In 1939 the American educator Harold Benjamin published a book of satirical essays, The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum. One tells the story of a Stone Age man called “New-Fist-Hammer-Maker”. New-Fist sets up a school that teaches “fish-grabbing-with-the-bare-hands”, “woolly-horse-clubbing” and “sabretooth-tiger-scaring-with-fire”. But then, an ice age comes, and the environment changes so that the Palaeolithic people can no longer grab fish with their bare hands or catch woolly horses to club them. Then, the sabretooth tigers go extinct, and New-Fist’s tiger-scaring techniques become “only academic exercises”.
Tribesmen invent new methods of catching food and protecting themselves. These skills are “indispensable to modern existence”, people begin to argue, so why aren’t they taught? The school says there isn’t space for “these fads and frills” alongside the “standard cultural subjects” of fish-grabbing, horse-clubbing and tiger-scaring: “The essence of true education is timeless. You must know that there are some eternal verities, and the sabretooth curriculum is one of them!”
Debates about what children should be taught, and when and how and why, are old – perhaps not Palaeolithic, but old enough to have been the subject of parody for centuries. Such arguments continue to rage: about whether children should be taught a canon of knowledge, or skills for modern life; about the authority of the teacher over the mind of the child; and, increasingly, about what we teach children about Britain’s place in the world.
At their heart is a deeper question: what is school for? Should it prepare children to take an economically productive place in the workforce, or to thrive in the academic rigour of university? Does it have a more holistic purpose, to create well-rounded, emotionally mature members of society? And is it possible to design a curriculum that works for children who will go on to be doctors and lawyers and those who will be bus drivers and mechanics?
It is these questions of purpose, as much as any arguments over diversity or decolonisation, that make the curriculum and its revision so contentious, and with which Labour and its curriculum review must now do battle.
The curriculum taught in English schools is that pioneered by Michael Gove. In the 15 years since his tenure as education secretary began, classrooms have been dominated by his thinking, which, though divisive, has been credited with raising standards – a rare Tory success story. The stakes, then, are high for Labour’s review. Get it right and it can take ownership of education; get it wrong and it will invite the same criticisms it faces over the Schools Bill: that progress is being sacrificed for ideology.
Curriculum reform is, relatively speaking, an inexpensive way for a secretary of state to make their mark. Labour’s review is led by Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation and former head of the UCL Institute of Education. Its areas of focus, as identified in its 18 March interim report, are: equity in attainment; an “imbalance between breadth and depth”; the need for digital literacy in the AI age; confusion in the provision of vocational qualifications; and concerns over the volume of 16-19 exams. Its final report is expected this autumn. Many teachers – for whom each new curriculum necessitates hours of work, translating it into lesson plans – will be reassured by the promise of “evolution, not revolution”. The interim report is careful to note that the panel “recognises the hard-won successes and educational improvements of the last quarter-century”: the house will be renovated, not bulldozed.
In the most simple terms, a national curriculum is a list of what children should know at a certain age. The primary curriculum for maths, for example, specifies that by the end of Year 2, children should know number bonds (simple sums) to 20. It might also feature skills we want children to develop – critical thinking, or communication – and values we want them to embody. It does not (with the exception, in the present iteration, of the phonics approach to reading) specify pedagogy, meaning teachers are free to decide how to teach.
The changes made on Francis’s recommendations will be the fifth time the curriculum has been revised. Before England’s first national curriculum was introduced in 1988, control was held by local authorities. This variation between regions caused problems when pupils moved between them. “It got very, very ragged,” Kenneth Baker, who as Margaret Thatcher’s education secretary was the architect of the first curriculum, told me. “The good schools had good curriculums, and the mediocre schools had mediocre curriculums, and the poor schools had poor curriculums.”
When Baker’s curriculum, which mandated pupils learn ten subjects up to 16, began arriving in schools, it was immediately apparent that it was too full. Its content was divided into colour-coded binders for each subject. “The pile of papers detailing changes often reached well above a metre in staff rooms,” Peter Mortimer writes in Education Under Siege.
