In July 2024 a newly elected Labour government announced an independent curriculum and assessment review for England spanning from Key Stage 1 through to Key Stage 5. The purpose of this exercise being to ensure that the national curriculum appropriately balances ambition, excellence, relevance, flexibility and inclusivity for all children and young people. In September 2024, I shared my interest in the curriculum and assessment review’s aim to deliver recommendations [to the Labour government] for ‘a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society, ensuring all children and young people are represented.’ My interest was triggered particularly by racist riots during the summer across the UK in which young people of school age were involved, and before this, in the summer of 2020, where the Black Lives Matter public protests across the UK that also involved young people had demanded through parliamentary petition that the Westminster conservative party government reform the national curriculum so that it include statutory teaching and learning for young people about Britain’s cultural diversity. This demand was rejected.

The current curriculum and assessment review has undertaken an evidence gathering process that has included a public call for evidence, two online webinars and nine events, getting the views of over 3,600 attendees – a mix of experts, teachers, parents, pupils, school and college leader, roundtables and oral evidence sessions to get more targeted input. However, in their anticipation of the recommendations, right-wing conservative social commentators have instigated polemical anti-woke inflammatory discourses and spread these across the various public domains with statements such as ‘children will be taught that white society is innately racist and western nations were born in the original sins of colonialism and imperialism’ and ‘[the]  updated’ curriculum will inevitably degrade education further. In attacking subjects such as English literature and history, children will be left not just academically impoverished, but also alienated from their own national heritage’.

This BERA Presidential seminar will present educational research and examples of educational policy and practice that have been offered to the curriculum and assessment review as evidence for recommending a statutory anti-racist education that can benefit all young people in a diverse society. In evaluating our evidence against historical and contemporary political and social and educational challenges in England, we ask delegates to help to consider: What’s next in the struggle for curriculum knowledge and culture in England?

Draft programme: