New Primary Curriculum for England Dropped

The new primary curriculum, following the Rose Review, had been accepted by Ed Balls and published in the government's website as being statutory from 2011. It has been distributed to many schools, teachers are already engaging positively with it and in some LAs teachers are being trained to implement it.

However, the proposal for this to become statutory was incorporated in the Children Schools and Families Bill, along with various other more controversial legislation. Progress through parliament was consequently slow – and on Thursday the new primary curriculum was dropped from the Bill in the so-called 'wash-up' that takes place when a general election is called. The opposition could have agreed to it going through, but they did not.

This leaves all of us involved in primary education in a bit of a mess. A huge amount of time, effort, expertise and funding has gone into the development of this curriculum, including the Rose Review itself and the extensive consultations about the proposals. The outcome was something that primary schools seem to support and which was research-based and contemporary. Schools may well determine to implement it anyway – but we are left now with the statutory curriculum for primary schools still being the one that was published in November 1999.