Over the last 14 years NEU members have seen and experienced the growing disaffection amongst students with the curriculum and the impacts on wellbeing and engagement caused by the assessment and accountability regimes.
The NEU has been involved with extensive research to explore the problems and solutions, working also with young people, parents, employers, researchers, and policy experts. This work includes The Independent Assessment Commission on 14-19 assessment, the Independent Commission on Assessment in Primary Education, the assessment inquiry of the APPG for Schools, Learning and Assessment and the NEU’s Secondary Assessment Working Party.
Driven by the experiences of NEU members, and supported by the research, we have made it clear in our response, summarised below, that the curriculum must better engage students by preparing them for the world they will enter, becoming more relevant to them and giving them greater ownership over their learning. The assessment system should support not hinder this.
The review panel, and ultimately the government, has a generational opportunity to modernise curriculum and assessment in England and, in doing so, to improve the educational experience and life prospects for all young people. NEU members, with their extensive expertise as education professionals, are essential to the success of any changes and stand ready to contribute.
Curriculum
- The curriculum is currently not, and must become, broad, diverse, inclusive and fit for the future in order for young people to thrive.
- The curriculum in our schools and colleges has been narrowed by underfunding and constrained by Government performance targets in ‘core’ subjects.
- The curriculum is driven by a one-size-fits-all approach which affects all students’ opportunities and particularly impacts those with SEND.
- Change must guarantee access to the arts for all, delivered by expert teachers, and give students more time for PE and outdoor learning. It must also include teaching about climate change, nature and green skills.
- Educators should be enabled to use pedagogies they determine most appropriate, rather than being driven by the pressure to rehearse for tests.
- The curriculum should prepare all students for life in modern, diverse Britain, actively challenge barriers, discrimination and inequality, and help all children and young people feel valued and have a sense of belonging.
- The content mandated for each subject must become, then continue to remain, manageable and enable students to enjoy and consolidate their learning.
- Curriculum content in secondary must be reduced in size in most, if not all, subjects and Key Stages, especially Key Stage 4.
- Curriculum content in primary maths and English must be reduced.
Assessment and qualifications
- Assessment methods are not diverse enough to develop the breadth of skills required nor to properly allow students to show what they can do – in many instances using just one mode, the formal written test.
- The assessment system must be modernised, moving away from reliance on any one method and allowing students to develop and demonstrate important skills relevant for the 21st century.
- In primary, all high-pressure government testing should end and good practise from the Early Years should be better considered.
- In secondary and post-16 a shift towards multi-modal assessment must take place and the damaging, unevidenced default of exclusively terminal exams for GCSEs and A- Levels must end.
- Applied General Qualifications are trusted, high-quality courses which provide access to next steps for hundreds of thousands of young people. The threat of their de- funding must be undone.
- Post-16 students in England have one of the narrowest curriculum offers of comparable nations. In the longer term, a move towards a broader 14-19 phase is necessary, in which ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’ courses can be combined and courses can be taken more flexibly
- Results of tests are misused for school accountability, leading to damaging, perverse consequences to curriculum breadth and student and staff wellbeing.
- High pressure government testing must end in primary schools.
- EBacc and Progress 8 should be discontinued.
- The purpose of assessment should be reshaped around one core purpose of
- supporting teaching and learning, rather than also acting as an accountability process.
Implementation
- Professionals must be at the heart of curriculum and assessment reforms. No significant change to curriculum and assessment can be made without meaningful, consistent engagement with the profession.
- Reforms, as well as the monitoring and evaluation of reforms, must be enacted with input from education staff and their trade unions.
- Time must be set aside and ringfenced – as a right – for all teachers to engage in high quality training and planning for any changes implemented as a result of curriculum and assessment renewal.
- This should not be a one off, “big bang” curriculum renewal. The core national curriculum resulting from this review should be audited periodically in order to ensure it becomes and continues to remain manageable and culturally and socially relevant.
- In order to promote teacher expertise and provide flexibility for the curriculum to account for local context, the outcome of this review should not look to mandate the entirety of a student’s learning time in school or college.