In the early Nineties under John Major, the first review, led by Ron Dearing, was commissioned with the aim of “slimming down” the curriculum and making it “less prescriptive”. The resulting syllabus, published in 1995, was reduced in content by some 20 per cent. The second revisions were published under Tony Blair, and stripped back requirements for non-core subjects to allow more time for the “three Rs” of reading, writing and arithmetic.
In July 2007, under the then education secretary Ed Balls, a new secondary curriculum was introduced that claimed to contain “less prescribed subject content” and more “focus on the key concepts” underlying each subject. (A review of the primary curriculum was also conducted, but its implementation halted after the 2010 election.) Balls said his secondary curriculum would protect “the classic elements… that have stood the test of time such as Shakespeare, algebra, historic dates and the world wars”. But he also wanted children to “learn skills to help them excel in a fast-changing world”: “skills that increasingly employers and universities demand”. Pupils would study the British empire and the slave trade; there was no mention of Henry VIII and his wives. Budgeting and climate change were in, as was – thanks to Jamie Oliver – cooking.
Michael Gove, David Cameron’s education secretary, considered these reforms a serious error, and on entering government in 2010 set up his own review. Tim Oates, the educationalist who led it, argued Balls’s curriculum diverged from those of high-performing systems around the world. “It had been so stripped of concepts: photosynthesis was no longer in there,” he told me. “Key concepts in science… history and literature were absent.”
Balls and Gove, however, had one common objective. Labour’s approach in the late 2000s was informed by the Every Child Matters agenda – established in 2003 after the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié in 2000 – which aimed, among other things, “to ensure that every child has the chance to fulfil their potential by reducing levels of educational failure”. The 2010 white paper laid out a similar aim: “Our schools should be engines of social mobility, helping children to overcome the accidents of birth… to achieve much more than they may ever have imagined.” But Gove’s methods could not have been more different.
When Michael Gove entered the Department for Education (DfE), promising the end of “vapid happy talk” and the restoration of academic rigour, he reignited education’s oldest culture war: traditionalists versus progressives. Traditionalists favour what the public might consider a Victorian approach: the teacher is the sole source of authority in the classroom, and their role is to teach directly a defined set of knowledge. Its inculcation is tested through recall quizzing – which, its critics say, encourages rote-learning. Ken Robinson – a progressive – calls this a “factory model” that destroys individuality and the innate creativity of children.
Progressives consider traditionalist learning styles passive and oppressive. They favour a child-centred model, with the teacher as a facilitator rather than instructor; they might use group work, “learning by doing” and cross-curricular projects. Influenced by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johns Locke, Piaget and Dewey, they believe children should learn and explore for themselves. Progressives might emphasise skills such as problem-solving, or traits such as creativity. Crucially, they often resist the idea that there exists a single body of knowledge that should be taught, on the basis that all pupils are different.
The Balls reforms, Gove believed, were typical of the “fatuous enunciation of high-sounding but empty goals” progressives favoured. His schools minister Nick Gibb recalled: “Michael and I discovered… that the degree to which a school was progressive… was the degree to which its results would be underperforming.” They would return education to the traditionalists. With some hyperbole, Gove told the Tory party conference in 2010 that the curriculum had been undermined by “ideologues” who didn’t believe in schools “doing anything so old-fashioned as passing on knowledge, requiring children to work hard, or immersing them in anything like dates in history or times tables in mathematics”.
Gove referred to his critics among teachers, academics, bureaucrats and unions as “the blob”. “What the right were able to do was create this bogeyman of the blob… this profession, teachers, who were so enslaved to wokeism that they didn’t want to teach children anything,” Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers from 2003 to 2017, told me. “That is just such an offensive mischaracterisation.”
The Gove and Gibb reforms explicitly drew on the work of the American educationalist ED Hirsch, the father of the neo-traditionalist movement. Sam Freedman, an adviser at the DfE from 2010 to 2013, told me, “Nick [Gibb] would give ED Hirsch to anyone who walked into his office.” Hirsch considers knowledge to be cumulative: “If we want our children to be broadly competent readers, thinkers, and problem solvers, they must have a rich, broad store of background knowledge to call upon.”
