Academies and the right to opt out of the National Curriculum

The fact that Karen Badenoch, the Conservative Party Leader has called Labour’s plans for schools, recently announced in the new Education Bill, as an act of vandalism, is both predictable and welcome – predictable in the context of the rhetoric of educational debate in Parliament and its confrontational nature, and welcome because it’s a sign that the Labour Government may be challenging the status quo and forging ahead with some policies which are based on some more enlightened principles. Take for example the decision to make Academies follow the National Curriculum as opposed to giving them the right to opt out. This move is seen by its critics as an ideological shift of Marxist proportions to deprive schools of their right to tailor the curriculum to meet the particular needs of their pupils without the straightjacket of the National Curriculum.

However, if one sees the National Curriculum as a statement of entitlement for all children of school age, as a framework of aspirations across the disciplines, as a way of viewing the key strands which make for progression through the phases of development, then this should apply to all children, irrespective of the particular educational setting they attend. Why should academy pupils be deprived of such entitlement? Conversely, why should teachers in maintained schools not have the opportunity to adapt the curriculum to match their cohorts.

Of course, the National Curriculum needs to be designed to allow for variations to meet local needs, to cater for particular cultural heritages and to give sufficient scope for teachers to exercise their initiative in breaking new ground as well as responding to the challenges posed by particular groups of pupils with special needs. One recognises that this degree of flexibility has been impeded in recent decades by the prescriptiveness of some of the National Curriculum, especially in the core subjects (for example in its approach to early reading and its pedagogy), but in principle there is no reason why the National Curriculum cannot be re-designed to allow for greater variation, alongside its articulation of educational entitlement.

No doubt the Independent Review body examining Curriculum and Assessment, which is about to issue its interim report, will be grappling with this issue of getting the balance right between commonality and differentiation in its approach to curriculum design and implementation. We await its pronouncements with great interest!

Robert Young

February 2025