When Michael Gove launched his curriculum reforms in 2011, he highlighted the country’s “plummet” down international league tables, and promised to “catch up with the world’s top performers”.
Nearly 15 years on, England’s primary pupils are the best in the western world, according to those same attainment tables. And secondary pupils are, relatively speaking, doing markedly better. Does that mean the curriculum reforms have been a soaraway success? Schools Week investigates…
Build networks, stick around
While the previous iteration of the national curriculum in 2007 faced accusations of being “trendy” and “new age”, that is not an allegation Nick Gibb and Michael Gove needed to worry about in 2011.
Instead, the charge against their version was that it was Gradgrindian. In 2007, the goal had been “personalisation”, flexibility, and freeing up space for cross-curricula learning and teachers’ professional judgment. In 2011, it was about a common entitlement to “the best that had been thought and said”.
Gibb and Gove had spent years in opposition, forming a set of quite distinctive ideas about what education should be like
“Gibb and Gove had spent years in opposition, forming a set of quite distinctive ideas about what education should be like,” says policy specialist Loic Menzies. “Those views were explicitly at odds with the status quo.”
Tim Oates, who led the 2011 national curriculum review, explains the new approach: “Teacher-led, knowledge-rich, subject discipline-focused didactics and pedagogy were seen as a better-evidenced approach to securing high attainment and high equity.”
Most of the new national curriculum came into force in September 2014.
Ten years on, we all know the buzzwords: content-heavy, facts, rigour, high standards. Everything mostly assessed by a final exam (not coursework).
The curriculum drew heavily on some US academics, notably E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham, and adopted principles from the world’s highest-performing countries.
When asked why he thinks the reforms were successful, former long-serving schools minister Gibb says: “The arguments are very, very compelling. Knowledge builds knowledge. The more knowledge you have, the more you can acquire.”
Another key element was “building up networks of people that were already thinking these things. That helped build a movement, and that’s how you change ideas.”
Menzies adds: “Ministers realised their case would be strengthened if they had back-up from allies in the teaching profession… to make the argument for the reforms– even if those individuals didn’t share ministers’ Conservative politics.”
There is also undoubtedly a lesson about longevity. Despite Gove leaving office in 2014, the “direction of policy remained solidly in place, not least due to Gibb’s long tenure as ‘heavy lifting’ schools minister”, Oates writes in an Institute for Government paper.
Academy autonomy clash
Jonathan Simons, a partner at Public First, says it’s “under-appreciated” how much curriculum was meant to be the single biggest thing that government wanted to do. “It was what Gibb cared about. But structures overshadowed it.”
And the two clashed. Oates says academies not having to follow the national curriculum was “undermining its power as a universal policy instrument”.
He attributes the rise in international rankings to “very illiberal” interventions, such as maths mastery and phonics.
But adds: “On the one hand, there was a political impetus to shrink the state and increase autonomy of schools; on the other, a desire to see highly specific, evidence-driven practice. This is a fraught tension and remains entirely unreconciled.”
It is a tension across many other Conservative policies. So how does Gibb, who leaned more to the control side of the debate, square it all?
“If you just have structural reform, there’s a danger nothing changes: that the sector uses autonomy to do what it’s always done,” he says.
“You need both structural change and a standards agenda. You need ministers challenging orthodoxies when the evidence says the orthodoxies don’t work.
“And when the evidence is so overwhelming for these things – knowledge-rich, maths mastery, phonics – politicians have a duty to engage in this debate, at the very least.”
Labour now says all academies will have to follow the national curriculum, which Matt Hood, the chief executive of the Oak National Academy, says is the right thing to do.
“But we need to mitigate the risk to innovation. If everyone is doing the same thing, where are the next brilliant ideas coming from?”
The trusted few
And there are wider curriculum issues.
Dr Helen Drury, the founder of Ark Curriculum Plus and who was involved in the 2011 curriculum review, says: “There’s a lot of content that lacks a clear rationale. There was a temptation to borrow content from high-performing jurisdictions, rather than pursuing coherence.”
She suggests the lack of a “shared vision” was partly down to the government “carrying out the whole review with just a trusted few [advisers]” in a bid to be free of “interest groups hammering away at each other”.
“But one of the strengths in this country is a brilliant national community of education experts with decades and decades of experience and expertise – and they didn’t want to use it.”
Liz Robinson, the chief executive of the Big Education academy trust, says this “closed shop” extended to the wider curriculum debate.