A consequence of Gove’s focus on a “core, knowledge-based, fact-rich entitlement” was the demotion of skills. But the Francis Review’s interim report found parents want more focus on competencies such as budgeting and interview techniques. “The essence of effective learning is not what you have digested,” Bousted said. “It’s how you can use what you’ve learned… in a new area – whether you can merge it into work in another discipline, whether you can use it for your own ends.” Developing such skills, as David Miliband put it in 2003, was “learning how to learn in preparation for a lifetime of change”.
There are those who argue that this “lifetime of change” will render much knowledge irrelevant. Baker told me: “You no longer need a knowledge-rich curriculum, but to say that is outrageous. The students already have in their pocket [on their smartphone] all the knowledge that they need… It’s the use of knowledge that’s important in the next ten or 20 years, not the acquisition of knowledge.”
Might the ever-changing online world be a reason to maintain a canon of knowledge? The educational consultant Lucy Crehan argues that knowledge is key to tackling misinformation. “If [children] have a basic science understanding of key bodily systems… they’re much less likely to be misled by someone that says that if you have sex standing up, you won’t get pregnant.”Indeed, the interim report, while emphasising the need for greater digital literacy, describes knowledge as “the best investment” to equip young people for “a world of rapid technological and social change”.
Most educators agree that the binary between skills and knowledge is false. They are “two sides of the same coin”, Bousted said. “You can’t teach skills in the abstract, but neither can you ignore them and just say they will come as a result of knowledge.” As Hirsch puts it, knowledge and skills are like scrambled eggs: you can’t unscramble them.
Freedman believes the division of knowledge and skills “is a complete category error”: it’s not that you need both, but that they are the same thing. “A skill is knowledge that has been built up in stages; a skill is knowledge.” Freedman uses the example of driving a car – a skill that comprises lots of small parts of knowledge: “How to use the gear stick, how to use the pedals.” Put academic rigour first, Gove believed, and the rest would follow.
Crucial to Hirsch’s core knowledge entitlement is the concept of “cultural capital”. The phrase was coined in 1977 by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to refer, critically, to the way privilege is passed between generations: some children – but crucially, not all – learn the mannerisms, references and social cues that allow them to pass frictionlessly through the halls of power. The reintroduction of Latin under the Tories (the funding for which has been cut by Labour) is a prime example of cultural capital: Latin is not essential knowledge – it is, like the sabretooth tiger, extinct – but it confers social status.
Hirsch flips Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital on its head: a curriculum, he wrote, should “place all children on common ground, sharing a common body of knowledge”.
“The difference between middle-class kids and kids from more deprived backgrounds is that typically you don’t have the same conversations, you don’t have the same cultural resources,” Oates told me. “If you don’t acquire… these bodies of knowledge through school, you’re not going to get them anywhere else, or it’s going to be difficult for you. The role of knowledge in bringing about a greater equity and attainment in society is just fundamental.”
The idea that education can lift children out of poverty is instinctively appealing, and Gove seized upon it. Speaking to the House of Commons Education Select Committee in July 2010, he referred to research by the Institute of Education that tested children at 22 months and again at six, and found that, on average, toddlers with low ability from the wealthiest families overtook high-achieving children from the poorest within a few years: “In effect, rich thick kids do better than poor clever children when they arrive at schools.” Disadvantaged students must be held to the same high standards as their more advantaged peers. Any other approach was, Gove said (borrowing a phrase from George W Bush), “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
The first schools were established in Britain in the 6th century, when St Augustine started “song” schools, which taught the performance of church services, and “grammar” schools, which taught Latin and literature. They were both vocational and concerned with spiritual enrichment. Alfred the Great broadened the purpose of education when he insisted English be taught as well as Latin: school became a means of kingdom-building, creating a unified culture in the face of Viking incursions. As Christianity spread, the Church needed to raise up priests across the country, offering the able a route out of their circumstances.
In quick succession, the invention of the printing press, the Renaissance and the Reformation transformed access to knowledge, and embedded the notion that there was value in education for its own sake. But with this opening up came the fear that knowledge could be revolutionary. By the 15th century, a new tension was emerging: education was the preserve of the elite, but it could also be a tool for social mobility. Eton, for instance, offered “free” education, but the wealthy paid for their living expenses, while poorer students worked to settle them. By 1862 the reformer James Kay-Shuttleworth called for the introduction of universal education explicitly because “the diffusion of knowledge amongst the working classes” would “promote the maintenance of public order”. With the introduction of free school meals in 1906, schools also began ensuring children’s welfare.
