- Professor Sir Chris Husbands was Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University between 2016 and 2023 and is now a Director of Higher Futures, working with university leaders to lead sustainable solutions to institutional challenges.
Almost everyone has views on the school curriculum. It’s too academic; it’s not academic enough; it’s too crowded; it has major omissions; it’s too subject-dominated; it doesn’t spend enough time on subject depth. Debates about the curriculum can be wearying: just as everyone has a view on the school curriculum, so almost everyone has views about what should be added to it, though relatively few people have equally forceful ideas about what should be dropped to make room for Latin, or personal finance education, or more civic education and so on.
One of the achievements of Becky Francis’s interim report on school curriculum and assessment is that it tries to turn most of these essentially philosophical (or at least opinionated) propositions into debates about evidence and effectiveness and to use those conclusions to set out a route to more specific recommendations which will follow later in the year. It’s no small achievement. As the report says, and as Becky has maintained in interviews, ‘all potential reforms come with trade-offs’ (p 8); the key is to be clear about the nature of those trade-offs so that there can be an open, if essentially political debate about how to weight them.
The methodology adopted by Becky and her panel points towards an essentially evolutionary approach for both curriculum and assessment reform. The first half of that quoted sentence on trade-offs is an assertion that ‘our system is not perfect’ (p 8) and of course, no system is. But the report is largely positive about key building blocks of the system, and it proposes that they will remain: the structure of four key stages, which has been in place since the 1980s; the early focus on phonics as the basis of learning to read, which has been a focus of policy since the 2000s; the knowledge-rich, subject-based approach which has been in place for the last decade; and the essentials of the current assessment arrangements with formal testing at the end of Key Stage 2 (age 11), key stage 4 (essentially GCSEs) and post-16 which were established in the 1988 Education Reform Act.
More directly relevant to higher education, the report’s view is that ‘the A level route is seen as strong, well-respected and widely recognised, and facilitates progression to higher education’ (p 30) and that ‘A-levels provide successful preparation for a three-year degree’ (p 7). Whilst the review talks about returning to assess ‘whether there are opportunities to reduce the overall volume of assessment at key stage 4’ (p 41), it does not propose doing so for A-level. The underlying message is one of system stability, because ‘many aspects of the current system are working well’ (p 5).
However: one of the most frequently used words in the interim report is, in fact, ‘however’: the word appears 29 times on 37 pages of body text, and that doesn’t include synonyms including ‘but’ (32 appearances), ‘while’ (19 appearances) and a single ‘on the other hand’. Frequently, ‘however’ is used to undercut an initial judgement. The national curriculum has been a success (p 17),'[h]owever, excellence is not yet provided for all: persistent gaps remain’, The panel “share the widely held ambition to promote high standards. However, in practice, “high standards” currently too often means ‘high standards for some’”(p 5).
These ‘however’ formulations have three effects: first, and not unreasonably in an interim report, they defer difficult questions for the final report. The final report promises deep dives ‘to diagnose each subject’s specific issues and explore and test a range of solutions’, and ‘about the specificity, relevance, volume and diversity of content’ (p.42). It’s this which will prove very tough for the panel, because it is always detail which challenges in curriculum change. If the curriculum as a whole is always a focus for energetic debate, individual subjects and their structure invariably arouse very strong passions. The report sets up a future debate here about teacher autonomy, arguing, perhaps controversially in an implied ‘however’ that ‘lack of specificity can, counter-intuitively, contribute to greater curriculum volume, as teachers try to cover all eventualities’ (p 28).
Secondly, and in almost every case, the ‘however’ undercuts the positive systems judgement: ‘the system is broadly working well, and we intend to retain the mainstay of existing arrangements. However, there are opportunities for improvement’ (p 8). It’s a repeated rhetorical device which plays both to broad stability and the need for extensive change, and it suggests that some of the technical challenges are going to rest on value – and so political – judgements about how to balance the competing needs of different groups. Sometimes the complexity of those interests overwhelms the systems judgements. The review’s intention is to return to 16-19 questions, “with the aim of building on the successes of existing academic and technical pathways, particularly considering [possibly another implied ‘however’] how best to support learners who do not study A levels or T Levels” (p 9) is right to focus on the currently excluded, but the problem is often mapping a route through overly rigid structures.
The qualifications system has been better geared for higher attainers, perhaps exemplified by the EBacc [English Baccalaureate] of conventional academic subjects. Although the Panel cites evidence that a portfolio of academic subjects aids access to higher education, ‘there is little evidence to suggest that the EBacc combination [of subjects] per se has driven better attendance to Russell Group universities’ (p 24) – the latter despite the rapid growth of high tariff universities’ market share over recent years. This issue is linked to one of the most curious aspects of the report from an evidential point of view. It is overwhelmingly positive about T-levels, ‘a new, high-quality technical route for young people who are clear about their intended career destination’ which ‘show great promise’ (p 7). But (“however”) take up (2% of learners) has been very poor, and not just because not all 16-year-olds are ‘clear about their intended career pathway’. The next phase of the Review promises to ‘look at how we can achieve the aim of a simpler, clearer offer which provides strong academic and technical/vocational pathways for all’ (p 31). But that ‘simpler, clearer offer’ has defied either technical design or political will for a very long time. If it is to succeed, the review will need to consider approaches which allow combinations of vocational and academic qualifications at 16-19, partly because much higher education is both vocational and academic and more because at age 16, most learners do not have an ‘intended career pathway’.
And thirdly, related to that, the ‘howevers’ unveil a theme which looms over the report, the big challenge for national reform which seeks to deliver excellence for all. Pulling evidence together from across the report tells us that 80% of pupils met the expected standard in the phonics screening check and at age 11, 61% of pupils achieved the expected standards in reading, writing and maths (p 17). Some 40% of young people did not achieve level 2 (a grade 4 or above at GCSE) in English and maths by age 16 (p 30). To simplify: attainment gaps open early; they are not closed by the curriculum and assessment system, and one of the few graphs in the report (p 18) suggests that they are widening, leaving behind a large minority of learners who struggle to access a qualifications system which is not working for them. As the report says, the requirement to repeat GCSE English and Maths has been especially problematic.
The report is thorough, technical and thoughtful; it is evolutionary not revolutionary, and none the worse for that. Curriculum and assessment policy is full of interconnection and unintended consequences. There are tough challenges in system design to secure excellence and equity, inclusion and attainment, and to address those ‘howevers’. The difficult decisions have been left for the final report.