I suppose I’m being churlish and should be celebrating the fact that the Department for Education is now only four years behind reality, an improvement, perhaps, since the tenure of former schools minister Nick Gibb.

However, when the stakes are as high as supporting our school leaders to deliver education recovery, I believe our pupils deserve the DfE’s education evidence base to be grounded in up-to-date sector research and insights to ensure new policies are fit for purpose and have the best chance of achieving success. 

Sadly, the DfE’s plans to establish a new arms-length curriculum body have been worked up on the back of a four-year-old survey commissioned in 2018 of just 39 schools, less than two dozen Ofsted inspection reports and a handful of additional partisan evidence sources.

No up-to-date post-lockdown independent government research was commissioned, despite the fundamental shift in the challenges facing schools as a result of Covid. 

Instead, the DfE officials appear locked in a 2018 time warp, back in the days when the biggest health and safety risks facing schools were over-enthusiastic flossing and fidget-spinner-related injuries rather than Covid.

When I met schools minister Robin Walker earlier this week, he seemed to genuinely care about developing education policy to help support school leaders and reduce workload, but his admirable ambition and good intentions risk being let down by the department’s lack of consultation and engagement with the sector to gather evidence and inform policy-making that will truly help frontline school leaders during the next crucial period. 

Missed opportunity?

The amazing achievements of Ed Vainker and his team at Reach are an example of what can be achieved collaboratively. In setting up Oak National Academy, teachers, subject associations and educational publishers came together at speed to produce additional resources to help during a period of national crisis. I’m pleased that these resources will remain available for schools, parents and learners to access during snow days and home days. 

However, we need to look closely at the DfE’s suggested catch-all solution of ‘more Oak’ and the longer-term implications of imposing an emergency crisis response like Oak on a post-pandemic school system facing a myriad of new challenges, including the education recovery of learners and teachers exhausted by relentless pandemic teaching pressures. 

An identikit model curriculum won’t be the right tool to inspire tired teachers to stay within the profession, DfE officials would be better placed addressing the current priorities that school leaders consistently flag.

BESA’s own research (based on survey responses from 1,200 schools in 2022) found that teachers want autonomy over their own curriculum resource budgets, and value independently sourced high-quality resources over “one-size-fits-all” centralised content. Our research consistently finds the top three key concerns of school leaders to be school resource budgets (which have declined in real terms since 2015), CPD training needs and digital infrastructure.

Just 14 per cent of schools in our latest research survey, carried out last month, said that they would be in favour of DfE-commissioned free curriculum content, with 63 per cent of all schools saying they would be against the centralised creation and provision of new free curriculum content.

BESA represents the best of the UK’s educational publishers and suppliers and our members produce high-quality curriculum resources that are trusted and relied upon by thousands of schools across the United Kingdom and around the world. Our sector prides itself on working hand-in-hand with school experts to listen to their needs and produce resources to aid sequenced learning progression and scaffold and support classroom teachers.  

Lack of evidence

A move to a system of centralised, limited government procurement of curriculum resources will result in the distortion of the UK’s successful publishing marketplace and a decline in innovation and investment in our world-leading publishing industry to the longer-term detriment of our education system.  

I applaud the department for seeking to support schools’ access to high-quality curriculum resources but I believe schools deserve autonomy and agency over their own diet of curriculum resources and school budgets, rather than being served a meagre limited snack of centralised free resources. 

I urge the department to work with schools and the wider sector to carry out a proper consultation, independent research and market analysis of the current problems and issues facing school leaders to ensure that the DfE focuses its efforts on helping schools effectively during the next challenging period.

I fear not to do so will risk the forthcoming Schools White Paper achieving even less impact and longevity than those now long-forgotten fads of flossing and fidget-spinning.

Caroline Wright is director general of the British Educational Suppliers Association