Thursday briefing: ​Inside Labour’s ambitious rethink of the national curriculum

Good morning. I’m Martin Belam, and this is my first time in your inbox for First Edition – though you may already know me from Guardian live blogs, my Doctor Who obsession, and the increasingly silly Thursday news quiz I write.

I’m also old enough to have been part of the first ever cohort to take GCSEs instead of O-levels, and that exam upheaval has been followed by decades of successive governments tinkering with how children get educated. The latest attempt is a Bridget Phillipson-commissioned review of the entirety of England’s national curriculum, led by Prof Becky Francis, which has recommended shortening exams, streamlining some subjects, and adding in new components she suggests will better equip pupils for the modern world.

For today’s newsletter, I spoke to the Guardian’s education editor, Richard Adams, about the review, the government’s response to it and why the process of deciding what children are taught seems so impossibly complicated.

First, here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. UK news | David Lammy, the UK justice secretary, is under mounting pressure after two more prisoners, including a convicted foreign sex offender, were mistakenly freed.

2. China influence | UK academics whose research is critical of China say they have been targeted and their universities subjected to “extremely heavy” pressure from Beijing. The Guardian this week revealed how Sheffield Hallam University complied with a demand from Beijing, halting a big project about human rights abuses in China.

3. France | One of the men arrested on suspicion of stealing €88m (£77m) of crown jewels from the Louvre is reportedly a minor social media star with a passion for motorbikes who has worked as a security guard at the Pompidou centre. He has been identified by justice officials as Abdoulaye N, 39.

4. Environment | There is still a chance for the world to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown and return to the goal of 1.5C if governments take concerted action on greenhouse gas emissions, a new assessment argues.

5. UK politics | Lancashire’s Reform-run council has been accused of “selling off the family silver” with plans to save £4m a year by closing five council-run care homes and five day centres and selling off the land.

In depth: ‘The structure works​. There’s just tweaking around the edges’

In setting up a review of the national curriculum in England, Richard Adams says the government was looking for “evolution not revolution”, and Prof Becky Francis has delivered a report that broadly suggests the structure of education is right – but needs corrective measures.

“It doesn’t rip stuff up and start again,” Richard said. “She’s identified that the existing national curriculum – a broad but detailed description of what children should be taught at every stage in a state school – is not overly academic, but it has just got too much stuff in it.”

The result, he says, is “the curriculum has sort of taken over schools and is seen as the beginning and end of what school should do. And that was never meant to be the case.”

Why did England get a national curriculum anyway?

The modern national curriculum – which initially also applied to Wales, though not Scotland which has long had its own system – was introduced by Ken Baker in the late 1980s. Before then, what children learned in school was largely decided by teachers, local authorities and universities.

This excellent article by Mary James for the British Educational Research Association, tracking the history of the curriculum’s development, contends that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government argued this situation amounted to “curriculum capture” by an educational establishment unaccountable to parents.

The 1988 Education Reform Act introduced the curriculum as a way to standardise what was taught and give central government far more control – a deliberate political shift away from local authority autonomy. The national curriculum’s last major revision was in 2014 under then Conservative education secretary, now Spectator editor, Michael Gove.

What was the problem the report was trying to solve?

Critics warned from the outset it might grow endlessly and swamp schools with content – and, Richard says, that is “kind of what’s happened”. Nearly every reform since has promised to cut it back in one way or another.

Francis was asked to review everything from Year 1 to Year 13, covering every subject, every key stage and every exam. Richard described it as “a sisyphean task”, saying that schools are always under pressure to do more, but that they “can’t keep adding new things without taking anything away. The school day is only so long.”

He told me he knew a teacher who kept a meticulous list of every topic lobby groups wanted added to the timetable – compulsory swimming, basic first aid, internet safety. All worthwhile and well-intentioned, but the point, Richard said, was to ask: what stops happening to make room?

“Has she actually solved that problem? It’s not obvious. She’s trying to shrink the national curriculum while also adding citizenship, financial literacy, digital literacy and things like being able to spot fake news. Whether that’s possible is another question.”

The order in which topics are covered might hold the key. “One of the things she talks about a lot is sequencing,” said Richard. “That’s really interesting to teachers and schools, and less so to the rest of us. She wants the curriculum sequenced properly – so children aren’t taught the same thing twice, or at the wrong time. There’s no point learning something in maths and then being taught it again in physics. Equally you don’t want skill gaps.”

