The new UK Labour government, elected in 2024, almost immediately commissioned a Curriculum and Assessment Review, with the intention of developing a broader, cutting-edge curriculum in England that prepares young people for life and work. The hope is that, when the Commission reports, its work will be driven by coherent, reason-giving, and ethically-rich principles and determinations. This blog post focuses on these principles and determinations from which the new national curriculum could and arguably should be derived.

‘We need to go back to the foundations of any curriculum and then try to derive practical propositions from them, especially with regards to pedagogy.’

Rather than a training model, which tends to be the preferred model of state-sponsored bureaucrats, this is an approach which is future-orientated, semantically conceived, fundamentally values- and virtues-based, ethically and compassionately driven (at curriculum, teaching and learning levels) and life-long. It would also fulfil Martha Nussbaum’s (2011) requirement for a philosophy of equal esteem for all human beings – the equality principle. We need to go back to the roots of curriculum, what a curriculum is, what it is for and what it tries to achieve. We also should be aware of the many failures in the past, taking in the first attempt at writing a national curriculum in 1988 (see the Education Reform Act), Michael Gove’s 2013 conservative and regressive reformulation (see Education Reform: new national curriculum for schools), and some misguided appeals from the conservative wing of academia for a subject/discipline curriculum and a subject didactics (such as Young, 2005). We need to go back to the foundations of any curriculum and then try to derive practical propositions from them, especially with regards to pedagogy. Some of these principles might be:

• The curriculum at all levels of the system should be networked and integrated (see Scott, 2021, 2024, 2025a, 2025b) as far as this possible, and this means that a subject-based curriculum model and a subject-didactics model is considered to be undesirable.
• Learning and teaching approaches should be understood as separate from curriculum objectives, but derived from them.
• There should be: a minimisation of curriculum washback effects; an emphasis on curriculum, rather than assessment-driven change; the preservation of the curriculum as the principal driver of the learning programme rather than that which can be most easily assessed; a clear separation of the evaluative and learning functions in any educational programme; and an intelligible set of curriculum specifications. (These principles are given a fuller expression in Scott, 2025a).
• A curriculum should reflect the full range of human activities and capacities: knowing, communicating, genealogising, placing, cognising, understanding, technologising, philosophising, behaving ethically, valuing, embodying and being creative, and these are the building blocks of any curriculum that we might want to construct.
• A curriculum should be a learning curriculum above all else. A learning curriculum is much more than simply transmissive and should constitute a lifelong relationship with the many experiences that we have during our lifetimes (see Brandom, 2022)
• A curriculum should always prioritise formative processes over and against summative ones. Under the current arrangements for primary school mathematics children are expected to work towards solving problems involving multiplication and division, using materials, arrays, repeated addition, mental methods, and multiplication and division facts, including problems in contexts. These operations express summative outcomes and not processes of learning.
• A curriculum should never be constructed solely in relation to those cognitions (relating to propositions), skills (relating to processes), embodiments (relating to bodily accomplishments) and dispositions (relating to the characteristics of a person) that can be easily measured. For example, testing for reading should embrace understanding and meaning-construction, rather than just the technical deciphering of syllables, words and phrases.
• A national curriculum should be a statutory requirement for all the various providers: maintained schools and colleges, academies, academy trusts, free schools, grammar schools, city technology colleges, state boarding schools, special schools, faith schools and private schools. At the moment it is not a national curriculum.
• At age 18 all English students should take an English Baccalaureate Examination and at age 16 a modified and reduced English Baccalaureate Examination (see Scott, 2024, 2025a), these examinations being the pinnacle of a child’s formal education.
• A curriculum convention should be called with the intention of reworking and reforming the national curriculum.

The tasks here are immediate as the current curriculum review is getting ready to publish its findings. To not take account of these curriculum and assessment principles is to miss the opportunity to reform the national curriculum in England, so that learning, learning capabilities and learning opportunities are regarded as formative, non-competitive, future-orientated, caring and fundamentally about our life experiences.

References

Brandom, R. (2022). The Spinoza lectures: Pragmatism and idealism: Rorty and Hegel on reason and representation. Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating capacities: The human development approach. The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Scott, D. (2021). On learning: A general theory of objects and object-relations. UCL Press.

Scott, D. (ed.) (2024). On learning: Volume 2, Philosophy, concepts and practices. UCL Press.

Scott, D. (2025a). On learning: Volume 3, Curriculum, knowledge and ethics. UCL Press.

Scott, D. (2025b). On learning and ethics: Philosophy, knowledge and normativity. Ethics International Press Ltd.

Young, M. (2005). Bringing knowledge back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. Routledge.