Curriculum and Assessment Review - the report and DfE response

We finally have the outcome of the Curriculum and Assessment Review with the publication of the final report today. Many thousands of educators have been waiting for months.

In July 2024, the government commissioned Professor Becky Francis CBE to convene and chair a panel of experts to conduct the Curriculum and Assessment Review.

The report has taken on board the many consultation responses from individuals and organisations.

These are available in a summary document which is separate to the main final report - this is also worth looking at.

The RGS's original response to the call for consultation is here. It was referenced in the final report, along with the GA's, and reports from UCL's Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education.

The report has been almost a year in the making, and runs to 197 pages.

The recommendations for Geography are as follows:

We recommend that the Government: 

Makes minor refinements to the Geography Programmes of Study and GCSE subject content to respond to the issues identified, including by: 

• Refining content to support progression better to further study, deepen children and young people’s understanding of key geographical concepts, make content more relevant and inclusive, and remove unnecessary repetition across topics. 

• Embedding disciplinary knowledge more explicitly at Key Stage 3, such as geographical enquiry, spatial reasoning, use of digital tools, human  geography and use of evidence, to ensure all children and young people have access to high-quality geographical education. 

• Clarifying and reinforcing requirements for fieldwork to demonstrate its role more effectively in supporting content and the developing of disciplinary knowledge, ensuring changes remain proportionate and inclusive. 

Embeds climate change and sustainability more explicitly across different key stages, including across the physical geography, geographical applications and human geography sections of the curriculum, ensuring early, coherent, and more detailed engagement with climate education. This should be done without risking curriculum overload. 

There is also an element of media literacy here for climate change education in particular, where there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation. There is a need for pupils to be aware of AI and its value and issues.

There is also mention of the need for diversity and for all students to "see themselves in the curriculum" - something which I was particularly keen to see.

And these will ultimately form part of changes to the national curriculum (will this be compulsory for all schools?) and GCSE subject criteria. These will be consulted on again and no changes will happen before 2028 in any case.

On the purpose of the review itself:

National curriculum content must be kept up to date, fit for purpose and reflective of the needs of wider society. Periodic holistic reviews of the national curriculum are therefore essential for ensuring these aims are achieved, as well as for maintaining overall curriculum coherence. Reviews are also a valuable mechanism for addressing curriculum shape in the round. Reviews can evaluate whether the breadth and depth of different subjects and their content remains appropriate, as well as determining the overarching aims of schooling and the time needed for the different activities required to meet these aims. Reviews can also address the build-up of content in particular areas to ensure that the curriculum remains deliverable for teachers and ambitious for students.

The Oak National Academy is also mentioned as being further involved in the development of curriculum materials which are up to date.

The DfE has responded to the Curriculum review and that is published here. This is just over 60 pages long and has a little more useful detail on the implications.

We agree with the Review that the national curriculum and the resources that support it, should reflect our modern society and diverse communities. Our aim is for the curriculum to be both a mirror, in which every child can see themselves and their communities reflected, and a window through which every child is connected to the world beyond their existing horizons and perspectives

On the topic of GCSE Natural History

Equipping children and young people to thrive in a rapidly changing world therefore means enabling them to understand and meet the global challenge that climate change presents. We will take the opportunity to enhance the climate education content which is already present in the national curriculum, in the subjects of geography, science and citizenship. We will also include sustainability within the design and technology (D&T) programme of study and sustainable practices within the citizenship primary curriculum. We agree with the Review that key concepts on climate education should be introduced earlier in the curriculum and will ensure that the relevant programmes of study contain this at primary level. We also want to go further on this and ensure that more people can engage with and develop respect for the natural world.

 
We will therefore consult on the subject content for the natural history GCSE, as confirmed earlier this year.

The Review noted that changes to curriculum content are only part of the picture and that teaching also has an important part to play through the use of climate-related examples and resources to teach existing curriculum content. The National Education Nature Park, funded by DfE, has a website which hosts free resources and activities for all education phases across a wide range of subjects. These are aligned to the curriculum and quality assured by experts, giving educators trusted information that allows them to teach about sustainability and climate change with confidence, in subjects where climate education is a core part of the curriculum content and in other subjects.

