The new national curriculum must ensure non-Catholic students are allowed to exercise their faith and be taught about it in line with the value of inclusion, according to the University’s Department of Education Studies.

We need to accept... the fact that students... come to school with diverse backgrounds

“We need the sort of provisions that strengthen autonomy and responsibility in the forming of conscience,” the department wrote in a document reacting to the draft national curriculum framework.

“This includes the opportunities to learn about different religions and to do so not from the standpoints of the dominant Catholic belief system where different religions, and their respective knowledge, are positioned as “other”.

The department listed its concerns starting with the opt-out clauses for certain schools and pupils.

While it supports curricular autonomy in schools, it fears this could lead to “differentiated outcomes” and repeated patterns of low achievement at the individual, school, sectoral and national level.

“The professional teacher’s role is to select suitable strategies to actively enable and motivate students... While the learning pathways approach is different, since people learn differently, the outcome should not provide marked differences,” the department said.

“We need to accept and engage with the fact that students are differentially located socially, that is they come to school with diverse backgrounds in relation to work, in terms of their aspirations, and in the way they relate to learning.

“An inclusive education system should be built around this consideration. We need to avoid seeing employers as beneficiaries of the educational system – in terms of getting human resources that are suitably skilled and socialised to benefit production,” the department said.

“The only specific contribution they should be asked to make is to provide work experience placements, giving students ‘a taste of the work ethic and entrepreneurship in context’. In the final document we ought to emphasise their corporate responsibilities, or their role in promoting learning at work.”

The department listed other positive elements in the framework that include less insularity in subjects, importance given to critical thinking, attention given to arts, sport and health and compulsory sciences throughout the entire schooling period.

The current National Minimum Curriculum, launched in 1999, came under fire recently when Prof. Peter Serracino Inglott criticised it for not allowing teachers freedom and initiative.

Carmel Borg, a lecturer in the department and a co-author of 1999 curriculum, said that despite the values of the curriculum, many syllabi continued to impose a rigid teaching regime.

Prof. Borg said the excessive use of peripatetic teachers (specialised teachers) at primary level had promoted “atomisation of knowledge” and contradicted one of the high points of the curriculum – integrated learning – something the new framework seemed to address.