s say we’re tweaking the maths curriculum.

The objective of the game is to have all children master every objective in the curriculum as close to 100% fluency as possible.

You can alter the mastery levels of every child in England by controlling 3 variables, listed below:

Difficulty

The top slider controls the average difficulty of each objective in the curriculum.

Each objective in the maths curriculum has been given a score out of 10 for difficulty, giving an overall average.

If you move the slider to the left, you will make the curriculum ‘too easy’ (e.g. replacing the KS2 curriculum with the EYFS framework). If you move it to the right, it becomes ‘too difficult’ (e.g. replacing the KS2 curriculum with the fourth-year syllabus for the MSc in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics at Oxford University). In the middle will be ‘about right’.

Assume that each objective will be taught well. Using current Ofsted figures, there is a 90% chance that the teaching of each objective will be good or outstanding.

Before you move it, stop and think: imagine the consequences of moving that slider too far to the right:

the constant scenes of confusion in your classroom
the job dissatisfaction when no-one understands a thing
the planning headaches when you realise the futility of your every word
the sense of underachievement amongst the nation’s teachers
the burnout
the dire teacher retention rates
the stress of pupil progress meetings when no-one has made any progress
the lack of mathematical fluency at secondary school
the amount of children’s time wasted in maths lessons, etc…

Personally, at the moment, I think it’s about right. Each objective on its own is more than achievable by the majority of children in England. The average difficulty is not my beef.

Number of objectives

The second slider controls the number of objectives.

If you move it to the left, the number of objectives to master becomes ‘too few’. If you move the slider to the right, the number of objectives becomes ‘too many’. If you put the slider in the middle, you guessed it, it becomes ‘just right’.

Remember, the aim of the game is to master every single objective in the curriculum as close to 100% fluency as possible, so you might decide that just one objective from the fourth-year syllabus for the MSc in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics at Oxford University for the whole of Key Stage 2 would be optimal. Up to you.

But beware the consequences of sliding it too far to the right:

the assessment trackers that you’ll have to fill in to track the success of every single objective for every pupil
the break-neck speed with which you will have to fly through the objectives
the lack of time available for coming back to previously taught objectives and committing them to long-term memory
the unjustifiable amounts of time spent on geometry when big swathes of your class have gaps in their arithmetical fluency etc…

Where would you say the government has positioned this slider? You won’t be surprised to find out that I believe it has been pushed way too far to the right and that the consequences are spiralling out of control.

Time

The final slider on your control panel determines the time available per objective. Remember, we know from cognitive psychology that mastering knowledge and committing it to long-term memory requires regular retrieval and revision, as well as breaking the knowledge down into smaller steps to avoid the pitfalls of cognitive load.

Moving the slider to the left will give you ‘too much time’ (e.g. 20 years to teach the KS2 curriculum). Moving it to the right will give you ‘too little time’ (e.g. 5 minutes to teach each objective).

Where will you position the slider? Don’t lose sight of the consequences of moving it too far to the right. They are almost identical to the consequences above.

What to do about it?

I am proposing a radical reduction of the curriculum in the 3 core areas, in order to free up the time required to achieve fluency and automacity on a mass scale across the country.

Here is my starting point for a new KS2 curriculum. Every school would have the power to decide when objectives are taught. A pass rate of 85–90% would become the ‘expected standard’ at the end of primary school.

If you find yourself getting upset about an objective that has been ruthlessly culled, ask yourself: how much quicker would my lowest attaining pupil understand said sacred objective with a 90–100% fluency rate in the following objectives? Remember that knowledge is ‘sticky’ — the deeper you understand one concept, the more the next one ‘sticks’.

The fainthearted should close their eyes now:

A Revised Key Stage 2 Maths Curriculum