On the topic of Geography

We agree with the Review that the subject does not need significant change, and we will update and refine the programme of study and GCSE subject content with modest changes, to support pupils and teachers. As recommended, changes will support a better understanding of the disciplinary requirements in the national curriculum and in the GCSE, ensure the content is updated where needed, including in relation to climate education, and clarify and integrate the fieldwork requirements. We will also improve the GCSE subject content to support better progression, deepen understanding and remove unnecessary repetition across topics.

Some videos have also been produced on LinkedIn featuring Becky Francis.

"We will follow the curriculum principles of coherence, subject mastery and depth – making sure that programmes of study and subject content are grounded in relevant and important knowledge and disciplinary skills."

A document with some notes I put together today has been shared on Scribd. See the bottom of the post.

Others have shared their thoughts on LinkedIn, or Substack (such as Mark Enser).

There will also be a fully digital and easily navigable version of the national curriculum - we will create a rich, connected online version of the curriculum which visually represents the links within and between subject areas and gives connections to prior learning, helping teachers to contextualise learning across traditional subject boundaries in the classroom. 

Some final initial thoughts:

When a long-awaited Government document such as this appears there will be lots of different perspectives on it: from teachers to senior leaders, to those working in Trusts (who will need to adapt what they teach). 

As the Review recommends, we intend to retain a single national curriculum which serves as a core entitlement which every pupil can access. We are legislating through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill so that academies will be required to teach the refreshed national curriculum alongside maintained schools. This will ensure that parents and carers have certainty over the core concepts in their child’s education and that there is a floor beneath which this cannot slip. The national curriculum is not the entire curriculum but an underpinning of what every child is entitled to know, which schools build on locally. Schools will continue to remain responsible for deciding how their school curriculum brings those core concepts to life in their choices of historical events, physical and human geography, and novels, for example. This will allow them to create dynamic learning environments where pupils can flourish. 

From those who feel too much has changed to those who don't think the changes have gone long enough.

Some involved in climate change education will be pleased to see it referenced several times, others will feel it doesn't go far enough.

Some commentators e.g. the Daily Mail will see it's mentions of diversity, social justice and students 'seeing themselves in the curriculum' as lacking the 'rigour' that was promised in the previous iteration. 

Some will say that achieving the aims for some will be possible, but not perhaps 'for all'?

Some will ask where the money is coming from.

Some will focus on the assessment element of the review and question

Some will delve into the data that was included in the review and question some of the findings.

Some will be interested in the wording of "nature and adventure".

Some will ask about the continuing lack of take-up for GIS despite the availability of free tools such as ArcGIS and its related apps.

Some will be thinking about the place of AI in this...

Some will be considering the powerful pedagogies (echoing the work of Margaret Roberts) that are required to turn the words on the page of new documentation into the enacted curriculum. I've written about that before.

"Music excites when it is performed" - Benjamin Britten

Some will say nothing today as there is much to emerge over the next two years ahead of any impact in schools.

Some will wonder about the impact on option numbers and job security, or the state of the teaching workforce.

Some will not know any of this is happening because they're getting on with the day job... and that's fine...

What are you thinking?

Here's an implementation timeline...

Pearson are one of the Awarding bodies, and they have responded already.

Others will respond over the coming months.

The RGS and the GA will swing into action once things become clearer to support geography teachers through the changes ahead.

Thanks in advance to everyone who is going to be involved in that work.

Curriculum and Assessment Review Report by Alan Parkinson

'Changing the subject'

This book by Eleanor Rawling was flagged up for me by David Lambert in a recent conversation where I talked about some of the curriculum changes I'd seen.

It describes the changes that took place in school geography between 1980 and 2000 - the era when I trained as a teacher and then started teaching.

I purchased a copy from Amazon second hand, which turned out to have been withdrawn from the Edward Boyle Library at the University of Leeds.