And so at the beginning of the 20th century, Britain was left with several, potentially conflicting answers to the question: what is school for? It could be the seed of revolution, or a means of maintaining the social order; a tool for self-betterment, or training for work; a place where children’s social, emotional and physical needs could be attended to.
The 1944 Education Act, introduced by the Conservative minister Rab Butler, established free state education for all up to 15, but it was another three decades before government involved itself in what pupils should learn. James Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin College speech began the “Great Debate” about state intervention in what the Tory politician David Eccles called the “secret garden” of the curriculum: “In today’s world, higher standards are demanded than were required yesterday and there are simply fewer jobs for those without skill. Therefore we demand more from our schools than did our grandparents.”
Deindustrialisation further changed expectations of schools. In the mid 1980s, just 40 per cent of 16- and 17-year-olds were in full-time education. For those entering employment at the end of mandatory schooling, prospects were increasingly limited. In his memoir Education, Education, Education, Andrew Adonis recalls a headteacher in Sunderland saying while his students would once have got jobs in the shipyards or the mines, “All those jobs have gone now. They might as well walk straight on into the sea.”
In the 1990s more pressure was put on schools to raise the quality of education. With this came greater emphasis on standardised exams and league table results – and a narrower definition of “success”. Increasingly, results became the end goal of education, rather than simply a means of measuring it.
Accusations of narrowness have dogged the curriculum since its inception. Baker compared the scope of Gove’s with that of the 1904 syllabus for grammar schools: “It’s word-for-word an Edwardian curriculum.” It is a neat illustration of the circularity of these conversations that the same comparison was drawn with Baker’s curriculum by the London Institute of Education’s Richard Aldrich in 1988.
Thatcher wanted the curriculum to comprise only the “core” subjects – English, maths and science – but Baker wanted something broader, and so “foundation subjects” such as art and music were included. These categories (and the ranking of priority they might represent) endure today; David Bell, then the head of Ofsted, criticised in 2004 what he called “the two-tier curriculum” in which foundation subjects were treated as afterthoughts.
In 2011 the coalition government introduced a performance indicator that exacerbated this. The EBacc measures how many pupils achieve grade 4-9 (equivalent to C-A*) in English, science, maths, a language and geography or history. It has no inherent benefit to the pupil – it is not a qualification – but its publication in league tables incentivises schools to focus on these subjects(a trend the review’s interim report recognises). Between 2009-10 and 2022-23, entries to arts GCSEs fell by 42 per cent. Gove’s DfE also removed modules and coursework from GCSE and A-level assessments, disadvantaging those children less suited to the exam hall.
Today, 90 per cent of 16- to 17-year-olds are in full-time education, and in 2019, almost 20 years to the day after Tony Blair pledged to send half of young people to university, the symbolic target was reached. But should the end goal of school be further education, rather than employment?
Since at least 1867, when a Schools Enquiry Commission report claimed Britain’s technical education put it at a disadvantage in manufacturing compared to other European countries, successive governments have tried and failed to resolve the question of vocational education. In 2014 a review by Alison Wolf, commissioned by Gove, reported numerous problems with the quality and proliferation of technical qualifications, including “an attitude that vocational education is a second choice, easy option for the less able”. Channelling apparently less academic students, who are more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds, into low-quality qualifications was the soft bigotry of low expectations at work once more. Conversely, Sammy Wright argues in Exam Nation, by forcing them to study “subjects that they can visibly see other ‘posher’ kids are more at home in, you are asserting to them in the strongest possible terms that who they are is not good enough”.
Given the crisis gripping the sector, the sustainability of university as the ultimate goal of school is under question, and there is pressure on the Francis Review to signal a way forward for alternative routes into meaningful employment. As Crehan told me, “eight academic GCSEs is not necessarily the right thing for everyone… at some point you need different pathways. Not everyone is going to go on and study law at Yale.” For Baker, quality vocational education that gives students workplace-specific skills and links them up with employers should be at the heart of the DfE’s offering if it wants to answer Rachel Reeves’ call for growth. Baker runs a charity that oversees university technical colleges (UTCs), which provide vocational education from 14. A quarter of UTC graduates go on to apprenticeships at 18 – six times the national average.
