Curriculum and Assessment Review: The case for a 16-18 curriculum guarantee

By Eddie Playfair, Senior Policy Manager at AoC

It’s not every day we have a national review of curriculum and assessment in England, so we need to make the most of this one. The Curriculum and Assessment Review flows from a genuine desire for change and there is no shortage of suggestions for reform coming from across the education world. Now that the initial evidence from thousands of respondents has been sifted and an interim report has been published, how much actual change can the 16-18 phase expect?

We get a sense of the approach from the Review’s key mantras which can be summarized as: “evolution not revolution”, “the current system is not working well for all” and “a knowledge-rich curriculum fit for the future”. These will be applied to a context where there is no national curriculum for 16- to 18-year-olds and little prospect of much additional funding.

From the start, this review has been framed as evolutionary and gradualist. The talk is of building on what seems to be working well in the current system and not fixing what isn’t broken. This rules out any ‘big bang’ wholesale reform of qualifications.

The danger is that the understandable desire to manage expectations could turn into an excess of caution. Our qualification and assessment system is complex, with many moving parts, but we should not allow the fear of disruption to prevent us from considering well-planned incremental change. Setting an ambitious new direction of travel can be compatible with starting modestly and progressing cautiously.

The Review’s focus on social justice is very welcome as is the recognition that the current system is not working well for everyone. There is plenty of evidence of stark socio-economic achievement gaps and too often our system seems to reproduce inequalities and bake-in disadvantage rather than challenging it.

But rather than focusing only on the weakest links, we should be prepared to look at the whole. To say that A Levels are gold standard qualifications which work well for a minority is another way of saying that the overall system they are part of isn’t working well for the majority; the value of a ‘gold’ standard requires the existence of lower rated ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’ standards. This is not to say that we should abandon A Levels, but we might want to rethink their place within a more inclusive curriculum framework with less tracking and fewer obstacles to progress.

England may well have a broad curriculum entitlement from Key Stages 1 to 4, but we also have one of the narrowest 16-18 offers, with very little specific guaranteed content for all students. The transition to post-16 education is a great opportunity for young people to make choices and select options based on their interests and ambitions. While this specialization can be highly motivating, the case for breadth does not stop at 16.

There is a good case for both specialisation and breadth post-16 and this doesn’t have to mean adding more and more new subjects from a menu of topical issues. Instead, we could try to define a coherent 16-18 Curriculum Guarantee which would aim to develop all students’ political, economic, cultural, technological and media literacies, including health, relationships and sex education. This could help young people to better understand the world they live in and equip them with key knowledge and critical skills for citizenship, community and working life. Such a curriculum could be complemented by project work, social action and enrichment opportunities.

Asserting the value of knowledge doesn’t require us to downplay the value of skills. Knowledge and skill are inextricably linked in the curriculum and need not be in competition with each other for teaching time. A coherent knowledge-rich curriculum can also help arm students with the skills to protect themselves against extremists, conspiracists and peddlers of hate-speech, mis- and dis-information. Once 16- and 17-year-olds get the vote and can exercise political power, the need for effective political and citizenship education in colleges will be more urgent than ever.

A key test of the Review’s 16-18 recommendations will be whether they can define the social purpose of this phase of education and motivate all our students with more than the need to acquire qualifications and prepare for employment. Any proposals should recognise the diversity of students’ needs and aspirations and revise the 16-18 study programme requirements as well as the content of the various qualifications on offer. We can then start to move towards an inclusive 16-18 Curriculum Guarantee which develops students’ essential skills and critical literacies alongside more specialist provision.

College leaders and staff don't have much headspace at the moment to be thinking about the design of a better curriculum for the future. They are busy dealing with the many challenges of trying to make the current system work today, with difficult reform timescales, qualification gaps and insufficient resources. Unfortunately, the big funding and systemic issues have been placed beyond the scope of the Review, but it’s clear that a system of well supported and financially viable providers is an essential precondition for the success of any national reform programme.

This Curriculum and Assessment Review has been described as a once in a generation opportunity - it’s one we need to grasp with boldness and ambition if it’s not to be seen as a wasted opportunity.