UK National Curriculum and Assessment Review with Ger Graus

Rebecca Durose-Croft and Global Education Adviser, Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE discuss the UK Curriculum and Assessment Review. The conversation focuses on the changes being proposed, potential long-term impacts for learners, ways to ensure teacher preparedness, and how the recommended changes can be implemented in an equitable manner.

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Transcript

[00:07] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Hello and welcome. I'm Rebecca Durose-Croft, Managing Director at Westchester Education. Today I'm joined by a very special guest, Professor Dr. Ger Grouse, OBE, a respected educator, thought leader and advocate for global learning and curriculum innovation. I'm also blessed to call him a good friend. With decades of experience in international education and curriculum development, Ger has been at the forefront of shaping modern teaching approaches that prepare students for a connected, rapidly changing world. Today we'll explore the ongoing UK curriculum review, what's changing, what needs to change and how it fits into the broader global Gereducation landscape. We'll discuss what a forward looking curriculum could mean for students, teachers, content developers and society as a whole. Welcome Ger.

[01:00] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: Thanks Rebecca, Nice to be with you.

[01:03] Rebecca Durose-Croft: So, let's start with students themselves. Then, Ger, if the curriculum really does broaden out and look more to the future, what do you think that means for kids? Day to day experience in the classroom and I suppose their confidence as learners as well.

[01:17] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: Let me begin with a quote from the American author Roy T. Bennett, who said many years ago, if you have a strong purpose in life, you don't have to be pushed. Your passion will drive you there. And if I may, I link that to a story. And the story is that over the many years that I've been working, and we're working globally, wherever I go, I ask to speak with children and young people of whatever ages, and almost the first question I ask them is, why do you go to school? And the answer I get in about 80% of the cases is because I have to. And I always think it's a really sad answer, because doing something for 11, 12, sometimes 13 years because somebody else tells you to and you feel that you have to is not a good starting point. So, whatever we change has to improve on that percentage. And one of the key areas to focus on is perhaps not the future, but it is perhaps a sense of purpose. It is to answer why questions. And it is through the purpose and the why answers that we develop passion. From the young people's point of view, there also needs to be relevance here somewhere, very practical relevance. So at the moment I'm seeing all these young people going to school and I'm seeing them on their mobile phones as they go to school, and then between nine and three, they're transported back in some Time Lord machine to the 1980s, as if mobiles don't exist. And at 3 o’ clock, all of a sudden the world, the real world, is theirs again. And I think we need to before we even talk about content changes and whatever else. I think we need to begin to look at, well, how can we connect with what our young people already know and who they already are, and how can we extend this and help them extend it themselves and then challenge themselves? And I think I want to stress this time and time again. When I say young people, when I say children, I start at the age of zero. We have a very silly habit, I think in certainly in England, where we seem to think that serious education starts from the age of 11 and anything before that, or indeed after it, is not really that cool. We need to begin to think about the difference between schooling and education that our content provision needs to address that difference. Education 0 to 99 and schooling about 10, 11, 12, 13 years in which we position our children and young people in such a way that they can educate themselves better and more confidently for the rest of their lives. Sometimes we refer to this as skills aptitudes and whatever else we might want to use. And there's an interesting thing, incidentally, Rebecca, about the skills thing. In 2000 I was working as education director in South Manchester and I was working very closely with Manchester Airport and I spoke to about 250 CEOs of all the companies inside the airport and asked them one question. And the question was, you're interviewing a 16 year old tomorrow morning for a job. What three things are, from your perspective, not negotiable. So we got the answers. And the answers we got from all 250 essentially consisted of surprise, surprise, effective oral and written communication, collaboration and networking, agility, adaptability, resilience, empathy, vision, self regulation, hope and optimism, curiosity, imagination, creativity, initiative, innovation, entrepreneurialism and critical thinking and problem solving, of course. Now that was 25 years ago.

[05:22] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yeah, and.

[05:23] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: And I turned this into a slide and, and used it 25 years ago. And then I found this slide in 2025 and unaltered at a conference. I used it again, but I didn't tell them that that slide was 25 years old. And everybody came up afterwards and said, can we please have a copy of this because this is so good and this. And I don't know why this wasn't done before. So my point with the renewal also is not to throw babies out with bathwaters. And actually when we talk in 25 years ago when we were talking about effective oral and written communication, we were probably talking about computers, but mostly handwriting. The fact that in this day and age that includes TikTok and Instagram, is actually neither here nor there.

[06:16] Rebecca Durose-Croft: So thinking about that Then does a more flexible or potentially more flexible curriculum make that easier or does it just add another layer of complexity when it comes to teaching?

