Mitigating ‘backwards pressure’: What to do about key stage 3

Key Stage Three (KS3) is currently a missed opportunity to provide a full, rich curriculum for all young people. But radical change is unnecessary. Some common-sense, measured reforms in a few key areas could command strong support across the sector and go a long way to achieving the curriculum and assessment review’s objectives.

Fix assessment to improve curriculum

Ideally, the national curriculum sets high standards from which assessment and accountability flow logically. However, one of the central issues with KS3 is its diminished breadth and depth, driven by the pressure of preparing students for GCSEs.

Instead of the flow from curriculum to assessment and accountability, the accountability system drives the curriculum and what schools teach. This creates ‘backwards pressure’ on KS3, pushing GCSE content and exam preparation into lower years.

In a world of high-stakes accountability at KS4, we need to mitigate this distorting effect.

1. Assess what matters at GCSE

If GCSEs are going to shape KS3, their specifications should reflect the full subject curriculum better. For example, if speaking and listening contributed to GCSE English grades, schools would spend more time on it in their KS3 curriculum.

This logic applies across subjects, especially where practical or interdisciplinary skills (like inquiry or extended writing) are essential but under-represented in exams. This would obviously also benefit KS4 itself.

2. Counterbalance the distortion

The government should avoid reintroducing high-stakes KS3 assessment, which would create a new backwards effect and further restrict the curriculum.

But there could be new expectations for assessment at KS3. At United Learning, we’ve created our own KS3 assessments that reflect the taught curriculum, not GCSE papers, to reinforce the importance of KS3.

We want to go further. For instance, portfolios or experience-building tasks could be used in all subjects to broaden curriculum and provide a richer sense of pupil achievement.

This would help make KS3 meaningful in its own right and provide a sense of success without relying on a stream of tests.

Curriculum can’t solve everything

The review’s terms suggest that curriculum changes may help solve current concerns. This is true in some cases, but the national curriculum is not the answer to everything.

The critical and growing issues of the under-performance of students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds cannot be solved through curriculum alone.

In fact, well-intentioned curriculum changes could lead to lowering expectations. The national curriculum should set out the important concepts, knowledge and skills that all students should learn and leave it to schools to enact this by meeting students where they are and helping them achieve their potential.

Nor should the national curriculum attempt to predict skills for future job markets. What seems crucial today may be irrelevant in a decade. Over-emphasising current trends could lead to fads that require constant updates, adding unnecessary workload for schools.

Integrate cross-cutting topics systematically

The review is an important opportunity to improve climate education and citizenship in the curriculum. But these are inherently interdisciplinary topics and should neither be turned into a separate discipline, nor treated as vague ‘themes’ that are difficult to implement.

Topics like these need to be worked out as a coherent scheme and split across the right subjects at the right stages. The detail of this should be worked out locally – as we have done at United Learning – but the national curriculum could usefully highlight the key components of each topic and in which subject discipline and key stage they belong.

Balanced and proportionate suggestions like these could help restore the richness of KS3. Such changes would be supported across the sector and could have more impact – and present fewer implementation and workload challenges – than more radical or eye-catching reforms.

But to work, the review panel need to consider curriculum and assessment reforms in the context of parallel changes to the accountability system (new Ofsted report cards) and the new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence teams.

Ensuring curriculum, assessment and accountability all pull in the same direction is the greatest challenge, but also the greatest opportunity, for this government.

This article is the fourth in a series of sector-led, experience-informed recommendations for the Francis review of curriculum and assessment. Read them all here