Eleanor, a former GA President of course, describes the various policy decisions at national level which influenced the shape of the National Curriculum in the mid 80s, with its many many attainment targets, which were turned into double page spreads by David Waugh and Tony Bushell in the ubiquitous 'Key Geography' series.

The book was published by the Geographical Association, and the acknowledgements section mentions a whole list of former GA Presidents who were also involved in its production, particularly Richard Daugherty and also in the contents as they were a big part of discussions around the time of the development of the National Curriculum.

More to come once I've had a chance to digest it further...

2021: Alan Parkinson (that's me...)

Updated June 2024

The final entry for the blog - at least for a while - is a post about me. 

I'm Head of Geography at King's Ely Prep, and also an author and consultant geographer. I'm a Chartered Geographer and Fellow of the RGS and RSGS.

For what I get up to, please visit, and subscribe to my main blog, which is called Living Geography, and follow the development of my Quotidian Geographies project during 2021.

I will also add other blog posts here from time to time through the following year, before the next President as I have the chance to go into the archives.

You can also follow the #POTGA21 hashtag during this year as well as #everydaygeographies.

I was born in the Listerdale Maternity Hospital, to the East of Rotherham in late December 1963. I lived in the village of Wickersley and went to Northfield Lane Infants and then Junior School before going on to Wickersley Comprehensive School. This was formerly Wickersley High School (many of our folders still had the old name) and also had ROSLA extensions after the raising of the school leaving age, and a classic 1970s construction. My journey to school involved walking over the blue bridge here, with distant views of the Peak District and Sheffield.

Image: Alan Parkinson

Miss Moon was my teacher in Year 8, then I had John Neale and Steve Hanstock amongst others. I still have my exercise books from that time. I moved to a house on the main Bawtry Road shown above during my secondary days. I got an 'A' in my 'O' level Geography, and stayed on to do 'A' levels at the school.

I was really interested in computers too, and our science teacher Doc Humphries had an Apple II computer in a locked-up trolley at the back of his lab. I used to stay behind one or two evenings a week after school and teach myself to programme the machine, and used magazines and books to find out more about how it worked. I took 'O' level Computer Science and ended up teaching GCSE and A level Computer Science as well as Geography for a while.

Taking Computer Science also meant that we would travel on an old double decker bus operated by Powell's coaches, and head for Dinnington College to actually access some computers - RM machines with green graphics on black screens, and machine coded. 

I did quite well in my 'A' levels, and the big success was Geography for me. My teacher was Steve Hanstock who was personable and a good teacher.

John Neale was another of my teachers, who it turned out worked with John Lyon, who later became a colleague at the GA.

Our notes were often banda duplicated, and had lots of information and diagrams and spaces to fill at GCSE, but as we got more into geography, we had more lecture-style lessons.
When I opened my 'A' level results in August 1982, I had the grades to head for either Lancaster University or Huddersfield Polytechnic, but chose the course which would be more practical and fieldwork based, and also physical geography based as that was my interest back then. I also had plans to return home more than once or twice a year and Huddersfield wasn't too far away from Rotherham.
As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, in entries describing Huddersfield and the connections with other GA members, it is clear that this was a good proving ground for some young lecturers including Tim Burt and David Butcher amongst others.
A few images of me emerged on a local Facebook page, and also another dedicated to those who 'survived Huddersfield Polytechnic'.

Image: Sally Stow. I'm the one in the yellow and black hat. I haven't changed a bit.

I graduated with a II, i and was not sure what to do with myself.

Teaching was an option as my mother was a lecturer at the time at Dinnington College of Further Education. I took a Computer Science 'A' level at Rotherham College of Arts and Technology, which involved learning other computer languages and gave me the time to read, and play a lot of golf. 

I went for several interviews for PGCE courses, and was eventually accepted at the University of Hull by Vincent Tidswell, who was in his final year as PGCE tutor. He appears on this blog of course as I later found out he was involved with the GA and wrote a number of influential books.

