1 An ABC for the 21C Michael J Reiss and John White Summary School curricula nearly always start with subjects. We argue that it would be better if they started with the aims of education. We begin from two overarching ones: to enable each student to lead a life that is personally flourishing; to help others to do so, too. These two aims generate lesser aims of increasing specificity. Once a nation‐ wide framework is in place, the remaining task of curriculum construction passes to the schools. It is they who fill out the general scheme of an aims‐based curriculum (ABC) with activities suited to their students and their circumstances. Contact details m.reiss@ioe.ac.uk, john.white@ioe.ac.uk Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK Tel 020 7612 6000 Brief biographical details Michael Reiss is Pro‐Director: Research and Development and Professor of Science Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. John White is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. An ABC for the 21C The last few weeks have seen yet another raft of announcements about school and college education. We can set aside Ian Duncan Smith’s proclamation that it’s more useful to stack shelves in a supermarket than to have a geology degree. More substantively, Michael Gove has announced that English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBCs) are to be abandoned – though we wait to see how much the ‘reformed’ GCSEs will resemble what EBCs would have been. Perhaps of most significance in the secondary sector is the announcement that school performance measures will move away from seeing grade Cs in a maximum of five GCSE as the be all and end all. Instead, there will be a sliding scale depending on the grades obtained in up to eight subjects, some of which can be ‘vocational’. We also now know Michael Gove’s traditionalist proposals for his new National Curriculum. These reflect, for instance, his idiosyncratic vision of history (including his desire that seven or eight year olds study the Anglo‐Saxon Heptarchy). The trouble with our present Secretary of State for Education is less that he dwells in curricular fantasyland, and more that he wants the whole nation to dwell in it, too. His new National Curriculum proposals prompt the question: how far, in a