School-based curriculum development (SBCD) gained a lot of attention in the 1980s and 1990s and many countries have adopted an SBCD approach during their curricular reforms. However, papers describing and analysing SBCD have been scarce since the 2000s and are mostly from Asian countries (e.g. Chen, Wang, & Neo, 2015). The term SBCD is used in diverse ways in the literature; the most complex is a model provided by March, Day, Hannay, & Cutcheon (1990, p. 49). They extended the model of Brady (1987, cited according to March et al., 1990), which combined the type of activity (creation, adaptation, selection of curriculum materials) and people involved (individual teachers, pairs of teachers, groups, whole staff) with a third dimension – the time commitment. It means that SBCD can take various forms – from individual teachers investigating one area as a one-off activity to teachers, parents, and students creating new materials according to a long-term plan.
The Czech Republic, however, only accepted a curriculum reform that embraced SBCD as late as in the middle of the 2000s. In 2005, a new national curriculum was adopted for pre-primary, primary, and secondary education. All teachers were expected to become curriculum developers, and curricular reform was compulsory. Not all teachers, however, were prepared for such a level of autonomy and decentralization. Only a minority of teachers expressed the belief that they had the skills and the desire to participate actively in SBCD (Straková, 2007). Teachers did not appreciate the shift to a competency-based curriculum either (Vrabcová & Pazlarová, 2016). As a result, the underestimated involuntary implementation of the new national curriculum has led to “uncontrollable formalism” (Janík, 2013). The new curriculum and the fact that it is school-based have even been considered to be one of the reasons for the deterioration of the quality of education (ibid).
During the 2010s, however, there has been a decrease in the proportion of people who assess the quality of general secondary schools positively by six percentage points (Pešková, 2017). Parents have become more interested in innovative schools, and the number of non-public schools has increased by approximately a third since the 2007/2008 school year (MŠMT, 2017), many of them as a result of initiatives by disappointed parents.
Thus, ten years after the national curriculum reform, the head teacher of a medium-sized public general secondary school hired a new teacher to develop a new school-based curriculum. It was one of the first public secondary schools to have declared the need to change the curriculum in order to keep pace with changing social and educational environments and prepare students to deal with diversity. This decision came as a result of long-term discussion among a small group of teachers about the ways to improve education and to make it able to face the challenges of the 21st century. They were particularly interested in the inclusion of students with special educational needs. As a result of the discussion, a developmental team of seven teachers (about 1/8 of all the teachers) was established to design the new curriculum during one school year.
In my paper, I describe the process of the voluntary change of the curriculum in this public general upper secondary school. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of the first phase of a research project which included analysis of the developmental process of the new school-based curriculum. The research addressed two research questions: What key factors influenced the development of the school-based curriculum? Which crucial moments have shaped the process of development?