WIREDGOV

Announcement

In the Schools white paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’, published on 22 November 2010, Ministers set out their plans to reduce the amount of guidance and materials offered to schools. They believe that schools should be free to use their own professional judgement about how they teach, without unnecessary prescription.

The Department for Education (DfE) has started to reduce the amount of guidance and material aimed at schools on the DfE corporate website and will continue to do so.

With this principle in mind, DfE and QCDA have worked together to revise the National Curriculum website to focus on the statutory Programmes of Study that schools must follow. The site also contains non-statutory programmes for Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (PSHE), religious education and the primary framework for PSHE and citizenship so that schools can plan a whole curriculum that contains statutory and non-statutory elements.

All other guidance material which was previously available on that site is preserved in the Government Web Archive, based at the National Archives, for schools to use, if they choose to do so.

The changes to the site will take place in the week beginning 24 January. There is no need to download material as the current site will be preserved intact on the Government Web Archive, based at the National Archives.

Longer term

As the QCDA prepares to close down, the information available on the QCDA and on the National Curriculum websites will be brought under the DfE corporate site containing information for the school workforce, by the end of March 2012.