[06:27] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: I think that's such an interesting question because I think if I can just broaden that out a little bit. What we need to consider when we talk about a curriculum is not perhaps what historically and certainly in England over the last 14 or so years we've had in mind is the prescription of what is to be taught to children. But we need to think about this, what children learn and how they learn and how they internalize this content and how they make sense of it. So one of the things that we need to focus on almost instantly is. You mentioned personalization. Well, what does that mean? In order to personalize, I need to know my children, unless I want to personalize to whole groups of 30, which seems rather daft in my understanding of it all. But if we actually want to really personalize in an age of personalization, this is of course completely the right thing to do. If we want to personalize, there is something about we need to spend time to know our children and know them beyond the grade, beyond their attendance percentage and beyond whether they're sometimes naughty or not, or whether they've got special educational needs or disability. Because they tend to be the factors that we look at these broad brush factors that will require time, that it will actually require quite a lot of time for teachers to know their children well. And then we need to begin to, and almost go back to that connect, extend, challenge is well, so teachers need to then create scenarios, if you wish, create environments wherein children can learn. So I would advocate that this is very strongly an opportunity. We have to move more towards experience based learning so that fewer than 80% of the young people give the answer. I go to school because I have to. So I would strongly advocate. Advocate as a very simple example is that no child of whatever age, for example, should study Shakespeare without seeing the play or even being in it. And now I don't think that, I don't think that's very hard to do. I think it's very time consuming. But actually as a teacher, I also think I could have a great deal of fun moving into that world. And perhaps as an aside to that, we need to begin to ask ourselves collectively and professionally the question what kind of experiences do we think our children should have by the age of 11, by the age of 16, by the age of 18, should 11 year olds have some experience of social networking, for example? Now I can hear the oohs and Ahs going on in the background. But the reality is that that is happening at the moment. So we just grow up a bit and stop being blind about these things. Should we begin to think about using a mobile phone in classrooms now? My, my view is, yes, I'm a languages teacher. I want to walk into my lesson asking my youngsters whether their mobile phones are turned on because I'm setting up WhatsApp groups with their friends in Germany so that we can play games and practice live something that many years ago in my day was called a pen friend and took ages to get there and took ages to get back. So I think we need to look at not just the content, I think we need to look at something that some of our teachers may not be too used to, which is creativity, which is innovation, which is adaptability and actually which is trust that is placed in them. Because remember that the national curriculum, Ofsted, all those things actually were born from the premise that you can't trust teachers and very often that you can't trust children either, which is why we have silent corridors and all those kind of things. I think this curriculum change is about a culture change and it's about trust in the profession. So you create a framework within which teachers operate and you let them be the geniuses that they are.

[10:59] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yeah, I love that idea. And again, we've talked about that a lot in the past. That, you know, bringing back that autonomy for teachers and thinking more aspirationally about, you know, why they got into teaching that creativity piece is something a lot of them will relish given the time and space to do that. So thinking of the, the ecosystem around schools then, and I'm thinking, you know, from, from my side, publishers, ed tech providers, suppose anybody building those tools and that content for the classroom, what kind of shift do you think they'll need to make to support a curriculum that's more open, less prescriptive and like you said, probably should be more experience based with more real life examples.

[11:46] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: Totally. And I think, and I think those real life examples shouldn't be just. I mean, of course I've always said to teachers, if you talk to youngsters about an abstract in a lesson, the next thing that should happen is comma, for example.

[11:59] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yes.

[12:00] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: So that you make the learning visible. Now we talked earlier about knowing your children better and the personalization agenda, the experience based learning strategies that will need developing. So for Westchester, for example, I would suggest that it's a move, in a way, it's a move slightly away from just the. What question mark. Yeah. But it will need to include the how and who is it for? And who is it by? And I'll come to that in a minute. And the when and the where. And of course ultimately the full circle comes when it answers the question why? Which takes us back to Roy T. Bennett and his purpose Quote. So the what is just simply the curriculum, but the how it is about how do I make and create scenarios and environments and inside the classroom, online or elsewhere where the youngsters can experience this so that they can join up their own dots, write their own narrative of the possible within it and make it work for them. And who is it for? Well, it's for the youngsters sometimes it might be for the families. Maybe we need to think about family homeworks, for example, and parental engagement, particularly in the earlier years of schooling and education. Who is it by is an interesting one. So if I, I mean just a simple example, but if I in a, in a secondary citizen curriculum am required to address the issue of applying for a mortgage, then please don't do it from the textbook, but go and talk to your local building society or bank and bring in an expert.

[13:42] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yeah.

[13:43] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: And because actually everybody is an educator. Yeah. Those educators need to be led by the teacher. So we need to create and Westchester and organizations need to help us with this to create scenarios and suggestions as to how to do those things and also to be flexible because knowing our children better doesn't mean all of a sudden that all 30 youngsters in front of me are going to be doing exactly the same thing. The same applies to a when and where. Sometimes we might want to come back on a Saturday morning because we can bring in lots of guests that address to a theme. So schools could run conferences, they could run online conferences. And of course this goes, I can hear it now decide more time, more pressure on the teachers. Good leadership in good schools will make sure that gets accommodated appropriately. So it is not necessarily more, but it is necessarily different.

