There’s a moment in every teacher’s career when you realise that the latest government White Paper landing on your desk wasn’t written for you - it was written at you.

Another round of reforms dreamt up in a policy bunker, another exhausting pivot that ignores everything you’ve learned in the classroom.

So when Professor Becky Francis’ curriculum and assessment review arrived this week, the collective intake of breath across staffrooms was audible. Could this actually be different?

The short answer: yes. And remarkably so.

A different kind of curriculum review

This isn’t just another curriculum review.

It’s something that education policy rarely achieves - a document that treats teachers as the experts they are, acknowledges what’s working before rushing to dismantle it, and grounds every recommendation in evidence rather than political expediency.

After years of whiplash reform, Francis and her team have delivered something genuinely unusual: a blueprint for improvement that the profession might actually recognise.

Let’s start with what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t trash the knowledge-rich curriculum gains of the past decade. It doesn’t propose wholesale structural upheaval.

It doesn’t pretend that GCSEs can be wished away by ministerial decree, nor does it treat assessment as the enemy of learning. Instead, it does something far more radical: it listens.

The phrase “evolution not revolution” appears early and often, and it’s no accident. This review understands that real, sustainable change comes from deepening practice, not perpetually ripping up the floorboards.

Listening to teachers

Teachers asked for stability, coherence and breathing space. They got it - alongside a clear-eyed insistence that “high standards must mean high standards for all”. That pairing is crucial.

This isn’t permission to lower expectations; it’s recognition that maintaining them requires smarter design, not just louder rhetoric.

Take literacy and numeracy. Rather than yet another grand announcement about “back to basics”, the review proposes something practical and overdue: a diagnostic reading and maths check in Year 8.

Not another high-stakes exam, but a tool to catch pupils who slip through transition gaps and ensure that no one enters Year 9 unable to access the curriculum.

It’s the kind of intervention that makes intuitive sense to anyone who’s taught across key stage 2 and 3 - and precisely the kind of thing policy tends to overlook in favour of headline-grabbing initiatives.

Focus on social justice

Or consider the social justice thread running throughout. England’s attainment gap remains stubbornly wide - disadvantaged pupils lag roughly 15 points behind in Attainment 8, and progress for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities continues to disappoint.

But instead of weaponising those statistics for political point-scoring, Francis asks what curriculum design itself can do to close the gap.

The answers - reducing cognitive overload, improving transition, embedding inclusive exemplification, restoring enrichment as an entitlement - are levers schools can actually pull without waiting for legislation or budgets to materialise.

Sensible stance on exams

The assessment proposals strike a similarly sensible balance.

The review resists populist calls to abolish GCSEs while acknowledging that exam volume has crept too high and formative assessment has been squeezed out. Its recommendation to reduce overall assessment load while maintaining rigour feels grown-up in a way education policy often isn’t.

So, too, does its proposal to retire the English Baccalaureate headline measure while preserving academic breadth through a new accountability bucket. Creative and technical subjects - casualties of the EBacc’s blunt instrument approach - should breathe easier.

If there’s a frustration, it’s that the review pulls its punches on Progress 8 itself.

For a metric that shapes countless school decisions, it receives surprisingly light treatment. Progress 8 brought transparency and moved us beyond crude floor standards, but it now needs refining to open up genuine curriculum flexibility.

A bolder reimagining would have completed the picture. Still, this feels like a quibble rather than a flaw.

What makes this review genuinely heartening isn’t any single recommendation - it’s the cumulative sense that someone finally understands how schools actually work.

Pupils’ needs in the spotlight

It recognises that teachers aren’t resistant to change; they’re exhausted by incoherent change imposed without consultation or resource. It acknowledges that the system has strengths worth preserving and weaknesses that require intelligent intervention, not performative disruption.

Most importantly, it keeps the spotlight where it belongs: on the pupils who benefit least from the current settlement. They’re no viewed as rhetorical props, but as the reason why every proposal exists.

After years of policy turbulence, Francis has delivered something education rarely sees: a research-grounded, professionally owned blueprint that trusts the sector to implement it with intelligence and care.

Evolution over revolution, yes - but evolution that genuinely listens, learns and lifts.

For a profession weary of being talked at, that might just be the revolution we needed after all.

Dan Morrow is chief executive of Cornwall Education Learning Trust

You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Tes magazine on iOS and on Android