Curriculum and assessment review – What it means for teachers

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What the government’s curriculum and assessment review really means: early insights, why it matters, and what’s coming for schools…

What is the curriculum and assessment review?

More than ten years have passed since the government last looked at the National Curriculum. The current Labour administration initiated a curriculum and assessment review, headed up by Professor Becky Francis.

Who is Professor Becky Francis?

Professor Becky Francis CBE is chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation. She was previously director of the UCL Institute of Education. She has also held senior roles at King’s College London and the RSA. Francis has also been an advisor to the Parliamentary Education Select Committee.

What did the interim report say?

The government published an interim report in March 2025. This comprised an independent review of the current curriculum and assessment system in England, with statistical analysis.

At a recent education conference, Francis made clear that in her view, “Subject-specific knowledge remains the best investment we have to secure the education young people need in a world of rapid technological and social change”. The interim report reiterated this point.

The Youth Shadow Panel, a group of young people and youth organisations, led its own version of the government’s curriculum and assessment review. The panel released its interim report in February 2025. This summarised its call for evidence and outlined young people’s thoughts on the education system.

Findings included the following:

• Overreliance on exams causes stress for many students
• Learning should be more relevant to life, more inclusive and more interactive/practical
• Climate, environment and nature education is lacking

Final report

The final report was published on 5th November 2025.

What the changes mean for classroom teachers

Andy McHugh surveys the implications of the curriculum and assessment review for classroom teachers…

The curriculum and assessment review doesn’t mark a dramatic rupture with the teaching priorities of the past decade. GCSEs and A Levels remain. The broad structure of Key Stages remains too, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is changing.

Instead, the review sets out a careful recalibration of the system. It is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It aims to widen what counts as valuable learning, ease some assessment pressure and rebalance accountability. This is all without dismantling the entire system.

Broadening the curriculum

For classroom teachers, this means the impact will be gradual, rather than immediate. Nothing will change overnight. However, the direction of travel is clear over the next five to ten years. This is likely to reshape what’s taught, how those things are taught, and what schools will feel able to prioritise.

At the heart of the review is a concern that while standards have risen, the benefits haven’t been shared evenly. Disadvantaged pupils continue to lag behind their peers. Too many young people are leaving education without the knowledge and skills they need for life beyond school.

The response has not been to scrap the National Curriculum, but to refresh it. Programmes of study will be updated to ensure they’re ambitious, current and better balanced.

“Nothing will change overnight”

Media literacy, financial education and climate science will all be given greater prominence. This reflects the realities that pupils now face outside of the classroom.

Moreover, these themes are intended to be woven across different subjects, rather than confined to discrete lessons and one-off projects.

A different view

The review also marks a notable shift in how the curriculum itself is framed. The review explicitly stated that the National Curriculum should be seen as a minimum entitlement. This is rather than seeing it as a finished product.

Schools will thus be encouraged to enrich and adapt content. This is so that their pupils can encounter a broader range of histories, cultures and perspectives.

This step would legitimise work that many schools are doing already, while making it clear that relevance and representation aren’t just optional extras.

Taking centre stage

The review’s proposal for a ‘digital curriculum framework’ further supports this approach. In place of the static documents used up to now, teachers would be able to see connections between subjects and add their own enrichment materials.

This could, in theory, make planning more coherent and flexible. In practice, careful implementation will be needed to avoid adding to teachers’ workloads and creating inconsistencies between what different schools are teaching.

Speaking up

One of the review’s most striking features is its renewed emphasis on oracy, and how it positions speaking and listening alongside reading and writing as core foundations for learning and participation.

There’s a proposal for a new national oracy framework to sit alongside existing literacy frameworks. This is so that a combined oracy, reading and writing framework operates across all secondary schools.

This reflects a growing recognition throughout the profession that pupils need more than subject knowledge alone.

“One of the review’s most striking features is its renewed emphasis on oracy”

The ability to articulate ideas, listen carefully, challenge viewpoints and participate in discussion underpins success across the curriculum and beyond.

For many teachers, this will feel more like a validation of approaches they already value than a radical departure.

Providing stability

In terms of assessment, things stay familiar, but become slightly lighter. The review treads carefully here, with no proposals for a wholesale move away from exams.

