Valued but Unwarranted: Argument-Field Instability and the Curriculum Standing of an Unsettled Subject Lineage in the National Curriculum for England, 1904–2025

McLain, M ORCID: 0000-0002-8691-3155 Valued but Unwarranted: Argument-Field Instability and the Curriculum Standing of an Unsettled Subject Lineage in the National Curriculum for England, 1904–2025. Journal of Curriculum Studies. ISSN 0022-0272 (Accepted)

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Abstract

Design and technology in England has been affirmed as nationally important for more than a century, yet over the past three decades it has suffered one of the steepest participation collapses of any established curriculum subject. This article argues that the contradiction is structural rather than accidental, and accountability pressure alone cannot explain it. Drawing on Toulmin's account of argument fields, and on his later treatment of how a discipline's standards of reasoning are historically constituted, it advances a historical-explanatory claim: D&T has been repeatedly reassigned between incompatible fields (craft, applied science, design, vocational preparation, and technological literacy), and so has never remained in one long enough to accrue a warrant with which to justify itself. The claim is evidenced through a critical-discourse reading of the policy record and a longitudinal analysis of examination entries; tested against the contested labour-market literature on skills shortages. The subject emerges as valued but unwarranted. Beyond the case of D&T, the article advances field-reassignment as an analytical proposition for examining how school subjects acquire and sustain curriculum legitimacy, why some remain chronically unsettled, and what their stabilisation would require; its applicability in other subjects and systems is identified as a question for comparative investigation.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Liverpool Institute for Research in Education (LIFE); accountability; argumentation; curriculum policy; design and technology education; Toulmin; 1302 Curriculum and Pedagogy; Education; 3901 Curriculum and pedagogy; 3902 Education policy, sociology and philosophy
Subjects:	L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education N Fine Arts > NC Drawing Design Illustration T Technology > T Technology (General)
Divisions:	Education
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Date of acceptance:	23 August 2026
Date Deposited:	28 Aug 2026 10:12
Last Modified:	28 Aug 2026 10:12
DOI or ID number:	10.1080/00220272.2026.2725043
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29209

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