Redeveloping the Primary School Curriculum in Ireland

• In Event: Transforming Education Systems for Holistic Student Development: Learning From Case Studies Around the World

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine Ireland’s efforts to redevelop the primary school curriculum to support more holistic student development.
Perspective
In Ireland, the central analytic matter lies in understanding how an historically centralized, academically focused national education system has continued to evolve to support more holistic student development.
The national Department of Education has ultimate policy responsibility for the education system and works in coordination with the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) that advises on all aspects relating to curriculum and assessment policy. The Department of Education also works in close partnership with the broader educational ecology, including patron organizations, parent organizations, teacher unions, and school management bodies. Over three policy iterations since Ireland’s independence in 1922, the cornerstone of its macro-level educational infrastructure has been a centrally-developed, prescriptive curriculum to be enacted in all state-recognized schools, with modest provisions for local adaptation.
Ireland’s most recent efforts to move toward more holistic student development began in the early 2010s, with a fourth policy iteration that included a review of the primary school curriculum. National financial engagement with the OECD and European Union amidst an economic downturn interacted with concerns with PISA results to sustain academic performance as a priority, including improving foundational literacy and numeracy. New research on child development, increasing national diversity, and wider moves at early childhood and post-primary levels to more flexible curriculum frameworks also drove holistic student development to the fore.
Methods
This paper was compiled based on document analysis of both national and international policy and theoretical literature. A critical analysis of the Draft Primary Curriculum Framework, published for consultation in February 2020, was a key focus of the paper. The paper also traces the array of research and consultation publications that informed the development of the draft framework, and positions these within the wider theoretical literature. The author has academic expertise in the historical development and contemporary landscape of curriculum policy in Ireland and serves on an advisory panel regarding the primary school curriculum.
Results
Ireland’s efforts to support more holistic student development centered on a fundamental redesign of Ireland’s primary school curriculum. Three key themes emerged from the analysis. First, system-wide involvement by stakeholders has underpinned, informed, and enriched the redevelopment process from the outset. Second, the redevelopment process has positioned the entire education system as a ‘learning system’, conceptualizing all stakeholders as both contributors and learners in the reform journey. Third, a shift in understanding what a curriculum is, and what it ‘does’, has been prompted by the shift from a traditional detailed objective-based format to a learning outcomes-based curriculum framework. Collectively, the redevelopment process proposes the decentralization of many elements of curriculum making and enactment, highlighting the paramountcy of teacher and child agency.

Significance
The analysis provides evidence of the possibility to use macro-level policy instruments (in this case, a national curriculum) both to catalyze and to guide distributed, system-wide efforts to organize, manage, and improve instruction to support both academic and holistic student development.

Author

• Thomas K Walsh, Maynooth University
  Presenting Author