Curriculum and Assessment Review

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2026 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Freyberg]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the implications of the final report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, published on 5 November 2025, for education in England.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to be opening this debate and grateful for the number of noble Lords who have put their names down to speak. I confess I wish we had been granted more time, given the breadth and importance of this subject. I look forward to hearing all contributions, whatever the topic, and to the Minister’s response to what I am certain will be a well-informed and searching debate. I am grateful too for the many briefings I have received in preparation from a wide range of organisations, among them the Campaign for the Arts.

I intend to focus on arts education, though I will say a brief word towards the end about modern languages, where some difficult questions remain. The Curriculum and Assessment Review, published on 5 November last year, was an independent report led by Professor Becky Francis, and its findings carry considerable weight. The Government’s response deserves to be treated seriously. It acknowledges, clearly and without equivocation, that arts education in England has suffered a prolonged and serious decline—and that acknowledgement alone represents a change of tone that many in the sector had long been waiting for.

The scale of what has happened is worth stating plainly. Since 2011, the number of hours of arts teaching in schools has fallen by 23%. Since 2010, the share of GCSE entries in arts subjects has shrunk by nearly half and A-level entries have fallen by nearly a third. For nearly half of all young people aged 11 to 15—and for a majority when it comes to drama—school is their only contact with the arts. They do not participate in arts activities outside the school gate. When provision in schools declines, those young people do not lose some of their access to the arts, they lose all of it, and the burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it. Children in the most deprived areas are less likely to study arts subjects and less likely to access extracurricular cultural opportunities, creating what the Cultural Learning Alliance has called an entitlement gap. This is not a peripheral concern: it goes to the heart of what we believe education to be and what kind of society we wish to be.

Against that backdrop, the review contains much that deserves recognition. The proposal to abolish the EBacc has been widely welcomed by arts educators and their representative bodies. For 15 years, that performance measure squeezed arts subjects out of timetables, budgets and the thinking of school leaders who had little choice but to prioritise the subjects it rewarded. The reform of Progress 8, although still subject to consultation, signals a more inclusive conception of achievement. The Government’s second pledge in the executive summary, to

“revitalise arts education as part of the reformed national curriculum”,

is not a minor commitment. The arts are described, rightly, as an entitlement for every pupil rather than an optional extra. I welcome these commitments unreservedly.

The challenge, however, lies in the gap between aspiration and implementation, and it is a considerable one. The Government are pursuing an ambitious range of activity simultaneously: a reformed curriculum, an enrichment strategy, the National Youth Strategy, the schools White Paper, the National Centre for Arts and Music Education and the Hodge review of Arts Council England. These initiatives serve different purposes, and not all are primarily concerned with education, but those that are must be properly joined up if they are to deliver on the Government’s commitments. There is, for example, an apparent tension between the national centre’s reliance on leveraged philanthropy to fund activities that would previously have been covered by statutory schools funding, and the Hodge review’s parallel recommendation for an entirely separate philanthropic fund. I ask the Minister directly: is it either viable or desirable to place this much weight on philanthropy to fill gaps that statutory funding ought to cover?

Compounding this, the new National Centre for Arts and Music Education is reported to be operating on a smaller budget than the bridge organisations it replaces, only some of which will continue to receive support from DCMS. But even a well-resourced national centre could not on its own solve what is, in the end, the most pressing problem of all: there are simply not enough specialist teachers to deliver the arts subjects the Government have promised.

The Government have reduced initial teacher training bursaries for creative subjects at precisely the moment when the review calls for their expansion. The consequences are already visible. Drama is recruiting less than half its target number of trainee teachers; music is only just above half. The Campaign for the Arts has noted the obvious tension: the Government have pledged to put creativity at the heart of the curriculum, while simultaneously restricting the financial incentives that draw people into teaching those very subjects. I ask the Minister directly: how do the Government intend to build a revitalised arts education on a diminishing supply of specialist teachers, and will they reconsider the bursary position?

I will add a broader question about how the arts subjects are valued, not merely in policy documents but in public discourse. For too long, arts and humanities subjects have been set in opposition to STEM, as though the two were competing rather than complementary. That false hierarchy has been entrenched by the marketisation of higher education. When universities become dependent on student fees, students become customers, and subjects begin to be valued, or devalued, according to their perceived market worth. The arts and humanities have suffered on both counts: devalued in the league tables that drive student choice and devalued culturally in a discourse that has come to equate worth with starting salary. This is the context in which the review’s commitment to parity of esteem between subjects must be understood. It is why that commitment, if it is to mean anything, will require more than warm words in a curriculum document.

Finally, I will say a brief word about language—not the language of the review, but modern languages as a subject. The abolition of the EBacc is, on balance, good for arts education, but it carries a real cost for languages, which derived much of their school-level protection from that same performance measure. There are already reports of head teachers reducing GCSE languages provision in direct response to the removal of the EBacc. University departments have been contracting for years. Since January alone, closures or reductions have been announced at Leicester, Nottingham, Heriot-Watt and Essex. In 2024, fewer than 3% of A-levels were in languages; PE attracted more entries than French and German combined. Can the Minister say what steps the Government are taking to ensure that the gains for arts education do not come at the further expense of languages? The case for an advanced language premium, along the lines of the advanced maths premium, has to be considered.

The Government have made a public commitment to every child having access to high-quality arts education, regardless of background or postcode. The ongoing consultation on Progress 8 and the new curriculum expected in 2027 represent a genuine opportunity to get this right. I look forward to hearing how the Government intend to take it.