The Francis Review. 'Starmerism' as school improvement strategy?

Professor Becky Francis’s recommendations for how England should reform its national curriculum have successfully divided opinion. No other reception was possible. My own first reaction—and, bear with me on this—was to recall the Forster Act of 1870. The two reforms have more in common that the assonance of their lead author’s names.

The Forster Act, or The Education Reform Act, to give it its proper name, established the basis for universal primary education in England. Historians have generally accepted that it was a symbolically progressive but substantively conservative piece of legislation that nonetheless laid the foundations for more fundamental change.

The Francis Review’s self-confessed guiding principle—“evolution not revolution”—recalls Forsterism while being in sync with the prevailing caution of Starmerism. But these are not the 1870s. The electorate has so far judged caution to be a singularly inadequate response to the challenges facing modern Britain. Many people, perhaps most, clearly want a revolution—in public services, at least. What does that mean for an avowedly incrementalist approach to education reform?

Francis and the wider review panel deserve plaudits. The Review’s 196 pages contain many sound recommendations. Arts education has atrophied in state secondary schools since the introduction of the Ebacc. The panel is right to call for its restoration. The panel is right, too, to propose a change in the burden of assessment—not so much a reduction as a redistribution: more testing in the early years of secondary school, less at age 16. A call for schools to focus on oracy is worthy, if unoriginal. More refreshing is an assertion of every students’ right to be able to study all three sciences in depth—an overdue recognition of the need to increase the nation’s scientific literacy.

The panel makes two urgent calls for schools to focus on developing skills that are directly relevant to life in the Twenty-first Century. The first is to develop young people’s media literacy. This could hardly be more needed. The AI Security Institute concluded in July that chatbots were between 15 and 40 percent more effective engines of political propaganda than traditional medial. The second imperative is to teach more adolescents how to manage their finances. Not only will this contribute to what Andreas Schliecher at the OECD calls “a greater sense of empowerment”, it will also help protect them from falling pretty to online ‘finfluencers’.

The panel is also right to point out that the national curriculum, any national curriculum, should only be a part of what happens in school. Time and resources should be devoted to what is often rather bloodlessly called “non examined activity”—or, the process of teaching young people how to ground themselves in the world with confidence and optimism.

A focus on the teaching of “universal virtue” is not necessarily a nudge in the direction of authoritarianism—though, after 2029, who knows? And who does not believe that young people need a greater understanding of sustainability? (Leader writers for The Daily Mail aside.) Come to that, when was the last time a major school reform was pioneered by experts following serious consideration of a significant body of evidence, rather than at the whim of a politician?

These are not small contributions, but neither are they a cri de couer for a revived schooling system. Readers over the age of 45 will not be stirred by memories of “Education, Education, Education”, Labour’s galvanizing message of 1997.

The Department for Education has actually shown more dirigisme than the review panel: not only scrapping the Ebacc but also consulting on “an improved version of Progress 8 and Attainment 8 that balances a strong academic core with breadth and student choice”. The DfE proposal is at an early stage, but is similar in scope and outline to the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme. The IB MYP also encourages breadth, enables eight carefully curated subject choices, and results in an overall ‘score’ that can serve as a proxy for individual and school attainment.

There is a certain irony that the consultation comes only weeks after the government withdrew so-called ‘large programme’ funding from the IB Diploma, a move which is likely to make it the exclusive preserve of fee-paying schools.

The Review betrays its origins in its equivocal attempt to balance what it calls every child’s entitlement to a shared baseline of knowledge and skills with most teachers’ preference for professional independence. I’m not sure these points are at all commensurate, but I do strongly agree that teachers must be active curriculum designers to be fully effective in supporting students’ learning. The panel calls this “professional autonomy within entitlement”.

A more constructive contribution would have been to throw out the language of autonomy altogether, in preference for something more professionally mature. My last book, Greater Expectations, makes a case for the term ‘agency’ as that better alternative. My reasoning is too intricate—and too long—to repeat here. Suffice it to say that teachers could learn from doctors in aspiring to ‘best practice’ rather than necessarily to original practice.

The Review only indirectly addresses the engagement crisis that affects British schoolchildren more severely than those growing up elsewhere. To the extent that it has anything specific to say about this dispiriting picture, it concludes that we should “facilitate more successful transitions” between primary and secondary school—which seems more like a restatement of the problem that a step towards a solution.

Otherwise, we are left with the need for diagnostic testing in English and maths in Year 8. I’ve no strong objection to such testing, but it does play to the peculiarly English assumption that all education is transactional, useful only for the next test.

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The Review has too little to say about the related topic of White working class underachievement. In fact, the term ‘working class’ does not appear in the final report. Gestures towards “inequality of access” in subjects such as Drama, Music and Design Technology are no substitute for a sustained engagement with the most politically charged fault line in English schooling today.

Another notable absence is any more nuanced thinking about how we ignite in young people the capacity for genuine critical thinking. This would have been a natural complement to the report’s welcome focus on media literacy and, in a world both empowered and imperilled by AI, would seem existentially important. Perhaps we are to conclude that the changes proposed to various subject syllabi will overturn schools’ tendency to develop compliance at the expense of creativity. I am unpersuaded.

The English philosopher John Gray argues that the professional classes suffer from a reflexive faith in credentialed authority and bureaucratic process—a modern manifestation of Douglas Jay’s dictum that “the Gentleman in Whitehall is usually right”. The average citizen’s willingness to accept that principle has been waning since (at least) the 2008 financial crisis and lies in tatters since the Covid-19 Inquiry unveiled chaos at the heart of government during a period of national emergency. I am in good company in concluding that the British state is suffering from a loss of ‘output legitimacy’, or people’s willingness to go along with the status quo because it generally works.

The Curriculum and Assessment Review Panel is assuming that the public is less alienated from Headteachers than from Whitehall mandarins, less frustrated with schools than with other public services and willing to give schools greater license in putting things right than they will to, say, hospitals or GPs surgeries. They are probably right in these assumptions. Whether a series of recommendations bubble wrapped in caution will meet the moment is something altogether different. Other educationists, such as Lift Schools’ CEO Becks Boomer-Clarke, have been more candid in acknowledging a need for real change to restore confidence.

The Forster Act, for all its caution, provided an opening for subsequent reformers to establish a genuinely national schooling system in England and Wales. We must hope the Francis Review does likewise.