After finishing the course, I eventually found work. The first school I actually earned money from teaching in was Kimberworth Park in Rotherham - now demolished and famous for being the school where former England goalkeeper David Seaman. Ironically, I now teach at the school where Nick Pope - an England goalkeeper in the last year - was taught.

Here's the 'fun' biography I put on GeographyPages in 2006. It's a little out of date now of course, but includes some interesting snippets. Geography Pages was my website I started creating in 2001, and which became one of the most popular websites of the time (as one of the few websites of the time) gaining millions of page views a year (and costing me a lot of money to maintain)

Born on a sheer mountain side in South Yorkshire in the early 1960's during a blizzard, Mister P was educated at the local 'comp' and enjoyed moderate success (9 'O' & 5 'A' levels) before moving on to Huddersfield Polytechnic (when polys were polys) and spent the next 3 years pushing the Atterberg limits, enjoying the mid-1980's price of beer, checking tensiometer readings at Bicknoller, criss-crossing the Pennines in a land rover with a radioactive soil moisture probe.

He has taught at various schools in Derbyshire (the good old Amber valley), East and South Yorkshire, and at  King Edward VII School: a specialist Sports College, in King's Lynn, Norfolk where he is Head of Geography, and edits the school newsletter, amongst other things. In his time at the school he has overseen the introduction of the Geography National Curriculum, run the Duke of Edinburgh's Award group, been Activities Coordinator, Deputy Head of House, and for a year was acting Examinations Officer. 

A founder member of the sadly-missed Boiled Onions Climbing Club, he enjoys foreign and UK travel, hill-walking when he gets the chance, landscape photography, obscure travel literature, Scandinavian Jazz, open fires, a good tight end in a game of bowls, beachcombing on the North Norfolk coast and fine malt whiskies. The Old Hunstanton side he plays for won the Countryside League Knockout cup in 2005.

He completed a DfES Best Practice research scholarship on the use of ICT, particularly the Internet in improving the quality of teaching in Geography (2002) which is published online and has been referred to by other academic researchers, and also completed an Online course on Climate Change run by the University of East Anglia. He is an ICT consultant to 'silver surfers' in the North Norfolk area. He is also involved in various web-based interests, including 'Evaluate' (his software evaluations are featured on the website and have been published in 'The Guardian' as have contributions to 'Brainstrust')

In November 2003 he was awarded a Royal Geographical Society Innovative Geography Teaching Grant to develop the GEO BLOGS project. Blogs have come on substantially since 2003 and are now almost so mainstream that they are commonplace, but it was good to get in there at the start.

In May 2004 he was invited to join the Geographical Association's Secondary Education Committee (now Secondary Phase Committee). He had an article published in the October 2004 issue of 'Teaching Geography', and was an E:port representative of the DfES/Evaluate/Schoolzone at DfES ICT in Geography roadshow and BETT 2005 and 2006. He has also been a contributing author to GeoProjects  (http://www.geoprojects.co.uk) and has also done consultancy and writing work for Hodder and Pearson and 3 or 4 other publishers. He was Editorial consultant on the new Longman School Atlas, which was published in April 2006, and has also contributed to ideas and materials for the new BBC Digital Curriculum.

He has delivered ICT workshops at numerous Norfolk Geography conferences, and network meetings, and has also presented at the GA Conference, and the SAGT Conference in 2005, and will be once again in 2006. In August 2005, he became a Teacher Consultant for the Geographical Association, and is currently doing 'various consultancy-type-things...'

In October 2005 he was awarded a second Royal Geographical Society Innovative Geography Teaching Grant to develop the EARTH: A Users' Guide project. He'd appreciate it if you got involved.

2006 contributions to the milieu include: contributions to Brainstrust / Evaluate publication, Longman School Atlas published, article published in Pilot News, guest edited WebWatch section of GA News for May 2006 and invited to join the editorial committee of GA Magazine, teacher notes and curriculum maps produced for the RGS-IBG Discovering Antarctica website (launched June 2006), best of the web feature for Teachers TV (coming in September), contributions to working groups in Norfolk on SEN and Pilot GCSE. He is also involved in further Pilot GCSE developments to be announced shortly as part of the Action Plan for Geography. In 2006 he was awarded a 'Norfolk Geogers' award for contributions to Norfolk Geography. 

