19 March 2025 - 4:45pm
Yesterday’s publication of the interim report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review gives the strongest sense yet of what schools will be told to teach under this Labour government. Perhaps the most alarming recommendation is that pupils in England should take fewer GCSE exams than they currently have to. It is in keeping with the report’s other suggestions, which point to a narrowing of academic expectations and a predictable emphasis on trying to take the stress and anxiety out of exams.
Indeed, anybody concerned with maintaining high academic standards in our schools should be worried by its main messages. The “broad and balanced curriculum” referred to throughout will not be as broad or as balanced as the one it is set to replace, and these platitudes stem from a misguided desire not to damage pupils’ mental health.
The report’s authors claim that “half of those who completed their key stage 4 exams or assessments in summer 2024 found it difficult (41%) or very difficult (10%) to cope with stress during the exam period.” But exams inevitably cause stress, and young people complaining about taking them should not be news to anyone involved in schools. It doesn’t mean we have to act on what they say: after all, sometimes the adults really do know best.
Young people must learn to become emotionally resilient. If we keep deferring this fundamental adult quality, then we actively contribute to them being unqualified for adult life — regardless of how many certificates they have. High-stakes final assessments are the fairest way of measuring attainment: they eliminate teacher bias, and are surely better than any alternative model. And the more papers taken, the more likely it is that the final grade will be an accurate reflection of that student’s knowledge. Reduce a GCSE to one paper and the only decline you will see is in the fairness of that final grade: the stress is just delayed.
Ever since Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson appointed Professor Becky Francis to chair the review, the worry for all of us working in education was that diversity and inclusion would become the twin lodestars guiding all educational priorities. Francis has a long history of viewing schools as “damaging organisations”, and so for her it is logical to see a teacher’s role as being essentially palliative rather than academic.
By extension, if you feel that setting by ability is an act of “violence”, as Francis has also written, then discipline, competition, monitoring, examination and exclusion are different tools used to enact institutional control and promote certain systemic “hierarchies”. Put simply, for many progressive educationalists such as Francis, the way to get around schools failing children is to change what and how they teach. These themes are evident in this report, and no doubt will be recommended in more detail and with greater force when the full review is published in the autumn. Phillipson will almost certainly give it her full support.
There are some parts of the report which are to be welcomed, but they are obscured by an agenda that sees teaching and learning as tools for effecting social change. The Curriculum Review will become the foundation of one of the most important and lasting pieces of legislation this government will introduce during this parliament. This report suggests that academic rigour will become secondary to other politically determined issues. The stakes could not be higher; and should this reform fail, it will be our children who suffer.
David James is deputy head at a leading independent school in London, and also teaches at a local state school.
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