GCSEs and A levels will be retained. This is on the basis that externally set and marked assessments are still seen as the fairest way to assess essential knowledge.

There are some signs of softening around the edges, however. Exam content is set to be reduced by around 10%. This will free up teaching time and ease pressure on students.

That said, the review also calls for a new, compulsory diagnostic reading test in Y8. This is in order to identify gaps and support interventions early on.

While this is not intended as a high-stakes accountability measure, it will inevitably shape how schools think about literacy beyond primary school.

The main takeaway in all this is that the exam-driven system remains intact, but slightly less crowded than before.

For teachers hoping for a radical rethink of assessment, this may feel overly cautious. Others might see it more generously as a way of providing a little more stability for everyone, while simultaneously acknowledging some of the system’s excesses.

Accountability, subject choice and the end of the EBacc

A more significant shift can be seen in the area of accountability. The review recommends scrapping the EBacc performance measure. It argues that it has constrained subject choice and narrowed the curriculum, particularly for disadvantaged pupils.

Instead, we would see a redesigned Progress 8 and Attainment 8. English and maths would remain double-weighted, with science gaining two dedicated slots.

Four remaining slots will be reserved for a broader mix of subjects. This will encourage breadth and parity between academic, creative and technical disciplines.

This wouldn’t remove much existing pressure from core subjects, but it does send the signal that arts, humanities and vocational options matter.

There’s also a new entitlement for pupils to study triple science, alongside proposals for a broader computing GCSE and new qualifications that could address the areas of data science and AI.

“It does send the signal that arts, humanities and vocational options matter”

For schools, these changes may gradually reshape option blocks and timetables, but they also raise familiar challenges around staffing, specialist expertise and funding – particularly in shortage subjects.

Post-16 pathways

Beyond 16, the review presents a vision of a more simplified post-school landscape. New vocational ‘V Levels’ would sit alongside existing A levels and T levels, with clearer Level 1 and Level 2 pathways designed to reduce repeat GCSE resits in English and maths.

The intention is to widen participation, while creating routes that better reflect pupils’ needs and aspirations.

For colleges and schools with sixth forms, this signals the need for long-term planning, further investment in staff expertise, and closer collaboration with local employers.

These proposed reforms are ambitious, but they’re also phased. The first V Levels would only start to be taught in 2027, with full rollout not expected until the early 2030s.

The primary picture

There are two proposed KS1/2 changes that may have lasting effects when learners enter KS3/4.

The first is that citizenship education will receive a boost, becoming statutory from KS1. Pupils will learn about democracy, law, rights, climate education and financial literacy from an earlier age, which could have a noticeable impact on classroom practice over time.

Secondly, the review proposes replacing the KS2 grammar, punctuation and spelling test with an assessment focused on pupils’ ability to ‘use grammar in context’, rather than their aptitude at recalling technical terminology.

What schools can do now

In the short term, schools will continue to teach the existing curriculum and work within current assessment arrangements – there’s no need for immediate structural change.

That said, the direction of travel is unmistakable, so there are some practical steps schools can begin to consider now.

Strengthening oracy through more structured discussion, debate and presentation work is one. Reviewing enrichment provision in arts, sport and civic engagement is another.

“There’s no need for immediate structural change”

Schools may also want to reflect on how well they currently support literacy beyond KS2, in light of those proposed Y8 diagnostic tests.

Crucially, the review puts a strong emphasis on consultation and teacher involvement. Draft programmes of study will be released for feedback, with schools that engage early better placed to influence and prepare for change when the time comes.

A moment of possibility

The curriculum and assessment review ultimately offers a measured reset, rather than a dramatic overhaul. It broadens the curriculum, elevates oracy and enrichment, and slightly lightens assessment, while leaving the exam system largely intact.

Whether this leads to meaningful change in classrooms will depend less on the review itself, and more on how it is implemented. The risk is that accountability pressures simply shift elsewhere, rather than diminishing.

The main opportunity is that schools may feel genuinely empowered to broaden and deepen what their pupils experience.

For teachers, the message is clear. This isn’t a moment of disruption, but one of possibility. The years leading up to 2028 will certainly matter – and how the profession responds may ultimately determine whether this review becomes a footnote or a turning point.

Andy McHugh is a head of RE and the founder of Teacher Writers – a service that supports teachers wanting to write professionally or just for fun.

