Curriculum and Assessment in Children's School Lives: Experiences from Primary Schools in Ireland 2019–2023

Understanding Children’s School Lives (CSL) requires an in-depth exploration of how children experience the curriculum and assessment in their everyday lives, the focus of this thematic report. A core aspect of the CSL study has been to capture children’s voice and understand their experiences as they progress through primary school. In this report we place children’s experiences of curriculum and assessment practices at the centre of the analysis. While their voices are central, we present these also in the context of the perspectives of key adult decision makers in children’s lives: teachers, principals, and their parents. Relationships are at the core of the teaching and learning processes, as the evidence from the previous report on Pedagogy (Report 5)1 shows. For this reason, we explore teachers’ and principals’ experiences of both curriculum and assessment to better understand children’s experiences as these are framed within the complex challenges faced by school communities. Finally, a key element we explore in this report is the family dynamics around experiences of the curriculum, assessment and out of school learning by considering parents’ views and concerns. Each of these perspectives provides a wider lens into the rationale behind and experience of curricular and assessment practices in primary schools, and in the case of parents, their priorities and experiences, including the key insights they have over how their children respond to and engage with their learning.