Giving all children the same opportunities is a fallacy, Baker told me. “One of the quotations I always used about the purpose of education was… from Shakespeare’s Pericles when he said that ‘The fire in the flint shows not til it be struck’… The purpose of education is to find the flint in everybody and to make a spark. All children, however indifferent they are, however disengaged they are, they’ve got a bit of flint somewhere. The purpose of education is to find that bit of flint, and you can’t just do it with Shakespeare or Dickens.”
In Hard Times, Dickens used his school board superintendent Thomas Gradgrind to satirise the utilitarian mindset: “Now, what I want is, Facts,” Gradgrind says. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.” When Gove’s new curriculum proposals were published in 2013, he was labelled “Gradgrind” Gove. More than 100 academics signed a letter to the Independent, warning the proposals “could severely erode educational standards” with their “endless lists of spellings, fact and rules. This mountain of data will not develop children’s ability to think, including problem-solving, critical understanding and creativity.”
A decade later, Francis is grappling with the amount of knowledge in the curriculum. Writing in the Times Educational Supplement, she highlighted two pressing issues for her review: teacher workload and an “overloaded curriculum”. Despite the 2010 Oates Review’s intention to tackle an “overblown curriculum specification” and “a ‘tick box’ approach to learning”, the present iteration is “very, very over-full”, Bousted said. The reforms of the 2010s brought “a lot of the knowledge that was taught later” into earlier years. As a result, teachers “march through content knowledge, which is why you end up with rote learning”.
Teacher Tapp, an app that surveys teachers, reports 68 per cent say they don’t have time to explore student interests due to “curriculum content pressure”, and one in four primary teachers says “there is a good chance” they won’t get through all the material. The interim report claims the amount of content in some subjects limits teachers’ capacity to “tailor, adapt or extend” material, and has a “knock-on impact on time for other subjects”.The exam board OCR has identified a similar trend in its consultation with teachers, its chief executive, Jill Duffy, told me: “They’re saying they’re just rushing through to get through the content. And what that means is they’re not having the opportunity to work on teaching broader skills with their students.”
Oates conceded to me that “there’s overload in primary, which broke with some of the key principles of the [2010-13] review”. The Francis Review could reasonably argue for a reduction in content in English and maths at primary, but the optics of doing so would clearly be poor for Labour.
At secondary, many criticisms of the curriculum are in fact criticisms of assessment, which increasingly informs subject content as students move through GCSE and A-level. Perhaps surprisingly for the head of an exam board, Duffy would like the Francis Review to reduce the amount of testing in later years – a measure the panel is contemplating.“Exams are vitally important, and the fairest form of assessment that we’ve got. But we think in Key Stage 4 [Years 10 and 11] it’s reached a point where we’ve got too much of a good thing… We’d like to see a reduction in the volume and intensity of exams in that short period at 16.” Half of the young people surveyed by the review reported they found it difficult or very difficult to cope with the stress of 16-19 exams. The panel will consider whether other forms of assessment could be reintroduced in some subjects – a measure the shadow education secretary Laura Trott said proves that the “soft bigotry of low expectations is back”.
But despite dissatisfaction with many elements of the Gove curriculum, in the decade it has been taught in schools a level of consensus has emerged aroundits approach. The interim report stresses an ongoing “commitment to a knowledge-rich curriculum”.
At the same time Gove was rewriting the English curriculum to specify more subject content, Scotland was doing the opposite. In 2002 Education Scotland began a national consultation process that led to the publication of a review in 2004. It found the curriculum should be reconsidered in the context of “global social, political and economic changes, and the particular challenges facing Scotland: the need to increase the economic performance of the nation; reflect its growing diversity; improve health, and reduce poverty”.
The nature of work had changed, the review argued, and so had understanding of how children learn. The reforms would give young people more “skills-for-work options”, opportunities to “realise their individual talents”, “more cross subject activity” and “more space” for topics such as sport, music, dance, sustainable development and enterprise.
