Curriculum and Assessment Review: Evolution, not revolution

Let’s start with the important stuff. Everything referred to in this blog will only come into effect from the start of the 2028/29 academic year and the revised national curriculum proposed by the Curriculum and Assessment Review, and confirmed in the Government’s response, will not be published until the spring term of 2027/28. So, nothing changes for almost three full academic years and we won’t know exactly what changes will need to be implemented until the spring term of 2027.

The Review made it clear in its interim report that the reforms they proposed would be evolution, not revolution, and the content of the Review that relates to primary science seems to fit with that statement.

The major overarching recommendation of the Review, accepted by the Government, is that there will be a revised national curriculum that will:

“ensure that the national curriculum revised programmes of study prioritise core concepts in each subject and are coherent within and across subjects. We will also create an online and machine-readable national 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.”

If parts of the Government’s vision for the new national curriculum sound a bit like what the PLAN resources do for primary science, then hopefully those of you who are already using them may not find the new programme of study for primary science a major change. Many of you will already have considered the links between science and the other subjects in the primary national curriculum and, if not and you want to find out a bit more, have a look at our Links and Discrepancies between Maths and Science and Science: Making links to the Foundation Subjects documents.

The Government has also stated, in its acceptance of the Review’s recommendation that the national curriculum be revised, that,

“We will draft the new national curriculum keeping in mind the teaching time typically available to schools in each key stage and test our approach with teachers and curriculum designers.”

On that basis, it seems reasonable to assume that the content of the revised programme of study for primary science will not contain any more content than the current programme.

With regard to science specifically, the Review has unsurprisingly recommended that it remain a core subject and the Government has accepted this recommendation.

“it is vitally important that science, as a core curriculum subject, is made accessible to all pupils and provides them with the knowledge and skills they will need to be active and informed citizens, while also giving them the best opportunity to be able to pursue careers in STEM.”

As part of revising the national curriculum programmes of study, the Review makes a number of specific recommendations relating to primary science. It recommends changes to,

“ensure more consistency and cohesion in primary science, ensure that the purpose and expectations of high-quality practical work are more clearly articulated and reduce the unnecessary content duplication and complexity that leads to overload in the subject while maintaining, and in many cases, strengthening the rigour and depth of what is taught.”

We hope that, for those of you who use the PLAN resources, they have helped avoid the risk of duplicating content by establishing a clear progression in the substantive and disciplinary knowledge contained in the current science programme of study from Year 1 to Year 6. By being clear about the key learning for each year-group and phase, the risk of overload in schools’ primary science curriculums should have been reduced, allowing teachers to focus on the rigour and depth of their teaching of the required key learning.

To address the above, the Government has committed to ensuring that the new programmes of study will have “the right level of specificity to support effective sequencing between key stages” while allowing “flexibility to choose lesson content and how to teach it.” This pretty much describes what the PLAN team wanted to create when they started to develop the PLAN resources for the current primary science programme of study. Consequently, we’d like to think that the new programme of study will provide you with the equivalent in spring 2027.

Schools have worked hard, in recent years, on sequencing their primary science curriculums appropriately, supported by guidance such as our Sequencing Science Topics document. Assuming a significant proportion of the content of the current primary science programme of study remains in the new version, which seems inevitable, curriculums should just require adapting rather than wholesale revision.

One of the recommendations of the Review that probably doesn’t directly affect primary schools, but is a significant development, is that,

“Improved sequencing and focus will improve both transition between key stage 2 and key stage 3, and progress during key stage 3. We will ensure that the reformed key stage 3 national curriculum builds effectively from key stage 2 in every subject”

There has long been a concern that children lose their enthusiasm for science in the transition between Key Stage 2 and 3 because they repeat in Key Stage 3 content that they have already been taught in Key Stage 2. The Review has recognised that there is an issue with progression in all subjects between Key Stage 2 and 3 and hopefully the new science programme of study will provide the “specificity” to tackle this.

Another overarching theme of the Review is modernising and refreshing the programmes of study to,

“allow teachers to draw on a range of figures and content that best suit the needs of their pupils, build cohesion not division and paint a picture of a modern and forward-looking Britain.”

In many schools, work of this kind has already been done or is under way and there are lots of excellent resources available to support schools to do it from our own Scientists across the Curriculum document to STEM Learning’s STEM Ambassadors, Primary Science Teaching Trust’s (PSTT’s) A Scientist Just Like Me case studies, and NUSTEM’s resources and 1001 Inventions.

In addition to “modernising and refreshing” the content of the programme of study for science, the Government has also said that,

“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.”

What exactly this means for the content of the primary science programme of study will only become clear when the new national curriculum is published in spring 2027. However, it is important to emphasise that this enhancement of climate education content in the new national curriculum does not fall entirely on science and that the Government has accepted the Review’s recommendation for a “new statutory requirement to teach citizenship in key stages 1 and 2 … and consider it important including for introducing learning on financial and media literacy, climate change and democracy and law into primary education.” This may indicate that the enhanced climate education content in the revised primary science programme of study is likely to be linked to existing science content rather than totally new content.

Schools are already conscious that the climate is of increasing significance to many children and have been considering how to respond to this. Fortunately, there are already many sources of support for schools with this from the National Education Nature Park to Climate Adapted Pathways for Education (CAPE), Eco-Schools, WWF to name just a few.

Another new development for the new curriculum, as a result of the Review, is the Government’s decision to,

“create a new oracy framework to sit alongside the national curriculum”.

The Royal Society has recently published a Review of scientific literacy and oracy in primary school education which made the following recommendations:

• promote oracy-rich primary science as a means to develop and apply science thinking, by making this more explicit in guidance, resources and curricula

• demonstrate the value of oracy-rich primary science by exemplifying what this looks like for different ages and across topics, so that teachers and schools have clear examples to apply to their own context

• provide an age-appropriate definition and associated examples of scientific literacy for primary schools to underscore the importance of applying science ideas and thinking.

Hopefully, the new oracy framework will support the kind of oracy-rich primary science recommended in The Royal Society’s review.

Throughout the Review there is a strong emphasis on curriculum adaptation and adaptive teaching to ensure high expectations for all pupils, including those with SEND. In the Government’s response, it says it will

“ensure that core training throughout a teacher’s career, has a strong focus on high-quality adaptive teaching, formative assessment and high expectations for all”

and they will

“develop evidence-led resources to support curriculum adaptation for all children and young people, including those with SEND”

and

“support teachers to identify and challenge pupils who have more to give in the classroom or who are not yet achieving what they possibly could.”

For primary science, many organisations have already been doing work to support curriculum adaptation for SEND pupils, including the resources developed by PSTT with the STRATA Project, the Explorify for Inclusion Hub and the Association for Science Education’s (ASE’s) SEND Programme. For pupils who have more to give in science, our Challenging More Able Pupils guidance provides ways of challenging them by broadening the content in the national curriculum for the year-group they are in, while not straying into the content from later years and disrupting the progression of learning through the school.

Finally, on enriching the curriculum, the Government’s response indicates that,

“There are also lots of academic enrichment and excellence programmes available, in the arts, science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects, English and the humanities, but the offers are sometimes complex to navigate. We will help schools to identify effective programmes and get the best out of them.”

There are already many excellent primary STEM enrichment programmes and resources, such as the British Science Association’s CREST Awards, STEM Learning’s STEM Ambassadors and enrichment resources, PSTT’s enrichment resources, STEMazing, Smallpeice Trust and many others. Hopefully, the Government’s commitment to help schools identify and get the best out of them will enable more schools to offer STEM enrichment activities that support their pupils’ science learning and enhance their interest in studying STEM further.