Our education syllabus focuses on imperial vanities not realities.
Take the UK DNA of entrepreneurial innovation and add in an educational syllabus focused on providing the right IT skills, plus a rise in home grown UK and European cloud computing providers, and you get a potent mix; ideas, skills and access to low cost, reliable IT infrastructure that's fast to provision and connected to the world's markets.
There has hardly been any systematic syllabus focusing on the teaching of listening comprehension, let alone the teaching of listening strategy, and few existing documents include listening strategies apart from the CEFR.
The problems are deep-seated and decades old: outdated syllabuses, a focus on skills that do not meet national requirements and a misunderstanding of the true nature of employability.
In addition, the syllabus remains focused on nurturing the skills of children who have a propensity for competitive sport – the minority rather than the majority.
The project brought together a statistician, clinician and educational experts to re-conceptualize the syllabus, and focused on developing different methods of delivery.
The main part of the "can do" questionnaire was composed of descriptors, the bulk of which came from B2 to C1 in the CEFR with a few descriptors from A1 and A2, and the current English teaching syllabus (2000) and the TEM test syllabus (2004), and focus group discussion.
The government has repeatedly said it wants to change GCSE syllabuses so that they focus on the essential knowledge in key subjects and on in-depth study.
This has led to a situation where the debates in the field of curriculum have ignored important ground related to the technical form of syllabus documents – the categories, grids, shape, structure, and purposes of the syllabus – instead tending to focus on cultural and ideological debates about content.
Conventionally, the matrix stiffness method, a subset of finite element analysis, tends to occupy a central position in a typical syllabus, with a special focus on plane frames providing a bridge between basic structural components with pedagogical clarity and real-world structures.