The resulting Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), implemented in 2010-11, took a progressive approach, focusing on the experience of learning as well as its outcomes. It revised subjects into “curriculum areas”. Knowledge-specific content was replaced with skills-based competencies such as: “I can find, select and sort information from a variety of sources and use this for different purposes.”
Fifteen years on, the CfE is broadly considered a failure. Between 2006 and 2022, Scotland’s OECD Pisa scores fell by 35 points in Maths (to 21 points below England’s) and 32 points in science (20 points below). The Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy showed from 2011 until its abolition in 2020 a decline in both competencies. An Education Scotland review found secondary teachers “responded to the lack of a common base of knowledge” among children moving up from primary by “starting again”. The problem, Keir Bloomer, one of the CfE’s architects, told the Times, was that “we did not make sufficiently clear that… without knowledge there can be no skills”.
Knowledge, Scotland showed, must be at the core of education. But what knowledge?
It was the ambition of his new curriculum, Gove told the Education Reform Summit in London in July 2014, that education should introduce children to “the best that has been thought and said”. Here, he borrowed another phrase, this time from Matthew Arnold’s 1869 Culture and Anarchy. It is a noble aim, but who gets to decide what constitutes the best that has been thought and said?
“People often say, ‘We must take the politics out of education,’” Oates said. “But that’s a fantastically naive position.” We might “challenge the extent to which party politics is playing a role” in the curriculum, “but it’s always going to be driven by morality, ethics, political issues, the pressing issues of the day”. The nature of curriculum reform in England – that it happens irregularly and at ministerial whim – makes a review a rare opportunity “to get your thing in. That drives fairly contentious… debates, with people fearful that their opponent’s position is going to become dominant.”
The right fears one principle of the Francis Review interim report in particular: that it will seek to deliver “a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society” that ensures “children and young people can see themselves” in what they study.This aim will be warmly welcomed by the unions. In their submissions to the review, the Association of School and College Leaders and the National Association of Head Teachers have variously warned that the history and English syllabuses are “largely mono-cultural”, advised the new curriculum must “embed anti-racist and decolonised approaches”, and stressed “ethnicity and sexual orientation are under-represented in the national curriculum”.
English and history – fertile ground for the culture wars – were fiercely contested under Gove, and will be again in the discourse around the Francis Review. Historians including Simon Schama and Richard J Evans criticised Gove for his view that history ought to “celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world” and portray Britain as a “beacon of liberty for others to emulate”.
The secondary curriculum mandates students study “ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901”, with a suggestion this could include the slave trade. The Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, recommended the curriculum “embed statutory topics on race, migration and the British empire”, rather than focusing on “narrow, celebratory accounts of ‘our island story’”.
But Freedman believes calls to decolonise the curriculum are overstated. “I think it’s one of those examples where a very American phenomenon is getting argued over here.” The curriculum, he points out, doesn’t mandate that teachers portray Britain in an exclusively positive light: “You have to teach a bit of Churchill, but you don’t need to teach him as being a purely wonderful person.”
“There’s a tension between, on the one hand, this idea of cultural capital,” Crehan said, “and on the other hand, the aim of trying to change society through the curriculum. Although it may well be the case that lots of dead white men wrote or invented lots of amazing things and we want students to study them, you don’t want to give children this idea that therefore if they are young, black and female, that they can’t also do that.” Crehan believes we should over-represent women and communities that have previously been under-represented in our history.
At the Tory conference in 2010, Gove described British literature as “the best in the world” and said he wanted to see pupils reading Byron, Keats, Shelley, Austen, Dickens and Hardy. (It was, perhaps, a rebuke to Ed Balls, whose curriculum included contemporary writers such as Anthony Horowitz and Malorie Blackman.) American classics were removed from syllabuses, and by 2015 students could only study one post-1914 work at GCSE. This has not necessarily resulted in richer reading experiences: the emphasis on classic texts – both in the study of English and in “reading for pleasure” initiatives – has led to an increasing reliance on extracts and summaries.
