Professor Becky Francis sat down with Schools Week this morning to talk about her landmark Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR).
We’ve rounded up some of the answers she gave to key questions posed by sector leaders and Schools Week editor John Dickens (below).
Ground covered included language take-up concerns over ditching the EBacc, Progress 8 reforms, whether consensus can be reached on RE, and how she hopes her review will be remembered…
And you can watch the full recording here:
Agenda:
3 minutes, 25 seconds: Editor’s welcome
5 minutes: Becky Francis presentation
32 minutes, 30 seconds: Question and answer session
Question: How do you think the report has landed with the sector?
Becky Francis answer: I feel so proud and privileged. I felt that the sector has engaged so much with the review, and perhaps because of that, I felt that the sector has my back.
They have understood the evidence-led approach. They’ve put their faith in that. I think the sector has been convinced by the experts on the panel and their deep expertise, as well as commitment to the sector, and I’m really gratified to see that reflected in the response to the report
Of course, everybody will find something in the report that they disagree with or that doesn’t speak to their particular passion.
I felt that the sector has my back
But I really hope that overall, professionals will see this as a sensible review, giving coherent direction to the sector and allowing that professional leadership to come through strongly.
What did you make of the Daily Mail front page claiming this was ‘dumbing down schools’?
It’s frustrating when media stories and headlines have been written in advance of the review or certainly without reading the report.
Standards have been at the absolute heart of everything we’ve done: delivering high standards for all young people has been the beating heart of the review.
I don’t think any of these findings can be criticised as reducing standards
Anybody that reads the report will see the various ways that we’ve gone at this: from issues around supporting better writing, supporting momentum at key stage three, access to triple science and music and so on.
I don’t think any of these findings can be criticised as reducing standards.
If called to, I could argue that some of the long-standing problems have needed much more urgent attention than they’ve received to date.
I wouldn’t want to undermine the fact that I think that overall standards have improved in the last quarter century, and we really need to maintain that work.
There have been concerns scrapping the EBacc will lead to take-up of languages falling. Do you agree?
I think the concerns are fair. It’s really difficult to attribute causality with the EBacc, whether that’s to issues with modern foreign language, or to issues with the drop away in the arts, which is often claimed to be an effect of the EBacc.
The EBacc certainly hasn’t generated an uptake in modern foreign language, but it’s plausible to argue that it may have sort of caught or ceased what could have been otherwise further falling away.
I think the concerns are fair
But particularly because the EBacc is so limited in its application – only around 40 per cent of schools operating it – we can’t rely on the EBacc or some accountability measure to be supporting a subject area.
This is about professional autonomy, responsibility, and students’ appetite.
So, we think that support for modern languages had to happen in other ways, and modern foreign language teachers I hope will support the recommendations we’ve made in regard to subject [including] strengthening teaching in primary, and the support for better practice across transition as well.
We did hear a lot of calls for modern foreign language to be removed in primary, a lot of concern that it’s not being done well … We didn’t go in that direction. We want to support modern foreign languages to thrive.
But having reviewed the international literature, it’s interesting to see that this seems to be an issue for every English-speaking nation.
The review was clear the Progress 8 buckets should stay as they are. The government’s has proposed reforming progress 8. What do you think of that?
There were clear reasons why we adopted the proposal that we’ve made.
Our view is that no single performance measure can be perfect, and there is a risk of engineering every time you lever something in one way, it has consequences in others.
So that was why we thought that it’s simplest to leave progress 8 as stands with the EBacc bucket intact.
There is a risk of engineering every time you lever something in one way
We recommended that that be renamed as the ‘academic breadth bucket’ to basically ensure that all young people have an entitlement to that across academic subjects.
We know that is important to guard – but giving just a little bit more free choice to young people to…pursue their passions. We think that’s a good balance.
Obviously, you can go at this in different ways. But we kicked the tyres hard, as I said, and we thought that’s the best option.
Everybody will have their chance to respond to the government [proposals] through the consultation.
Government has said they will put RE back in the curriculum if the sector can build a “consensus”. Do you think that’s possible?
If anybody can lead this, it’s Dr Vanessa Ogden [who will lead an expert group to oversee this policy].
She’s been inspirational in her leadership of this area during the period of the review. If not, we know that the problems really are profound. We know it is a very controversial area and a very complicated one as well, with the different statutory elements and so forth.
If not, we know that the problems really are profound
So although we have a clear view that RE should come into the national curriculum, and in doing so, it should stop at age 16, as with other subjects, if there isn’t consensus in the sector, it would be an incredible sort of bogging down of government, time and energy.
What was the thing you wrestled over most – the one that ‘almost made it, but didn’t’’?
We did consider whether we could pull drama back out of English again. If there were sufficient hours in the school day, there would have been a lot of support for that in the review panel, because many of us have been really convinced by the importance of drama in the national curriculum.
But given everything we’ve heard about curriculum overload and so forth, there just really wasn’t the mechanism or room to do that at present.
Many of us have been really convinced by the importance of drama in the national curriculum
So what we’ve sought to do is give drama its own section in the English programme of study, which again, sort of signifies and steers that greater prioritisation and to ensure that that entitlement and attention is available to all young people.
Coming back to our theme of trade offs, hopefully the right balance.
How do you think people will describe your review when they look back in 10 years’ time?
I think that ‘high standards for all’ would be my mantra. The social justice lens and the determination to do better for those groups of young people currently not well served in our nevertheless-improving system has been the golden thread through the review.
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