The curriculum and assessment review (CAR) is a once-in-a-career opportunity to review our approach to teaching and learning, and to really get this right for pupils.

The time we have to make the most of this opportunity is disappearing quickly, and there has been no mention of a grace period for implementing new curriculum requirements.

Schools will need to have this fully in place for September 2028, so we need to be thinking about it now, not later.

The knowledge we need to respond to the CAR already exists across the sector, and we believe the system has now matured to a point where trusts and school groups are ready to commit to authentic, open collaboration.

Working together

To support this, we set out the need for true, open collaboration in a recent paper by the Confederation of School Trusts and, as facilitators of the Curriculum and Assessment Leads Network, we started bringing together talented leaders from across the country.

We have named this initiative ”The Big Think”, and we recently had the joy of hosting brilliant colleagues representing over 470 schools and more than 25 trusts and organisations at Creative Education Trust’s head office, where we tapped into early thinking about system-level responses to the CAR, drawing on their expertise.

Some of the topics we touched upon with participants in the room and online included the importance of establishing a shared language for the CAR across the country and our consensus on the principles of curriculum design theory.

We also had an important discussion on how we can avoid the “Frankenstein effect” - ensuring that new initiatives are baked into our curriculum and not “bolted on” in the form of various administrative headaches.

Sharing summaries

At our Big Think, we reflected on how far we understand the evidence underpinning the CAR itself, and whether we need to further distil or amplify this, as well as how this connects with the schools White Paper.

We started to review questions that we will need to continue to work together to answer, such as whether we are concentrating enough on readiness for teaching as well as readiness for learning, and what steps we need to take to ensure we can support the changing needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs and disabilities.

We are creating summaries from each discussion to ensure insights and actions are captured and shared beyond the room, so that findings and actions won’t get lost.

There has been a clear demand for stronger collaboration across the sector, and “The Big Think 2” for the CAR will be held on 11 June.

Due to demand, we have also scheduled further Big Think events in the next academic year, beginning with a dedicated session for finance leaders on 7 July, followed by sessions for HR and IT colleagues.

Get involved

We would love to hear from anyone interested in joining in person or online, and also from anyone interested in getting involved with promoting a more collaborative approach generally.

As we look towards the future, we’re planning bulletins to help outline our progress so that others can learn from this, and we are considering regional Big Think events to ensure we succeed in reaching schools from every corner of the country.

Together, we can achieve a systematic, strategic and serviceable response to the CAR and develop a more collaborative approach across the sector, which will help us support children properly for decades to come.

Lauren Meadows is curriculum director at Unity School Partnership

Nimish Lad is director of curriculum Development for Creative Education Trust