 In part three of this audio tape, we look at how curriculum designs turn out in practice in actual classrooms. Brenda, we've talked in part two about designing down from what we wanted learners to be able to do at the end of their schooling and about the political and other concerns that influence the decisions about what it is that learners should be able to do. But isn't there often a big difference between the curriculum as it's designed by planners and what actually gets taught in the classroom? I think you're absolutely right. We cannot, when we design a curriculum, ensure just by designing that it will be carried out. Whatever your curriculum is, that's not a particular weakness of curriculum 2005. A danger is simply to assume that because we've designed it, it will now work that way. That's why it's more useful to conceive of a curriculum as not just the document, the blueprint, but also our teacher training, our support mechanisms and perhaps even the debates that we drive in the press. There has been a criticism of our education policy that we designed them quite idealistically without taking into sufficient account the context and what would be necessary to implement that policy effectively. And I think that's, you know, maybe post-1994, that's what we were doing. We were perhaps more idealistic or we had an idea of what we wanted to get to. And now we need to start saying, well, how do we get there? If it's true that there is often a big difference between the planned designed curriculum on the one hand and the actual lived curriculum that learners experience on the other, it must also be true that there can be great differences between what learners experience in different classrooms. Let's listen to how two different teachers approach the same topic in the prescribed curriculum. We will focus on a tiny piece of curriculum, a small part of a lesson on the nomadic culture of the Sand people of South Africa. They were nomadic. What do I mean? They did not live in one place, understood? Yes. They were always moving from one place to another. Isn't that so? Yes, it is. Right. They were always moving from one place to another. We are going to be discussing a tribe called the Sun. I'm sure you all know about the Sun. Is there anybody that can give me any idea of who they were or anything they know about the Sun? Zainura. The Sun were people who always moved around. They were people who always moved around, okay? What else? For their food. They used to hunt for their food. They were sort of like yellowish in colour. They were yellowish in colour. They never had a settlement where they stayed. So, no settlement. I'm looking at your own families. I'd like to ask you a few questions. Where do you live? In Rabali. Rabali? In a house. So where too? How many times have you moved in the last 10 years? Two times. Once. Once? Never moved. Never moved. Right? Why did you move? My mother said that crying in our inner day way was to love that it's getting bad and we moved to another new place. So you moved for a safer place. In the learning guide, we ask you to describe what you see as the difference between these two approaches. We asked Karola Steinberg, who is a teacher educator at Vitz University, what she thought might make these two lessons such different learning experiences for the learners concerned. The curriculum will depend. One is on the resources and the culture of the school. And the knowledge and the skill base of the teacher. Teachers make the curriculum to what it is that children learn and how the curriculum is mediated. And the more knowledge base a teacher has, the more a teacher knows their students and is able to mediate between the knowledge and the students. And the more the teacher can draw on different resources to make the learning experience richer for the students, the more the students will learn and the better the lived curriculum will be. Penny Vingerfold, whom we met in part two of this audio tape, helps to run the annual Sunday Times Top 100 Schools competition. She discusses the first two factors that Karola has just raised. How significant resources and school culture might be in providing learners with different experiences of the planned curriculum. Penny, how significant is resourcing at schools in giving learners very different experiences, even though the planned curriculum might be the same? Louise Crouch's analysis of the Sunday Times Top Schools shows that it is an influence, but it's tiny compared to culture and resources. You're saying resources are less important than the school culture? Yes, resources are small compared. With one exception and that's textbooks. If you take textbooks out of Mbilwi or out of Matunjwa, the schools that have these extraordinary results, you would probably find a different thing. What they have got, I mean Matunjwa doesn't have textbooks, they have photocopy textbooks. That's what the principal spends every weekend doing is photocopying the textbooks in the hospital. They're good textbooks of course. But other than that, resources don't seem to show. Let me be clear on the metric exam. I'm sure the resources of access to computers and other resources means that those kids have a much richer experience. But it doesn't seem to be a decisive factor. When you look at five schools in a similar area, drawing from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and with similar resources, and you still get very uneven performance on the metric exam, that's often about ethos, not about resources. So it seems that the teacher, the culture of teaching and learning in the school and good use made of good textbooks are all crucial factors in shaping the way learners may experience the plan curriculum. These and other factors are discussed in more detail in the learning guide. In one of the readings that form part of this module, Peter Bucklin shows how these different experiences of a common plan curriculum may partly account for the very different performance of different learners. But this leads us to the important question, particularly in South Africa, of whether a common planned curriculum is likely to benefit all the country's learners or rather advantage some learners and disadvantage others.