A debate:

The two reviews set out competing visions of how to improve primary education. For Sir Jim, the main problem is curriculum overload, generated by empire-building subject specialists and a repeated reluctance to remove old material when adding new. His solution is twofold: to reaffirm the primacy of a “core curriculum”, adding computer skills to the literacy and numeracy now granted this status, and to replace the 12 subjects now taught, plus the foreign language soon to be added, by six cross-cutting “areas of learning”.

The Cambridge team offers a different diagnosis of the problem, and therefore quite different medicine. The problem, they think, is not so much curricular overcrowding, but that a narrow diet of literacy and numeracy has pushed pretty much everything else to the sidelines. School inspections, teacher training, pupil assessment and political populism all reinforce the message that only these “basics” count. That means they are allocated most time and that little attention is paid to the quality of teaching in other subjects. Such dumbing-down is self-defeating, they say: studies show again and again that a broad, rich and balanced curriculum, far from distracting from the basics, is actually a prerequisite for high standards in them.