“The change was done really aggressively. If you disagreed, it was ‘of course you would say that, you’re part of the Blob’. It made me want to opt out. It created division. Opposing views were vilified.
“If you argue against ‘knowledge-rich’, the opposite is knowledge-poor. So, it was a clever argument [by government]. But it’s more about knowledge ‘and’. Other things matter too.”
Becks Boomer-Clark, the chief executive of Academies Enterprise Trust, adds: “All we did was hurl abuse from one side to the other.
“Fixing the system … is much easier if it’s anchored by a really powerful and compelling shared vision of what we’re trying to build.”
But Gibb says Labour will be judged “on how effective its policies are, not on whether 70 per cent of the people it consulted were in favour of it”.
The accountability problem
Sir Jon Coles, the chief executive of the United Learning trust, says curriculum also has an accountability problem.
“It should be the national curriculum that is driving what’s assessed – to give an accurate measure of how well children have learnt the curriculum. That’s the rational model.
“But we’ve got it backwards now. Accountability is driving everything. It’s increasingly having a backwards effect on [which] qualifications [schools choose], and a backward effect on curriculum.”
The EBacc is a prime example. Introduced in 2010 as an additional performance measure, it shows how many pupils take a core group of subjects deemed academic.
“It is the cheapest and most effective bit of policy-making I’ve ever seen,” Oates says. “It wasn’t a legal requirement – but schools starting closing music departments the following Tuesday.”
More than 40 per cent of schools no longer enter any pupils for music GCSE or drama.
Peter Hyman, a former headteacher and ex-adviser to Sir Keir Starmer, says the EBacc just “crowded out a lot of things we want every young person to be studying at school.”
For Coles, it “illustrates how much control government has through these mechanisms, how over-responsive schools are to what government says, and how accountability is too dominant in driving what happens in schools.
“It’s not a stupid idea to look at how many children achieve well across the traditional basket of academic qualifications. But if it starts to hugely distort what qualifications people are put in for, that’s a mad system.”
Those international league tables aren’t all rosy either. They also show 15-year-olds in the UK now have the second lowest average life satisfaction across all countries who take part.
Meanwhile, the disadvantage gap – another of the Tory government’s KPIs – is widening again.
Enter the Spielman
When Ofsted picked up the curriculum baton in 2019, it didn’t just finish off the revolution, it put it on steroids.
“Intent, implementation and impact” became the new buzzwords. Teachers took photographs of practical lessons to stick in books, just in case that subject got a new “deep dive” from an inspector. Most schools ditched three-year GCSEs.
Then chief inspector Amanda Spielman said inspections had placed “too much weight on exam results”. Most in the sector welcomed the shift towards looking more widely at what kids were being taught.
Michael Fordham, the headteacher of T hetford Academy in Norfolk, says it was the right focus and, “despite all its flaws”, the 2019 Ofsted framework was “the best we’ve had”.
But he suggests it was “doomed from the outset because Ofsted doesn’t have the capacity to send subject-specialist inspectors to schools”.
“It didn’t matter how well you trained inspectors … you can’t ask a maths specialist to, say, do a deep dive on music. It’s easy to get them to ask the right questions, but they don’t have enough knowledge about what the gold standard is.”
Spielman says the quality of inspector training has never been better, but she adds government funding constrains what the inspectorate can do.
Becky Allen, the co-founder of Teacher Tapp, believes this has led to what some felt was a disproportionate focus in inspections on safeguarding.
“Inspectors might observe things they have disquiet about around the quality of education, but don’t feel capable of giving an unsatisfactory judgment – because they aren’t the right experts to do that.
“But you can fail a school on safeguarding because it’s concrete, and you can observe a concrete thing.”
And history teacher Tom Rogers says the inspection “injustice” just shifted. While “cold hard data” favoured schools with fewer poorer pupils, curriculum favoured those with “the gift of the gab and who could present a ‘coherent and knowledge-rich curriculum’ in lovely mind maps and diagrams”.
This was a particular issue for primary and small schools, with fewer staff and subject specialists.
While intentions were good, Hood says Ofsted’s expectations on non-subject specialist staff in those schools, and non-specialist inspectors, was “too high. It’s really hard to create a rigorous carefully sequenced curriculum in all subjects – never mind inspect it. It’s even harder if you aren’t a subject specialist.”
Government should stop behaving like a one-club golfer
Worth the millions of hours?
Former headteacher Michael Merrick, a diocesan schools commissioner for the Diocese of Lancaster, laments the “resource and millions of hours of workload that has gone into the curriculum fad … for little measurable benefit.
