Labour faces school standards and pupil wellbeing tightrope

The Labour standards tightrope: Can they fix schools without results slipping?

England may be the ‘best in the west’ for reading and writing. But pupils are less happy, behaviour is worse and more children are skipping school

Freddie Whittaker

‘A tremendous amount to sort out’

“I wouldn’t want to be in the secretary of state’s shoes, quite frankly,” says Dame Alison Peacock, chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching. “I think there’s a tremendous amount to sort out.

Dame Alison Peacock

“My sense is that more and more what I’m hearing from schools and from teachers … is that the job is increasingly difficult.”

Michael Merrick, a former head who works for the Diocese of Lancaster Education Service, said the bit that “has never been tackled is how much pushing the levers on standards has helped cause some of the fallout that we’re also trying to fix”.

“The bit that worries me is it feels like a good chunk of people … want to get out of education.”

He pointed to the “huge” SEND crisis’ “shrinking budgets” and buildings “beyond their shelf life”.

“There’s enough there for it to be perfectly legitimate for [Labour] to say, we need to round this out a little bit and make an education system that works for more people.

“My worry is that the answers that they’re currently landing on aren’t necessarily the ones that will lead to that outcome.”

While he said rolling back academy freedoms was a “mistake”, “some of the questions around curriculum were legitimate.

“Everybody howls ‘low expectations’ and ‘this is good for everybody else’s kids’. But it seems to me that it’s legitimate and fair for Labour to ask that question: are our schools working for enough people?”

Peacock said “notions of success” for schools needed to be broadened, “focusing beyond the academic” to create a “more nuanced view of what a meaningful, successful education looks like”.

Don’t miss ‘historic opportunity’

One of the key routes for this is Labour’s curriculum review led by Professor Becky Francis, which is due to issue an interim report before Easter.

The review has been pitched as “evolution not revolution”. But supporters of the Gove reforms fear a retreat from the “knowledge-rich” consensus, while others believe radical change is needed.

Peter Hyman

Peter Hyman, co-founder of School 21 and a key adviser to Sir Keir Starmer until July last year, said “some people are using the [evolution] phrase…to mean that bold curriculum reform is not needed”.

That was “never the intention of the phrase. It was always meant to mean that this time, unlike the Gove reforms, teachers and pupils would have enough time to plan ahead and prepare properly.”

Labour would miss “an historic opportunity if it just tweaks the curriculum and doesn’t think strategically about how to prepare young people properly for a fast-changing world”.

He pointed to a “ludicrous situation” where resilience, adaptability and critical thinking were deemed “soft skills”. At the same time, some saw the “often mundane exercise of naming the parts of a plant in biology” as “a deeply rigorous academic skill”.

Differing views on testing

The review is looking at assessment too. Hyman said that without serious reform, the curriculum would continue to be “hollowed out by the constraints of the exam system”.

Hyman added that “of course we need knowledge”, but “young people also need to be able to apply that knowledge through great oracy skills, the ability to problem solve and a creativity and ingenuity that is so vital today”.

Jeffrey Quaye

But others want more testing.

Dr Jeffery Quaye, of the Aspirations Academies Trust, said Labour must “strongly assert an uncompromising focus on raising standards by recognising the need to build on the excellent gains in the past 20 years”.

He said the government should reinstate year 9 SATs, but reduce the number of GCSEs pupils must study.

The politics governing these decisions has also swung. Downing Street is taking a much closer look at the reforms after Starmer was blindsided at prime minister’s questions last week by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch over school standards.

It has ratcheted up pressure on any future reforms to not be seen as“soft” on standards or leaving the government open to accusations of favouring the unions over parents.

EBacc was ‘short-sighted’ on arts

Gove’s reforms, which introduced new accountability measures for schools, have been blamed for narrowing the curriculum.

The English baccalaureate (EBacc) measures schools on the proportion of pupils who study a suite of five academic subjects.

Mary Myatt

It was created “on the hoof” and “needs a re-discussion”, said Mary Myatt, an education consultant and author.

“Gove was right to emphasise the academic subjects, but not at the expense of the arts, it was just so short-sighted.”

Curriculum expert and Opening Worlds co-founder Christine Counsell said the review “needs to be very careful to avoid the serious mistake of assuming some content is intrinsically more interesting or ‘relevant’ than others.

“A curriculum is a set of promises to future teachers: it gains its power cumulatively. It is knowledge structured as narrative over time.

“Anything which incentivises a thinner or bitty curriculum, either isolated topics or superficial thematic links as opposed to deep subject-derived structural connections, is not going to empower pupils.”

She also urged government to look at the “deeper causes of other problems, ones which cannot be solved by a curriculum review”.

