Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of adding defence as a subject in the national curriculum.

The government has established an independent Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis CBE. The Review wants to ensure a rich, broad, inclusive and innovative curriculum that readies young people for life and work. The interim report was published on 18 March and sets out the particular areas of focus for the next stage of the Review. The report can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-interim-report. This considers questions that have been raised across different subjects about the specificity, relevance, volume and diversity of content, and seeks to ensure that the national curriculum allows space for schools to support mastery of core concepts, effective transitions, and progression through each key stage. The Review’s final report with recommendations will be published in the autumn.

The national curriculum currently provides a broad framework which gives schools flexibility to organise the content and delivery of the curriculum to meet the needs of their pupils. Defence is not included as a subject in the national curriculum, as subjects are based around broad disciplines such as geography and history. However, schools can choose to teach about defence, for example, within secondary citizenship content covering democracy, the rule of law, the roles played by public institutions in society and the United Kingdom’s relations with the wider world.

As the Review said in its interim report that the current shape of the curriculum at key stages 1-4 provides students with good exposure to a wide range of subjects, and that they intend to recommend retaining the current curriculum architecture, we therefore expect that defence will not be added as a subject but that schools and teachers will continue to have the flexibility to adapt the curriculum to best meet the needs of their pupils.