“Curriculum is important. But are the hours that have gone into admin, the CPD for deep dives, the fretting over minutiae, the endless revision and review and editing of paper plans, the anxiety (especially for smaller schools) about all this holding up in inspection? No.”
For many, it also comes back down to the wider issue of the wrong things driving behaviour.
“Why did it take the inspectorate to turn schools’ attention to curriculum?” Drury asks. “We don’t want people doing this because Ofsted is looking for it, or exams require it.
“We want them teaching it because they really understand how it’s going to change the life chances of young people.”
But Spielman says it “set a better incentive through inspection that encourages people to do the right thing [teach a broad curriculum] – and the feedback we got was that people were happy to be incentivised to do the things they’ve always wanted.”
Claire Stoneman, head of Four Dwellings Academy, adds the reforms have also “made teachers super engaged. It’s been a new age of curriculum evidence and research, and it’s liberated teachers.”
For Allen, the shift poses a bigger question for our inspection model – can it even work?
Ofsted had tried inspecting pedagogy and then outcomes, but both were “found wanting”.
Curriculum was the “last of the three-legged stool”, but it “ended up being a bit of a monster that created this incredible frenzy of behaviour.
However she adds: “We know that teachers love curriculum and lesson planning. So we could look back and say this has been a success because given all of the dysfunctional and impossible ways that Ofsted could judge schools, at least we did one that was kind of enjoyable for teachers.”
What next for the curriculum revolution?
Gibb describes his work as “blowing up prevailing orthodoxies that were so cemented in our system”.
Knowledge-rich is the new concrete. But, this time, Labour has no plans to blow it up.
Despite pledging a curriculum review, any changes will “build on the hard work of teachers who have brought their subjects alive with knowledge-rich syllabuses”, the party says.
Oates says other countries that moved towards “competence-based” curriculum are now “re-examining the role of knowledge in the curriculum and looking with interest at Gove’s reforms”.
Fordham adds there is “a lot of good in the English system. We don’t need to burn everything to the ground and start from scratch.”
It’s an approach Labour is taking. It has promised curriculum “evolution not revolution”, and to deliver “phonics for maths”.
But it will ensure the curriculum is “rich and broad, inclusive, and innovative”, and it plans to update Progress 8 so it includes “at least one creative or vocational subject”.
Ben Gadsby, head of policy at Impetus, says Labour “needs a governing philosophy. That helps weigh up questions like ‘which skills are relevant?’ Just saying ‘the current [curriculum] isn’t working’ won’t work.”
Drury adds: “We need to be clearer about why we’re being ambitious, and which knowledge and skills in those subjects are important and why – rather than it’s just because it’s what’s on the test, or what Ofsted wants.”
Coles says the government should stop “behaving like a one-club golfer. Instead of changing the accountability system and changing the incentives, a much better model is to think through in curriculum and teaching learning terms: ‘What do we want to actually happen?’. ‘What is working, and what isn’t working?’. ‘How do we change that?’ ‘And how do we get assessment to line up to that?’.”
Laura McInerney, a former Schools Week editor, suggests a curriculum review panel that could answer such questions – but in rolling blocks, with each new government restricted on how many experts it could sub in and out.
“It would mean the curriculum is constantly open to new ideas, but each year group’s curriculum is only updated once every 10 years or so.”
It would mean the curriculum is constantly open to new ideas, but each year group’s curriculum is only updated once every 10 years or so
Oates says it is a better model to the “big bang” review every ten years, which “rips capacity out of the system. Teaching notes, practices, materials all become out of date.”
The idea was recommended to Gibb, but a source said he was worried about “political capture” of the process.
Robinson wants a broader debate. “Obsessing about whether we should teach the Tudors in year 9 is a bit like rearranging the deckchairs.
“The deeper and more fundamental points are ‘what are these young people learning about themselves and the world by being in this school’.”
While it’s not the attention-grabbing headline politicians crave, Teacher Tapp data shows staff would actually like less content in the national curriculum.
Dylan Wiliam, an adviser on the 2014 curriculum, thinks it is “immoral” there is too much content, as it damages the future learning capabilities of the least able.
Hyman says the Conservatives thought “cramming more knowledge earlier in someone’s school life would be a better way of catching up with those countries. But it turned them off learning.
“There’s a problem of quantity over quality. That has been one of the downsides.”
Fordham adds wider issues are also hindering progress, pointing to the recruitment crisis and the “systematic dismantling” of subject-specific training in a move to “highly generic models”.