Analysis of the curriculum and assessment review

The review seems to call for a careful adjustment of the government’s education priorities – but its cautious language conceals what may yet prove to be some genuinely profound changes in the years ahead, says Melissa Benn…

The opening statements of the curriculum and assessment review’s final report are a masterclass in the famous art of British diplomacy. Take this choice example from the foreword:

“The Review Panel recognises the hard-won successes and educational improvements of recent decades…”

And from the executive summary:

“We intend to maintain and build on the knowledge-rich approach and on the coherent structural architecture established by the last review.”

The telling term here is ‘knowledge-rich’ – a useful shorthand for what the Conservatives believe they brought to state education, in part through the implementation of their own highly controversial curriculum and assessment review back in 2014.

Substantive reform

In many ways then, Professor Becky Francis’ review is a further indication of how widely adopted the radical reforms pioneered by Michael Gove have become.

It concedes the settled (and in my opinion, wrong) view of many mainstream commentators on the centre-right, that education was the single greatest Conservative success in recent years; a victory of traditionalism over woolly progressivism.

At the same time, however, the conciliatory language of the Francis review serves to mask what seems like more substantive reform. The report’s recommendations include:

• abolishing the English Baccalaureate
• reducing the amount of time students spend in exams
• restoring the academic status of the arts and other creative subjects
• strong arguments for the benefits of teaching oracy (once dismissed by former Schools Minister Nick Gibb as the encouragement of ‘idle chatter’ in classrooms).

These changes have been sold as ‘Evolution, not revolution’ – but even within that messaging, there’s some covert political signalling at work.

Range of concessions

Firstly, Professor Francis will be acutely aware of the controversy – indeed, outrage – that accompanied the 2014 curriculum overhaul; how it triggered a national debate and resulted in widespread protest across the profession.

It’s clear that she wants to adopt a ‘softly, softly’ approach, and she appears to have succeeded in that aim. Thus far, there’s been relatively little fuss, or indeed much mainstream debate at all of the 2024/5 review.

In her pointed comments about ‘evolution not revolution’, and publicly stated rejection of certain demands by some ‘campaigners’, Professor Francis shows a desire not to appear too radical or progressive.

“It’s clear that she wants to adopt a ‘softly, softly’ approach”

This is in line with the style and tone of the current Labour administration, which built its broad, yet shallow electoral majority in 2024 on an explicit rejection of so-called left-wing politics, and is currently moving rapidly to the right on other key social issues, notably immigration.

Even so, in examining the Review’s proposed reforms, one can glimpse a range of concessions to myriad calls by campaigners, from both within and outside the profession, over the last 15 years.

Overstuffed curriculum

Many teachers and educationalists have, for example, long decried the overstuffing of the curriculum at every stage of a child’s life – from the bizarre requirement for ten-year-olds to grasp the use of ‘fronted adverbials’, to the insistence that secondary English and history students memorise great wads of ‘traditionalist’ knowledge.

Consider also the sustained and well-evidenced protests by many groups opposing the dramatic drop-off in arts subjects, oracy skills and citizenship studies over the past decade.

Or, indeed, the work of those who have justly argued that the intensification of exams since 2014 has placed greater stress on pupils, widened divides between social classes and sidelined more effective forms of pupil assessment.

That the Review regularly emphasises the importance of fostering a ‘love of learning’ throughout its near 200-page length is surely down to the often marginalised work of educational progressives going back at least a decade, if not much longer.

A positive direction?

For all the final report’s diplomatic language, and the Review panel’s apparent determination not to be seen as overly progressive, Professor Francis et al. are plainly trying to steer the system in a more positive direction. In many respects, they have come both to praise and bury Gove.

It’s hard to know at this stage how successful the review will be in the long term. There are several factors well beyond its control – not least ongoing staff shortages and declining morale, plus the evermore fraught question of SEND funding and continuing lack of capital investment.

“Professor Francis et al. are plainly trying to steer the system in a more positive direction”

To those challenges I would add the perennial problem of a hierarchical school structure sitting side-by-side with a nominal comprehensive system – but that, as they say, is another story…

Melissa Benn is the author of Life Lessons: The Case for a National Education Service. She is also a visiting professor at York St John University.