Image: showing the KES fleeces we used to wear for a while... taken around 2006.

In early 2008, I saw an ad for a post at the Geographical Association, and put in a speculative application for what was going to be my 'perfect' job, despite having a bit of 'imposter syndrome' about being up to a national role.

This was a good year, as I was also awarded the Ordnance Survey Award for Excellence in Secondary Geography Teaching by the RGS-IBG. Here I am prior to all that, and prior to the interview, presenting at the GA Conference as part of the authoring team for the new KS3 toolkit series.

In 2010, we published the first of the Mission:Explore books, written by the Geography Collective, which started with a conversation between Daniel Raven Ellison and myself. I am very proud of the work we completed together, with other members of the Geography Collective, and latterly with Helen Leigh and Tom Morgan-Jones.

Here's the motherlode: the 500+ missions that we wrote as a team, and then asked young people to select so that Tom Morgan Jones could do the inking.

Chatting to Anne Robertson of EDINA, with whom I've worked for quite a few years now.

In 2011, my job was sadly made redundant as a result of financial fallout from the end of the Action Plan for Geography.

I put out an appeal for help.

This led to two years of freelance work, with plenty of ERASMUS thrown in.

In 2013 I received a nice email from Mike Robinson, the Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, explaining that I had been awarded the RSGS's Joy Tivy Education Medal and Honorary Fellowship - a great honour.

I also received an email from Claire Kyndt of King's Ely. This resulted in me returning to the classroom for a second stint, where I remain to the present day.

In 2017, I got an email suggesting that I might make a good President, and asking whether I would put myself forward. I duly did, and the rest is... geography.

My Presidential theme is 'Everyday Geographies' or 'Quotidian Geographies'.

There are a great many people I haven't mentioned here who I owe a great debt too... these will be mentioned in future posts in the year ahead, and also in my Presidential lecture.

References

I have written, co-written or contributed to over 30 books, including KS3, GCSE, Fieldwork and A level textbooks, children's books, adventure books and eBooks.

Charney 20th Anniversary book, edited by Simon Catling - has a chapter called 'You can take the boy out of Yorkshire' which included a sort of autobiography as well - I think on hindsight that's one of the better shorter things that I've written.

Why not buy at least one copy of my book 'Why Study Geography'? - it's excellent.

Full biography on my About.me page.

Updates

I'm always creating and sharing resources.

Currently working on the Oak National Primary project as a writer and reviewer through into 2025...

Updated June 2024

On the 3rd of June, I was elected as the Vice President: Education of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) for the next 4 years.

I am proud to be continuing the tradition of GA Presidents being associated with the RGS-IBG in many different ways, going back to Freshfield. I am looking forward to supporting the work of the RGS-IBG in supporting geography educators.

National Strategies

GA colleagues were part of the development of support during the early 2000s.

At the time, I worked with 'The Guardian' to write reviews of software and also worked at the BETT Show for about 4 years in a row, and wrote the Geography preview for their special supplement. I remember handing these out to delegates from the DfE stand at the time. Came across this while sorting out some cupboards at school earlier in the week.

Commons Select Committee Evidence

The Geographical Association has often been called on to present evidence to official consultations and documents, and at times to Parliamentary Select Committees: particularly where that involves curriculum change or related educational issues. This work continues to the present day, with Alan Kinder being involved in such consultations and policy work regularly, along with other GA volunteers and staff. When I worked at Solly Street we were often called on to comment - I usually deferred such work to John Lyon as he has a good face for radio. :)

Here's an example provided by Richard Daugherty.

Parliamentary proceedings are all reported in Hansard.

This took place in April 1981 when there were discussions over curriculum content and what students should be learning in geography. It's interesting to see the way that subjects were viewed and also some of the preconcieved notions that members of the Education Select Committee had on the value of geography (and other subjects).