[14:48] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yeah. And you make, you raise a good point that Ger around, you know, good leadership in good schools and flexibility. I suppose there is always a worry that flexibility can turn into a bit of a postcode lottery. Do you see a risk then with that in mind, that some schools end up offering a much richer experience than others, which is a big possibility. And my question to you would be what could publishers and ed tech providers do? What could they provide in terms of leveling that out across the country and globally?

[15:22] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: Well, let's just think it through a little bit. So your question, you know, does the Increasing flexibility lead to greater inconsistencies between schools to a degree, quite probably. I mean. And that's the case at the moment? Yeah, yeah, it's. But it depends in looking ahead, it depends. Inconsistencies of what? Not perhaps inconsistencies of content, but perhaps more in terms of inconsistencies of the quality of delivery.

[15:51] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yes.

[15:53] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: Particularly on the personalization agenda. So one thing you cannot have is some massive multi academy trust with schools all over the country from a central office dictating what should be taught at a certain time. Yeah, that'd be a nightmare. I remember years ago, I'm going back years ago, the introduction of the literacy hour. Do you remember?

[16:18] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yeah.

[16:18] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: And you remember at the end of the literacy hour, which was always the first or most cases, first thing in the morning, at the end of the literacy hour, there was a plenary when all the children would sit on the carpet facing the front. Do you remember? Yeah, it's kind of. I've always had this North Korean picture about this, that in England there are 600,000 children in a year group. So at 20 past nine in the morning, every morning there would be 600,000 children in England doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, supposedly for exactly the same good reason. That is absolutely not where we want to be. And I come back to that issue of culture and, and professional trust. So what we need is we need a quality framework built around the content, not a dictat.

[17:08] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yeah.

[17:09] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: And that framework gets delivered contextually to the needs of the children and to the agendas of the children in a challenging way. This is not some pop out. I can hear that being shouted in the background somewhere from probably ministers of about 10 years ago. But. So, this is, this is not an issue of less good. This is actually an issue of better and more appropriate. And the one thing that we need to be mindful of is that this has got huge consequences if we want this to work, because we need to come out of the trap of the Ofsted tail wagging the education dog. Teaching to the test needs to disappear because otherwise you can talk about creativity, whatever you want. When it comes down to it, the teachers will be under undue pressure to deliver something in a way in a certain period of time. So those elements of trust and development, should there be one website that dictates what the rest of the country should do. So, we would look to organizations, I would look to organizations like Westchester as an ongoing development partner. And actually, if you imagine that, and I suppose Rebecca, in this day and Age, with all sorts of technology, this is not impossible. Is that in old money one textbook should exist A couple of thousand times.

[18:35] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yeah.

[18:36] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: Because it needs to be. How do you become adaptable? How do you help and support the teachers to manage these things? And one of the things is with ideas and suggestions within this framework. And I can't wait. I mean there are, you know, some of the most genius teachers out there are just going to have a field day.

[18:58] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Yes.

[18:58] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: And the confidence that they will, will create in those youngsters is just going to be unbelievable. And, and, and I've always said, always said, bring me a confident child and I'll bring you the grade. Yeah, but, but we need to begin to think around in a very big way. In Children's University we used to call them the 10 A's. How does what we do and how we do it with our young people, how does that affect attendance and attainment? How does it affect achievement and attitudes and a sense of adventure? What about awards? What about agency? What about aspiration? Adaptability? All those things begin to play a very huge part of this. And again, I go back to what I said earlier. We probably around this will need to change our measurables. In my humble opinion, the recent review of the inspectorate in England is nothing short of a farce. There will have to be another review, and it will have to be around the curriculum. The what, the how, the who for and by the when, the where, the why as measurables within that personalization agenda. If we don't do that, we're just.

[20:19] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Pretending there's comfort in the prescriptive curriculum, you know, for those teachers that do feel less confident. So, I suppose I'm thinking, are schools and teachers ready for this kind of change?

[20:33] Professor Dr. Ger Grause, OBE: It's an interesting question. The answer is no. But before that, I think you mentioned, you know, the prescriptive. I would, I would like to see if there is going to be and there needs to be because otherwise the gaps will be too big nationally. But but what needs to be prescriptive is, is probably the framework and probably expected outcomes. But how we get there needs to be the personalization thing and also a personalization thing from the teacher's point of view. So, there are issues around how that framework is prescriptive and how that whole trust and agenda fits in there. But in terms of readiness, we're not ready.

[21:11] Rebecca Durose-Croft: Thank you for joining Ger and I for this discussion on the UK curriculum review and the future of global education. And thank you Ger, for sharing your insights and vision. If you'd like to explore the ideas we discussed further or want to reach out to Westchester Education directly, please feel free to get in touch via our website or LinkedIn to hear more from Ger and I on this topic. Please look out for details of our interview session at BETT London in January 2026.