This BBC report on Gordon Brown’s focus for secondary education explains…
England’s secondary curriculum is being overhauled to “focus on getting the basics right”, the government says.”
Subjects such as personal finance and cookery are likely to be included – plus languages like Mandarin and Urdu.
Anne Kiem, a commentator from the Institute of Financial Services School of Finance said: “We’re not talking about high finance – it’s things like how do you open a bank account, how do you pay a cheque.”
Please, please, pleeease let’s hope that it doesn’t turn out to be the basics envisaged by this commentator – this would likely be taught in such a way to be a waste precious school resources – drill and fill…
Thankfully another commentator Peter Hyman (a teacher surprise surprise!:^) says “I would do far more on schools preparing pupils for learning and making them more independent.”
What school leavers need is the ability to approach banks, institutions and potential employers, etc. with a good command of the basic skills as well as the confidence to present themselves as personable, well rounded, thoughtful, and confident individuals (chose your own adjectives) who are capable of finding out about what they don’t know and contributing creatively to any enterprise they engaged with.
Stephen Powell 
Yesterday’s independent carried an article which seemed to indicate the change is intended to be about “personalisation” of learning but again mentioned cookery. Could this mean that while one young person chooses to learn how to make a balanced meal from microwave dinners, a classmate chooses to work through Delia Smith’s recipes?
Me again! Sadly, unless driven by changes in formal assessment (Key Stage tests, GCSE etc) none of this is likely to have much impact. If neither Delia nor instant cookery is likely to be awarded a recognised certificate, either the teachers will ignore it or students will dismiss it – probably both. I’m off to microwave a luxury dinner.
Hi Shirley, all seems like ‘spin’ to me, or was that the previous PM…
Anyway, glad to see you are personalising your own diet by choosing luxury food. Eat well;^)