Can we really expect the government to grasp the nettle?

So far the official response appears broadly welcoming – albeit with limits. Francis recommended new diagnostic English and maths tests at Year 8, but Bridget Phillipson and the DfE had already jumped the gun by announcing a new reading test at that stage.

The idea of reducing the length of the exams pupils sit at GCSE, which looks set to go ahead, is, Richard says, “a really direct and valuable thing Francis has done”. Anyone who has tried to steer a child through the GCSE years will surely applaud.

“She’s basically saying the structure works: GCSEs stay, A-levels stay, SATs stay. There’s just tweaking around the edges,” he told me.

Richard mentioned that an impressive aspect of the report, which was a dense 197 pages of text, was that it drilled down into some really specific examples, as well as attempting to deal with the overall picture. He cited the example of the PE GCSE.

Francis identified that the academic content of the exam was bleeding into actual PE lessons, and so, he said, “Kids who are supposed to be doing PE – running around, throwing balls, trying not to get hit – are suddenly doing anatomy lessons on muscles instead”. The suggestion is to rebrand the qualification to GCSE Sport Science to protect PE as an activity; also, he added, “it sounds way cooler anyway”.

The reforms introduced by Gove in the early years of the 2010 coalition government, Richard said, pushed pupils towards a core group of academic subjects, leaving things like design and technology, the arts and vocational subjects on the margins. One of the report’s aims is to reverse that and protect what Francis calls “enrichment” – the extracurricular and real-world experiences that help build confidence, life skills and enjoyment of school.

The government has already announced pupils will be entitled to “enrichment”, although there is no extra funding, and schools will probably not have enjoyed hearing that Ofsted will be grading them on it.

Will this just be undone by the next government?

One of the hardest things about education reform is that it takes a generation to see if it works. The government envisages having the new curriculum in place by 2029 – a timetable Richard said was “incredibly tight. The sheer amount of work to rewrite the curriculum, retrain teachers, and change exams is huge.”

But pupils entering Year 1 in 2029 won’t sit GCSEs until 2040. That leaves plenty of time for further technological – and political – change. There is the real prospect that Labour’s own reforms to England’s schools will be coming into effect right after the next general election, when voters will already have had a chance to mark the party’s homework for themselves.

What else we’ve been reading

• Their practical use may have dwindled to almost zero – but 100 years on everyone still loves a photobooth; and this collection of stories (and images) from our writers on their favourite snaps is a beautiful encapsulation of why. Toby Moses, newsletters team

• Every day is a school day, and this piece taught me the phrase “Don’t come the raw prawn with me!” entered Australia’s lexicon via the riotous cabaret, vaudeville and showgirl-laden Tivoli circuit, which Rosamund Brennan informs us is being brought back to life in a musical. Martin

• We all get a bit annoyed from time to time by the “pavement etiquette“ of our fellow travellers – but Cameron Roh has taken it to fresh extremes, recording and marking bad behaviour. Just remember to walk in a straight line and avoid any sudden stops … Toby

• Sarah Martin went on Roblox – the platform with millions of young children using it to make and play their own games – and had a chilling and grim week which highlighted the seedier side of the multiplayer environment. Martin

• The pressure is building on Kemi Badenoch, as the Conservative poll numbers continue to sink, and Henry Hill lays out the thinking behind the party’s desire to keep her in place: let her failing leadership carry the can for the potentially disastrous local election results next year. Toby

Sport

Champions League | Having gone ahead through Estêvão Willian early on, Chelsea were pegged back by goals from Leandro Andrade and Marko Jankovic, the latter from the spot, before Alejandro Garnacho levelled to secure a 2-2 draw. Dan Burn and Joelinton were on target for Newcastle in their 2-0 win against Athletic Bilbao. Manchester City eased to a 4-1 win against Borussia Dortmund with Phil Foden opening the scoring and adding to his tally in the second half.

Tennis | Amanda Anisimova fought past Iga Swiatek 6-7(3) 6-4 6-2 in a winner-takes-all match at the WTA Finals on Wednesday to join Elena Rybakina in the semi-finals and stay in the hunt for a first crown on her debut in the season-ending championship.

Football | Destiny Udogie has been named as the Premier League footballer who was allegedly threatened at gunpoint by an agent on a north London street. The Tottenham defender was out with a friend when the alleged incident occurred.

The front pages