Primary school curriculum set for major overhaul

Children of national school age will also be consulted on the proposed changes to the primary school curriculum.

An overhaul of the primary school curriculum will see an emphasis on new learning areas including foreign languages, engineering, dance, and media arts.

Five draft curriculum documents are to be published today to coincide with a public consultation on the new proposals, which will see the fundamentals of primary education updated in Ireland for the first time since 1999.

The public consultation will run from March 6 until June 7 of this year and will encompass online and in-person focus group events, online questionnaires for parents and teachers, and written submissions.

Children of national school age and those in the early stages of second level will also be consulted.

A consultative forum is also set to take place in Croke Park in April.

The new curriculum, which will be only the fourth major change of the primary syllabus in more than 10 years, proposes new emphases including:

• Subjects such as modern foreign languages, arts education, social and environmental education, engineering, and wellbeing;
• Increasing the emphasis placed on physical education and social, personal, and health education in the overall context of wellbeing, digital learning, and sustainability;
• A renewed focus on the ways by which children learn, such as play and integrated learning, and the promotion of critical thinking and problem solving;
• And an increase in the flexibility by which teachers can approach their teaching day, a departure from the more prescriptive time-management restrictions under which teachers have been operating since 2012.

The emphasis on modern foreign languages would be aimed more at the manner by which children learn a new language.

It would emphasise the foreign languages now being spoken in different classrooms due to the multitude of nationalities resident in Ireland.

The teaching of engineering as part of the wider science curriculum, meanwhile, would emphasise the design-process and trial-and-error learning.

Separately, the new arts education curriculum would see subjects such as dance and music focused upon in the classroom.

The curriculum aims for children to achieve certain core competencies, according to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, including communication with others, digital proficiency, a sense of wellbeing, and active citizenship.

As part of the focus on wellbeing, meanwhile, children would begin to learn about life changes such as puberty at an earlier age, from fourth class and onwards.

This is understood to be a response to children starting primary school at later ages and also the fact that they would prefer to learn about changes that are due to happen to them, rather than those they have already experienced.

Self-identification would not be specifically taught as part of the curriculum, however, apart from in cases where a student has presented their interest in the matter to their teacher — who can then use their own discretion as to how the subject should be handled.

The chief executive of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, Arlene Forster, said that the consultation period marks “an important step” in the redevelopment of the curriculum.