‘Knowledge-rich gone wrong’

Counsell warned of what she termed “knowledge-rich gone wrong” – the “imposition of generic pedagogic approaches which are insensitive to subject, and the poor leadership professional development that perpetuates this”.

Christine Counsell

She called for “really substantial change to NPQ courses and qualifications, so that deep understanding of subject curriculum and, for senior and system leaders, rigorous understanding of subjects other than the leaders’ own, becomes front and centre”.

One criticism is that schools prepare pupils for exams too early. Many trusts launched three-year GCSE programmes, only to be slapped down by Ofsted when its new framework launched in 2019.

Martin Robinson, an education consultant who wrote the influential book Trivium 21c, said when schools tailored everything towards GCSEs from year 7 “the whole thing becomes very reductive, and dangerously so in terms of what a curriculum should be if it’s knowledge-rich”.

Robinson, a drama teacher, said the re-prioritisation of the arts was key. But the review should also “look at the limitations at A-level”.

Three subjects were “far too narrow for today’s world, but also for today’s people”.

Making lessons more fun?

The debate over school standards and the curriculum reached fever pitch on New Year’s Eve when The Times published an article headlined: “Make lessons fun to keep children in school, ministers told”.

The headline was based on comments from Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL).

He raised concerns that Gove’s reforms led schools to reduce vocational and creative subjects, particularly impacting less academic pupils. He did not use the word “fun”.

Sir Keir Starmer clashed with Kemi Badenoch pictured in Parliament over standards

But the headline caused huge debate.

Di’Iasio said he was trying to communicate his hope that the review alleviated “excessive burdens” that an over-focus on testing and accountability measures had created.

“I’ve been in too many classrooms where there are systems set up and timescales around the curriculum delivery that really focus on assessments and preparation for assessments.”

Children need ‘calm classrooms’

But the debate that the headline prompted raises an important question: what can schools do to improve pupil engagement? And how can they do it without torpedoing standards?

Tom Bennett, a government’s behaviour adviser, said that question “shouldn’t lead us into the mistake of thinking ‘what amuses them already?’ or ‘what are they familiar with or like?’

“That leads us into a hell of ‘Shakespeare taught through rap’, or ‘Design a TikTok about Pythagoras’ or equally dreadful things that we have tried to consign to history.”

Children needed “calm classrooms, where they experience positive regard, safety, and well-informed teachers who understand how to deliver well-sequenced lessons.”

Sir Jon Coles, the chief executive of United Learning, believed it would “obviously be a serious error to omit from the national curriculum things which children need to know and understand…on the grounds that they are not ‘fun’ or for any other reason.”

He did not think the Francis curriculum review would make the same mistake.

Myatt added: “We’re not edutainers, we’re educators. If we’re working and offering our pupils and students really interesting, demanding, worthwhile stuff – that becomes engaging in and of itself.”

‘What about if youngsters are asking for more?’

But Becks Boomer-Clark, the chief executive of Lift Schools, said the experience of going to school “should incorporate moments of challenge and fun”.

“We need to make space for both of these, and we need to value them in the academic and extended curriculum.

Becks Boomer Clark

“We need to ask ourselves: what if the attendance challenge is not fundamentally about young people simply ‘voting with their feet’, but instead reflects a much more discerning younger generation who are actually asking for more?

“It’s on us to respond to that.”

The review’s terms of reference state it will look “closely at the key challenges” to youngsters’ attainment and the barriers that hold children back, in particular those who are socio-economically disadvantaged and those with special educational needs.

Myatt said she expected “guidance around provision for children with additional needs in mainstream”.

Her hope was that it would be “nuanced. Children with SEND are not automatically low-priority attainers. It’s about thinking about a truly inclusive curriculum for all.”

Children need to ‘feel happy’

Despite the backlash against the suggestion that schools should be made more enjoyable, some trusts are keen to emphasise the importance of pupil happiness.

Andrew Rigby, the national director of education at the primary trust REAch2, said it was important to help children “feel safe, happy and to thrive”.

“We can’t underestimate what it means to be smiled at first thing in the morning, to be welcomed, to feel that the adults and other children around you genuinely care.”

At Endeavour Learning Trust, creative and performance-based subjects have equal value with maths and science.

Chief executive David Clayton said: “We would hope that any review of the curriculum would redress this balance, moving away from focusing on the EBacc and changing how the Progress 8 figure is constructed.”

Labour will review accountability. But some feel the government is lacking a wider “vision” for how all these changes fit together.

Peacock said there was a “vacuum” while the government reviewed elements of the system, and “whenever there’s a vacuum, then all kinds of narratives come into play”.

“I’m not hearing anything that says this government doesn’t care about academic standards. [But] a vision statement would be really helpful, because that in itself starts to rebalance some of the fears that are emerging.”