The website of the UK Department for Education explains what the Key Stages are:
The national curriculum is organised into blocks of years called ‘key stages’ (KS). At the end of each key stage, the teacher will formally assess your child’s performance.
A section of the website defines the main goal for English studies:
The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written language, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.
An overview describes how the curriculum works to achieve that through the first four Key Stages, the ones covering the first six years of school. It mentions poems or poetry thirty-three times, at least once for each of Year One through Year Six. The site then offers more detailed descriptions of the programs for English study for each of the Key Stages. For instance, this is the document that describes the English program for key stages 1 and 2
After explaining that the programs of study for English are set out year-by-year for key stage 1 and 2 and yearly for key stage 2 because “The single year blocks at key stage 1 reflect the rapid pace of development in word reading during these two years,” this document mentions poems or poetry approximately 125 times in its eighty-eight pages. Here are some of the goals:
Pupils should be taught to:
develop pleasure in reading, motivation to read, vocabulary and understanding by:
listening to and discussing a wide range of poems, stories and non-fiction at a
level beyond that at which they can read independently
continuing to build up a repertoire of poems learnt by heart, appreciating these
and reciting some, with appropriate intonation to make the meaning clear
Furthermore, the activities for developing “positive attitudes towards and stamina for writing” include
writing poetry
In the light of the concern expressed for hearing, reading and writing poetry in these documents, I can understand why a market exists in the UK for books like The Works and all those Oxford anthologies.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic here in Nova Scotia, just one seventy-page long document covers the language arts curriculum for grades Primary through Six. It mentions poems or poetry just twenty-six times, and the 10 pages in it describing the Language Arts Curriculum for Grade Two mention poems or poetry just four times:
▪ How does your voice change when presenting a play, reading a poem, sharing your reading?
▪ explain understanding of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry texts orally
▪ How is poetry different from other forms of writing?
▪ write a variety of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction texts
But the main difference of the Nova Scotia guide from the British one is its focus on aspects of using language that are not specifically language-related, so that language arts are firmly embedded in their social contexts. The guide repeats its major goals in its description of every grade level:
▪ Citizenship (CZ)
▪ Communication (COM)
▪ Personal Career Development (PCD)
▪ Creativity and Innovation (CI)
▪ Critical Thinking (CT)
▪ Technological Fluency (TF)
It’s instructive that at least three of these goals are not specifically related to language: “personal career development,” “technological fluency,” and the first one listed, “citizenship.”
As a fairly typical Canadian, I’m anything but blatantly and defiantly patriotic, so it took me a while to figure out what “citizenship” even has to do with language study. But a closer look at the guide clued me in: “citizenship” here means an awareness of Canada as a proudly multicultural nation. The insistence that “Learners will select, interpret, and combine information in multicultural contexts” is reported six times in the guide, once for each grade, except, oddly, Grade Four, which says only, as do all the others “Learners will communicate effectively and clearly respecting cultural contexts.”
It’s also instructive that two of the other goals, “Personal Career Development “ and “Technological Fluency,” relate more to the social usefulness of having language skills than to the inherent value of access of how and what they communicate. Indeed, all six goals imply that learning language Arts is more about developing socially useful skills than it is about experiencing and understanding language. We don’t read poems to enjoy poetry. We read them to become better citizen and indeed better people, people with the creativity, critical thinking skills, and technological expertise to embark on promising careers.
The Nova Scotia guide is so insistent on its central goals that in addition to restating them again and again, it often repeats many of the more specific activities or goals it recommends from grade to grade. Thus, the grade one goal, “identify whether a text is a poem, poster, letter, story, or information text,” is echoed in the Grade three goal, “recognize a growing range of genres—narrative (realistic fiction, adventure, mysteries, etc.), non-fiction (information text, biography, procedural text), and poetry” and in Grade five’s “How can the same message be relayed through different communication forms? (song, poetry, dance, narrative, etc.?”
In the light of all this repetition it seems fair to say that the major difference between the Nova Scotia guide and the Key Stages is its overall lack of anything as identifiable as a “stage.” There are hardly any specific steps that are then left behind as they gradually lead to the achievement of the overall goal. Instead, the same things keep happening again and again, grade after grade. The implication, I’m sad to say, is that children require an ongoing and multi-grade immersion in the same experience in order eventually to acquire the desired skills and attitudes. There’s a way in which that implies a lack of faith in. education: you really can’t really teach anything, you just have to wait until children develop enough to finally get it. It also implies a lack of faith in children: why bother actually trying to help them to achieve the desired results when they’re absolutely not capable of it yet (and, hey, who knows, maybe never will be?).
One other note: I suspect that part of the problem here is the widespread faith of North American. educator in the benefits of cross-curricular content. As a post on. this subject by Ben Johnson argues,
deeper learning requires that groups of teachers pool their talents, resources, time, and efforts to maximize coherence, relevance, and connections among the content areas. . . . Without belaboring the point that teacher isolation has to end, unless teachers stop departmentalizing their teaching and start teaching knowledge in context of other knowledge, student learning will continue to be stuck at the dam. It is time for teachers to collaborate.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that the experiences of poetry my granddaughter told me about are a result of this kind of thinking—that her teachers found and shared poems that related to the topics their classes were otherwise exploring, and that the resulting focus on what the poems were about meant that not much attention was being paid to what made them interesting as poems. as I said, I could very well be wrong about this, and I’d be grateful if someone with more knowledge of what happens with poetry in classrooms that adopt cross-curricular practices could tell me more about that.