In Britain’s battle over school curriculum, Celtic nations have got it right

First paragraph: Thenational curriculumintroduced by Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s was a seminal development in UK education history. Applying to England, Northern Ireland and Wales (but not Scotland, which has a tradition of educational independence), the move was highly controversial. With too much content and little flexibility on what could be taught, it was a teacher-proof curriculum that was widely decried by education experts as badly thought out and damaging to young people. Such criticisms seemed borne out, as it was reviewed and revisedthroughout the 1990s