Politics of the School Science Curriculum : A Case Study of the National Curriculum in England and Wales

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of the science curriculum principally in a political context. We took the process of drawing up the National Curriculum in science in England and Wales as the object of study. In conducting the study, we adopted a new approach based on interviews in order to examine the subject from the viewpoints of planners, administrators, and science education scholars. The following results were obtained: 1) As Young, M.F.D. (1998) suggested, there was indeed a bureaucratic integration in the process of developing the National Curriculum in science. It was also found that there were various conflicting political demands and controls in the process. 2) The most influential controls among them were the professional control of the Science Working Group, composed of science teachers and science education scholars, and the bureaucratic control by the government, which aimed at the centralization of school education. 3) Our study presents a new view that the National Curriculum in science was designed in the process of these conflicts.