Labour’s New School Curriculum: Where Education Goes to DEI

The final report of the Government’s review of curriculum and assessment in England’s schools has recently been published. After 16 months of meetings and consultations and with 197 pages plus 101 more of annexes a mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse. Only the outlines of the proposed changes are given, the crucial details about subject requirements being developed between now and spring 2027 with a view to implementation in schools in September 2028.

The proposals for this self-described “world class” and “cutting edge” curriculum – almost all of which have now been endorsed by the Government – appear on the surface less radical than expected. The review team has resisted appeals to get rid of GCSEs and, although it would clearly have liked to cut exams further, the proposed around 10% reduction in examining time ought not to be too damaging. It has also kept the original subject-based structure of the national curriculum. Sadly for Scotland,  but happily for England,  the SNP’s  laughably named  ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ has killed off for a generation in these islands the progressive idea that you can get rid of boring old subjects, replace them with friendly ‘open borders’ cross-curricular mush and still achieve academically.

I have recently been re-reading Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, where he famously states that a curriculum should be the transmission from one generation to the next of “the best that has been known and thought (or said)”. Seen from this viewpoint there is no need for a national curriculum to be revised every time a new government or a new secretary of state comes into office. The eternal task of education is to transmit inherited knowledge without any other purpose than enabling future adults to use it in ways they see fit. That is what traditionally has been called a ‘liberal education’.

What ought not to happen if we are to retain the pretence of offering a liberal education is to keep on rewriting a national curriculum to bring it into line with the changing ideologies of those in power. That, however, is exactly what this review team has done. It is insinuating into the curriculum wherever it can opportunities to mould the minds of children into ‘right ways of thinking’. The ideology here is that of the radical progressive elite currently dominant in our universities, schools, cultural institutions and public bodies and clearly well-represented on the review panel. I am no Marxist, but Marx’s notion that elites spawn ideological superstructures that help them assert control over the rest of society has always convinced me. It is alive and well in the requirements for this new curriculum.

There are three ways in which the report envisages embedding this ideology in the new curriculum and in the minds of young people. The first is through the promotion in all parts of the curriculum of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, also referred to as ‘social justice’. The second is through inducting children of all ages into every aspect of climate orthodoxy. The third is using an extended ‘citizenship’ curriculum to make absolutely sure that they learn to identify ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ in officially approved ways. Steven Tucker has already shown, with his usual coruscating wit, how the second and third of these involves nothing less than a programme for indoctrination that in due course, quite shamefully, will have the force of law.  My concern in this article is solely with the review team’s parallel obsession with DEI.   

Diversity and inclusion are everywhere in the report. All children must be able “to see themselves in the curriculum” is its incantatory refrain. There are four problems with this. The first, and most important, is that the purpose of a curriculum is to teach you things you don’t yet know, not to ‘represent’ you. The second is practical: how on earth could all the 19 groups used in ethnicity data collected from schools, as well as children in all socio-economic groups, “see” their highly specific identities represented back to them? The third is that prioritising diversity over other criteria for the selection of content distorts the main aims of a subject. The fourth is that emphasising diversity is doing what radical progressives are always keen to be seen doing, which is favouring minority groups at the expense of the majority (a majority finally waking up to the fact that they are the ones who always lose out).

‘Equity’ is similarly everywhere in the report and a concept that by law must now be taught in primary schools. Insofar as ‘equity’ means ‘equality of outcome’, it is what appears to be prompting the report’s many statements about delivering excellence to all young people and the entitlement of all to the highest standards. If this were to mean just removing obstacles from and giving extra help to those who are struggling no one could object, but lurking behind such statements is the Panglossian dream characteristic of the Left that everyone must be enabled to reach the highest levels and ‘all must have prizes’.  

One of the review’s worst recommendations is the abolition of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) measure designed to encourage pupils to choose more demanding subjects at GCSE. It was one of the surviving instruments for encouraging a liberal education. Because schools with large numbers of ‘disadvantaged’ pupils score poorly on this measure, especially outside London, they will now be encouraged instead to offer less demanding options to their pupils.  As someone born in the town with the second worst EBacc results in the country, Stoke-on-Trent, and had his primary education there, I agree that this level of attainment is a scandal and needs to be urgently addressed. You do not achieve greater equity, however, by removing an aspirational target. You put in place arrangements to make sure there is better management, teachers, resources and ethos at school level, so that those pupils with the talent to do so can succeed in following a demanding curriculum.

What is also striking about the review team’s emphasis on DEI, climate and a utilitarian approach to citizenship education is how these preoccupations ignore other deep-seated curricular needs that ought to have been staring them in the face. What is the urgent need for a society in the middle of demographic change not previously experienced since the mass migrations that led to the end of the Roman Empire? It is not more of the multiculturalism (rapidly developing into plural monoculturalism) on which this new curriculum’s diversity initiative is doubling down, but a curriculum in line with the traditional emphasis on transmission that helps to foster a sense of national unity.

One of the submissions to the review was a Policy Exchange report on the state of history teaching in England which recommended that one of the papers in the History GCSE should be a mandatory module requiring an overview of British history 1066 to 1989. Although history is not a compulsory subject for 14-16 year-olds (compare Hungary where it is required to 18) it is the most popular of the optional GCSE subjects on offer. Giving the young people who opt for it a further oversight of the chronology of our national story would be a small, but not insignificant, contribution to their developing sense of identity, as long as it was taught without the usual anti-patriotic bias. Did the review team respond with enthusiasm to this excellent suggestion (in a report backed cross-party by no less than David Blunkett and Nadhim Zahawi)? I will let you guess the answer.

Not only did they not take up the proposal but referred favourably to a request from the Runnymede Trust – a body with a Muslim CEO that campaigns against “racist state violence” and in favour of a law against ‘Islamophobia’ – that the current requirement for 40% of GCSE history to be British history be relaxed. The terms ‘British’ and ‘World’ were so intertwined, it argued in a weaselly way, that “a more inclusive approach” was needed “which better recognises the complexities and diversities of our national history”. Put in plain words, this means less time for the mainstream history of Britain and more time please for the histories of black and Asian Britons who from the country’s earliest days up to around 1950 never constituted more than 0.1% of the population. Picking up this point in its response to the report, the Government goes further, promising that in reforming the history curriculum it will “ensure that teachers can reflect the innate diversity of British history, including British Black and Asian history”. In practice “can” is likely to mean ‘must’, not least given schools’ anxieties about showing that their Public Sector Equality Duty under the 2010 Equality Act has been complied with.

It shows the blinkered attitude both of the review team and the Government that their only reaction to mass immigration is to keep on promoting separate identities rather than finding ways for individuals from minorities to both integrate and assimilate, as many have done over the centuries. Education is only one way of doing this, but potentially one of the most important.

It might be a good idea for the Secretary of State to swallow her pride and finally visit Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School to see how some of that school’s successful approaches to integration and assimilation might be rolled out more generally.

Dr Nicholas Tate was chief executive of England’s curriculum and assessment agencies 1994-2000 and adviser to French ministers of national education 2000-2005. He is currently Adviser to the Learning Institute, Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. He is the author of The Conservative Case for Education and Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.