It has also frustrated those concerned with diversity. In its submission to the Francis Review, the UK Literacy Trust complained the “national curriculum is dominated by narrow representations of modern society, with white, male, able-bodied, cisgender, standard English speaking authors and characters”.
Does applying principles of diversity to the canon dilute its quality? This was the criticism when in 2022 OCR removed Heaney and Larkin from its poetry anthology to create space for poets from British-Somali, British-Guyanese and Ukrainian backgrounds. Bousted, a former English teacher, argues “if you ignore that diversity, you miss out on so much good stuff… You’re missing out on seeing the world… and seeing the differences in the way people see the world through literature… It’s not just powerful for black pupils to read the work of black writers. It’s powerful for white pupils as well. And why should we think there’s a monopoly of knowledge and wisdom in our particular cultural setting? Particularly as that cultural setting is now so transformed.”
Traditionalists argue against a curriculum personalised to be more relatable: if you teach only with the knowledge and cultural references a child brings to school, you risk embedding disadvantage. Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School, for example, has criticised those who say Stormzy should be taught over Mozart, “especially when teaching black kids as they think this is ‘relevant’ to their lives”: “It is the same with denying Shakespeare and other literary greats to various unprivileged kids.” But by passing on a canon of knowledge, do we ensure the cultural status quo is replicated, rather than encouraging children to change it?
“There is a juggling act, I think, in terms of the purpose of schooling,” Oates said. “How far do we want people to stand on the shoulders of giants… in other words, reproduce existing culture… And how much do we want to prepare kids for the future?”
Much has been made in the right-wing press of Becky Francis’s academic work on gender and education – a subject on which she has authored several books. Yet Francis told the Guardian in 2015 that the most significant gap in English education is not gender but social class: “The relationship between parental wealth and background and children’s educational outcomes is particularly strong and deeply problematic.” It is likely for this focus that she was chosen by the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, for the task.
On its own terms, Gove’s curriculum has failed. As the Francis Review interim report observes, the attainment gap “remains stubbornly large”. The disadvantage gap index published by the DfE, a measure that compares the GCSE grades of disadvantaged pupils in English and maths with all others, fell from 4.1 in 2010-11 to 3.7 in 2019-20. But by 2022-23, at least in part as a result of the pandemic, it was 4. England’s most recent Pisa results show an 86-point difference in maths between the most and least disadvantaged, and 82 in English. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported in 2022 that “16-year-olds who are eligible for free school meals are still around 27 percentage points less likely to earn good GCSEs than less disadvantaged peers”.
Baker is unequivocal: “We inherited 300,000 disadvantaged students in 2010; we had the same number in 2024. That is failure. There are three quarters of a million youngsters below 25 who are now permanently unemployed. That is a disgrace.” Youth unemployment levels are, he said, “an indictment of all that we did – including me”.
For Bousted, it is in particular an indictment of austerity: “What was practised from 2010 was a huge deception… that you can make children and families poorer, you can cut the central grant to local authorities by 40 per cent over ten years, make [them] cut back on services – youth clubs, children and adolescent mental health, family support, speech and language therapy, special educational needs support… You can impose a 12 per cent real-terms cut on school funding from 2010 to 2022. You can take away all the support and… then say, but as long as… you give poor children the intellectual birthright that you give the children who have all the advantages, that will close the gap. That was always a lie.”
Freedman agrees: “Every time I hear someone say education is the best way of lifting people out of poverty, I say, ‘No, it’s not – it’s money.’”
Revising the curriculum is, to quote Tim Oates, a juggling act. Whatever its recommendations, the Francis Review will be variously accused of being too radical and not radical enough. If the government can pull it off, it may improve student attainment and teacher retention. But Phillipson has reached for the lever of curriculum reform because it is less costly – financially if not politically – than addressing the deeper challenges facing schools: dwindling budgets, rising absence, a SEND system in crisis, slashed benefits, nine children in every class of 30 growing up in poverty.
The white paper that preceded Butler’s seminal 1944 Education Act established that school should not just be for the learning of facts and formulae, but would, in shaping the next generation, “enrich the inheritance” of the nation. In this sense, the Francis Review must not only answer how best to prepare our children for adult life, but also what vision of England Labour wants to build.
[See also: The special needs trap]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?