The National Curriculum Council and the Whole Curriculum: reconstruction of a discourse?

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Abstract
In the decade from 1977 Her Majesty's Inspectorate in England and Wales developed and refined an influential discourse of ‘the whole curriculum’. With the passage of the Education Reform Act in 1988 this discourse was marginalised, to be replaced by a discourse of the National Curriculum, conceived of as a list of subjects structured by attainment targets and programmes of study. However, since 1989 the National Curriculum Council has begun to publish texts which once again introduce a discourse of ‘the whole curriculum’. Nevertheless, these texts cannot be read as transparent statements of intent, nor as simply ‘moments’ in discourse. They are seen here as works produced within a specific setting of practical action, the National Curriculum Council, whose relations of power are not fixed but contested. In this context, the political constraints on presenting a conception of ‘the whole curriculum’ in relation to a statutory curriculum based on separate subjects have resulted firstly in a model of the curriculum that is inherently unstable, but secondly in ambiguities and contradictions within the text that allow for different readings in relation to schools’ own specific settings of practical action.

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