The Curriculum and Assessment Review is a bundle of cliches with compromise at its core
The Curriculum and Assessment Review, which was published last week, is potentially the most important attempt to rethink what is taught in schools since the Conservative government’s radical reforms of 2014. Those changes were led by Michael Gove, a Secretary of State for Education who (irrespective of whether you agreed with him or not) had a clear sense of what high academic standards were and how they should be measured. We live in more relativist times, and the latest set of recommendations, enthusiastically received by the Department for Education, lacks his sense of purpose; they are, at best, vague and, at worst, potentially damaging to the academic outcomes of the children the report was designed to champion.
Inevitably, the Daily Mail thought it was dumbed-down and woke, but there were more voices that welcomed its findings. High-profile names, including Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ed Sheeran, welcomed its call for the performing arts to be more valued in schools, and progressive educationalists took to their safe space of Bluesky to congratulate the authors on their “sensible” list of ideas. Perhaps the overall mood was one of relief: given that the person in charge of this review was Professor Becky Francis, who is on record as claiming that setting by ability is “incompatible with social justice” and who seems obsessed with “inclusivity” in every area of life, many feared a wholesale destruction of the progress made over the last decade. That has not happened (yet) although any report described by Sir Simon Jenkins as “uplifting” should ring alarm bells for those who care for our children’s future.
The report is a product of its time: it is keen to avoid anything provocative and, as a result, offers no real sense of coherence or purpose. As you trudge through its 170 pages, you yearn for a clearly articulated vision of why education matters and is of intrinsic value. Instead, it is very much a report written by a committee of nice, well-meaning educationalists that, in the words of author and teacher David Didau, “reads like a negotiated peace treaty between warring tribes”. Any change in education policy is a series of trade-offs between those tribes: progressives and traditionalists fight over “skills” versus “stuff”, “breadth” versus “depth”,and child-centred learning versus high-stakes final assessments. The perennial problem is that there is only so much space on a timetable to include everything a child needs to learn if they are to be prepared for life. Delivering the recommendations will rely on factors beyond the scope and influence of this report (such as attracting and retaining good teachers), but it does create the conditions for the culture in our schools to change — and in ways that we may come to regret.
Instead of a clearly articulated set of proposals that recommits the government to a knowledge-rich curriculum with rigorous assessments at its centre, we have vacuous statements about “building a world-class curriculum for all”, which includes “stronger diversity and representation”, more “sustainability”, and “locally relevant” teaching. Clichés abound: this curriculum will be “fit for the future” (presumably as opposed to being fit for the past); “learners” (a word that is both patronising and reductive at the same time) will “thrive in a technology-driven world” because of this “broad and balanced curriculum”, which has both citizenship and wellbeing embedded in every key stage.
The problem with inclusivity is that if it is too wide, standards suffer or disappear altogether
It is strong on the why but not on the how. We are not told how schools will realise (or fund) its main recommendations, and it would be misguided to assume that Bridget Phillipson, a Secretary of State who seems keener on destroying success than protecting it, is qualified to provide a clear and coherent vision. Indeed, it comes as no surprise that she immediately went further than the report’s recommendation in promising to radically reform Progress 8 (the system of measuring “value added” in schools) so that arts subjects are included in that measure. As Matt Burnage, Vice Principal at a leading state school, has said, “choosing breadth will mean a sacrifice to depth. This will impact the work that has been done to promote and embed knowledge-rich curricula”. Progress 8 was a “problematic” measure introduced by the Conservatives because it was seen by those on the left as too elitist. The report has provided the Secretary of State with an excuse to bin something that promotes academic privilege and replace it with another measure that is more inclusive.
The problem with inclusivity is that if it is too wide, standards suffer or disappear altogether, and if every child has a world-class education then what do we mean by “world class”? The only way of making sense of such a term is to change how it is measured, and that means making high achievement “accessible” for all, even when it is not deserved. The school system will be gamed to allow more pupils to take easier GCSEs and, in turn, schools will be judged to be adding more value to each “learner”. By changing what is measured, you change the choices made. On the surface it will appear that greater breadth has indeed been achieved, and with no trade-off in standards, but look a little closer and you will see pupils with weaker GCSEs unsuited to A levels or university. By then, though, it will be another government’s set of problems, which will, no doubt, establish an enquiry before calling for another curriculum review that will deliver another set of recommendations for another world-class education. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
