Eight years ago, Tim Oates gave a series of lectures in which he argued that the national curriculum was heading in the wrong direction.

It had lost its grip on “core knowledge” and had become too generic, the research director at Cambridge Assessment said.

Instead, it should be “specifying with precision the content of subject disciplines” and making sure pupils learned certain key facts and concepts.

As he looked out into the audience, he noticed some unfamiliar faces.

A glance at the attendance list showed that they were from the office of Michael Gove who, at the time, was the Conservative shadow education secretary. “They [the advisers] had a whole series of interesting questions about why I thought this and what the evidence was,” Oates remembers.

So it was perhaps no surprise that when Gove became education secretary, Oates was invited to the department to meet him.

“He [Gove] said, ‘We’re interested in the principles you’ve been using to criticise the 2008 national curriculum’,” Oates recalls. “So I outlined, in a couple of meetings, what those principles were.”

It was the start of a relationship that resulted in the research director chairing the panel that reviewed the national curriculum for the coalition government. It elevated Oates from being a backroom policy and research wonk to one of the most influential figures in England’s schools system.

Now that the dust has settled on some of the biggest changes he has been involved in, he took time out with TES to reflect on the recent reforms and the role he has played in them.

He immediately makes it clear that he has reservations about the government’s latest plans for a new wave of grammar schools. Oates fears that it could lead “to the exclusion of things we should be talking aout in terms of curriculum and assessment”.

And he adds that there is no clear international evidence either for or against selective education. Whether such reservations will make any difference is open to question.

But one point beyond doubt is that Oates has already left his mark. The final version of the national curriculum, which came into force in 2014, was based heavily on the content of those Cambridge lectures.

Oates was also a key player in the debate surrounding another of the coalition government’s more controversial reforms: bringing an end to so-called “grade inflation” at GCSE and A-level.

In 2010 he was the first in the exams industry to put his head above the parapet and say that he believed grade inflation had taken place. A toughened-up statistical approach to setting grade boundaries, bringing an end to decades of rising grades, followed soon afterwards.

Oates says that the driving force behind both decisions - to criticise the national curriculum and to speak out about grade inflation - was academic research and evidence suggesting that things were moving in the wrong direction.

“We [Cambridge Assessment] don’t want to sit on evidence that there’s something wrong, if it really matters,” he says.

Research-informed policy

Another key element in his approach is a belief - shared by Gove - that pupils should be taught a core body of knowledge. In an essay published by the Policy Exchange thinktank last year, Oates argued that this was “essential for equity” and “connects [pupils] with their human heritage of accumulated knowledge”.

The influence of this view in the new curriculum is clear: in history, for instance, the curriculum states that pupils are expected to “know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative”.

Oates accepts that parts of the new curriculum have not gone to plan. Many teachers have said that this year’s key stage 2 reading tests, which are based on that curriculum, were harder than ever before. Some reported that pupils were reduced to tears by the tough content, which included questions on complex grammatical constructions such as subordinating conjunctions and fronted adverbials.

He admits that this section of the national curriculum was introduced hurriedly and should be rethought, because of a “genuine problem about undue complexity in demand”.

But he says the curriculum review as a whole was a success. “I think it put the national curriculum back on track as a precise and parsimonious statement of vital content.”

Oates adds that the process of reviewing the curriculum showed ministers were interested in, and willing to act on, research evidence about what works in the classroom.

The claim may provoke scepticism among teachers, many of whom viewed Gove’s flagship policies between 2010 and 2014 - when he was education secretary - as driven by ideology rather than evidence.

But Oates is insistent. “On a whole series of measures during the curriculum review, we put down evidence which ran contrary to the immediate preconceptions of a range of officials and politicians…that was listened to and action was taken.”

He cites the role of speaking and listening in the curriculum as an example. “[Gove] said that speaking and listening leads to unfocused discussion in the classroom…the preconception was, it shouldn’t be there,” he says.

“We took the totality of the research evidence to him…we reached agreement that oracy should be placed in every subject; that it should no longer just be a single strand in English.

“The civil servants came out of the room and said, ‘How the hell did you do that? How did you move from a position where speaking and listening was being questioned for being in the national curriculum at all to it being in every subject?’

“The answer is that we went through the evidence meticulously.”

Following the evidence

Oates says that evidence was also the thing that drove him to go public with his concerns about grade inflation, despite knowing that highlighting it could make him unpopular in the exams industry.

He says he went in to see Simon Lebus, chief executive of Cambridge Assessment, one sunny afternoon, and said, “Simon, I’ve done a lot of work that says there’s something seriously wrong with underlying standards in our examinations. I said, ‘There have been a series of studies which say grade drift is a problem’. He said, ‘Take me through the evidence’, and I did. And he said, ‘Goodness, we need to do something about this’.”

Oates told Lebus he realised that any acknowledgement of grade inflation would be “a particularly tricky message for an awarding body” because it had been handing out rising grades for decades.

“We were worried about the impact of exposing this. We didn’t want to threaten confidence in examinations but we did want their integrity to be reinforced by confronting a structural problem that was emerging within them.”

Initial news reports suggested that he was right to be worried. When the board did go public with its concerns in 2010, the headline in the Daily Mail read: “A-levels and GCSEs HAVE got easier, says Cambridge exams chief in ‘Ratner moment’ ” - a reference to the jeweller Gerald Ratner, who famously described his own stores’ products as “crap”.

But, although Oates is not entirely without reservations about the statistical approach to awarding that has since been used to tackle grade inflation, he is glad that he raised his concerns on the matter.

“We knew it would create issues for all of us, so we wanted to be secure in our evidence and make sure it landed in a way that the policy response would be a good one.

“I think Ofqual needs to be commended for tackling grade inflation and thinking about its consequences. It’s very brave to confront it.”

@kayewiggins