There is no quicker way to spot a government that has run out of ideas than to watch what it does to the school curriculum. Labour's Curriculum and Assessment Review, the architecture for which is now being rolled out, will make Citizenship a statutory subject in primary schools and strengthen its place at secondary. New emphasis is being placed on "media literacy", "critical thinking", "oracy" and "financial literacy". Reading, writing and arithmetic — the bedrock — have been quietly shoved over to make room.
Children Who Cannot Read Don't Need Lessons in Citizenship
Let's start with the basics. Pupil attainment in reading and maths has still not fully recovered from the school closures of 2020 and 2021. Phonics screening pass rates dipped. Key Stage 2 SATs results in maths slipped. The gap between children on free school meals and their better-off peers widened. Every minute of primary class time is a minute that must be earned. If we are spending statutory minutes on Citizenship for seven-year-olds, we are spending them on something other than the skills those children desperately need to escape disadvantage.
The Government argues that Citizenship will produce informed, active members of the community. Set aside for a moment the question of who decides what an "active member of the community" looks like. Ask the practical question: who is going to teach it? Primary teachers are already trying to deliver a packed timetable with constrained budgets and shrinking teaching assistant support. Adding another statutory subject without removing anything is a recipe for shallow teaching and stretched staff.
"Media Literacy" Is the Tell
Watch the language. The review trumpets "media literacy" and "critical thinking" as new pillars of the primary curriculum. In theory, fine. In practice, this is the route by which a particular set of views about government, climate policy, and social issues quietly become the default in the classroom. "Critical thinking" lessons that critique only certain ideas, and never the orthodoxies of the people writing the curriculum, are not critical thinking lessons. They are catechism classes.
Parents understand this instinctively. They have watched the rolling controversies over what is taught in secondary RSE, over how British history is presented, over the political colouring of school materials on net zero. They are not against children learning to evaluate sources. They are against children being marched through a particular worldview under the cover of a soothing curriculum label.
The Real Job of Primary School
The job of a primary school is to send children to secondary school able to read fluently, write coherently, do their times tables, and behave in a classroom. Those are not flashy outcomes. They will not produce a Ministerial press release. But they are the entire foundation of every subsequent qualification, every job application, every act of independent citizenship the child will perform as an adult. Get those wrong, and no amount of Citizenship lessons will compensate.
The implementation timeline runs through 2027 and 2028. There is still time to push back. The consultation will be answered, in part, by professional educationalists who broadly welcome the direction of travel. It needs to be answered by parents, governors, employers, and elected representatives who are willing to say plainly: fix the basics first.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would restore the central place of reading, writing and arithmetic in primary education. We would resist the politicisation of the curriculum under the guise of "critical thinking" or "media literacy" and insist that any such teaching presents the full spread of mainstream political and economic views, not the prevailing London consensus. We would back teachers to teach, and we would protect parents' right to know what their children are being taught and to challenge it where appropriate.
Schools are not laboratories for the political fashions of a tired Government. They are the place where children either acquire the skills to make their own way in life — or they do not. The Curriculum and Assessment Review is being sold as ambition. It is, on the evidence so far, distraction. Britain's primary schools have one job, and it isn't this.