Key stage 3 is “undeveloped” and a “wilderness” in many secondary schools, an influential curriculum expert has said.

Tim Oates, research director for Cambridge Assessment, said that schools should prioritise reform of the KS3 curriculum and stop making incorrect “assumptions” about pupils’ ability based on their Key Stage 2 Sats results. 

Mr Oates, who led the last national curriculum review for former education secretary Michael Gove, was speaking at an event in London this morning on the secondary curriculum.

“What are the priorities for the secondary curriculum?... boy it’s got to be KS3 in my view,” he said.

He described KS3 as “the wilderness in some schools through which tumbleweeds blow”, and said it was “still underdeveloped in the majority of schools into which I go”.

“We’ve got to get KS3 far more rationally connected both to primary, with the expectations communicated down into primary schools, and to key stage 4. Kids from day one in a school need to develop skills of extended analysis, self-organisation.”

Mr Oates repeated his view - first reported by Tes in May - that some pupils are being held back by low expectations based on poor use of data.

“I think there’s a lot of things happening in KS3 which are not right in terms of triaging people, making assumptions about them as learners,” he said. 

“We need to use formative assessment far more to get into the minds of young children to understand how they’re thinking. 

“We need to understand the children when they come up from primary. 

“What I know is that many schools are defining pupils by the data - they’re saying that this is a kid with this KS2 score, and we’re going to ratify that by putting that into the tracking system. 

He said many schools did not “distinguish between the kid who got that score because the primary schooling was bad, as opposed to a kid who got the score when the primary schooling was good”.