National curriculum changes: What teachers need to know

Curriculum change tends to arrive in waves. We are in one now. The Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis and commissioned by the Department for Education in 2024, published its final report on 5 November 2025, alongside the government's response on the same day. That sets the direction for the next version of the national curriculum, the assessment system that sits alongside it, and the qualification routes branching off it.

If you have been teaching for more than a few years, none of this will feel particularly new. Curricula get reviewed, recommendations get made, government adopts some and parks others, and the practical impact on classrooms takes a year or two to settle. The honest position now is that the headline decisions are set: A revised curriculum will be published in 2027, with first teaching from 2028, and GCSEs and A-Levels are retained.

This piece is a stocktake for teachers and middle leaders. What did the Review actually say, what did the government accept, and how do you prepare a department without overcommitting to changes that will not bite for two years yet? The detail of the revised subject specifications is still to come, so we hedge where we have to.

The current national curriculum in England was introduced in 2014 for primary and secondary state schools, with the first cohorts taking the redesigned GCSEs from 2017 and reformed A-levels phased in across the same period. Academies are not required to follow the national curriculum but most do, with some local adaptations.

The 2024 to 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review was set up to look across the whole 5 to 18 curriculum, including the qualifications system. The Department for Education set out four broad aims for the Review: Maintaining high standards, ensuring an inclusive curriculum, keeping pace with the world children will enter as adults, and a clearer, less stressful assessment system. The interim report in March 2025 confirmed the Review would not be proposing a wholesale tear-up, and the final report in November 2025 followed through on that framing. The headline is evolution, not revolution.

The Department published its response alongside the final report on 5 November 2025. The revised curriculum is due to be published in 2027, with first teaching from September 2028 and first reformed exams a year or two after that depending on subject. That two-to-three-year lead time between acceptance and classroom teaching is consistent with previous reform cycles.

The November 2025 final report ran across the whole 5 to 18 curriculum and was accompanied by the government's response accepting the great majority of its recommendations. The themes most consistently raised, and largely carried through into the response, were: A degree of curriculum overload at key stages 3 and 4, particularly in EBacc subjects; the need for a curriculum that better reflects the diversity of pupils in English schools; concerns about the volume of GCSE assessment and the pressure that places on pupils and teachers; the place of vocational and technical routes including T-Levels alongside academic routes post-16; and the cumulative impact of high-stakes testing on pupil wellbeing.

The specific content of each subject's programme of study is being worked through as part of the 2026 to 2027 development phase rather than landing in the November report itself. What the report did set out clearly was a direction of travel: Slightly less crowded subject content at KS3 and KS4, broader representation in chosen texts and case studies, a modest reduction in the volume of GCSE assessment in some subjects, and a clearer narrative about the value of different post-16 routes. GCSEs and A-Levels are retained as the structural anchor at 16 and 18.

Some of these are more certain than others. The table below is our reading of where the published Review and government response point, by phase. The detailed subject specifications are being developed for publication in 2027, so treat the certainty column as our estimate rather than a guarantee.

The most useful thing a department can do right now is not to anticipate specific changes but to make sure the curriculum it currently teaches is robust enough to absorb whatever comes. That sounds vague, but it cashes out into some concrete actions.

Look at your current scheme of work and ask which decisions are dictated by the specification and which are choices you have made within it. The choices, things like text selection, case studies, the order in which you teach topics, are the things you can adjust most easily when guidance shifts. Knowing the difference between "required by the spec" and "chosen by us" makes you faster to adapt.

Where your current curriculum already addresses the directions the Review is pointing in, breadth of representation, depth over coverage, oracy, links between subjects, document that clearly. If the new curriculum formalises any of these as expectations, you will already have a story to tell.

Where you suspect your current curriculum has gaps relative to those directions, start a slow conversation rather than a panicked redesign. Add diversity audits to your departmental cycle. Track which case studies and texts get used and whose perspectives they centre. These are not in themselves new requirements, but they are the sort of question Ofsted has been asking under the existing framework and that the new curriculum is likely to make more explicit.

Assessment changes are the part of any review that attract the most public attention and tend to move the slowest. The Review's terms of reference were explicit that any changes to GCSEs and A-Levels should maintain rigour and the value of the qualifications, and the November 2025 government response confirmed both qualifications would be retained.

In practice, the most plausible near-term changes are around the volume of assessment within subjects rather than the format of qualifications themselves. The final report and response signalled that some GCSE subjects may have more papers than is needed for valid assessment, and that the cumulative number of papers a pupil sits in summer of Year 11 deserved closer scrutiny. Any change here will still need to satisfy Ofqual, the awarding bodies, and universities who use the qualifications to differentiate applicants, which is part of why these conversations move at the pace they do.

For your planning, it is reasonable to assume that the basic shape of GCSEs and A-Levels will remain recognisable in the medium term. Some content within subjects will change as the revised programmes of study land in 2027, and some volume of assessment is likely to reduce, but the qualifications themselves are not being replaced. Departments who panic-redesign for a wholly new qualification will be redesigning again later.

Academies and free schools are not legally required to follow the national curriculum, although in practice most teach a curriculum that aligns closely with it, particularly at KS4 where the qualifications students sit are tied to specifications that follow the national framework.

If you work in an academy or MAT, the practical implications of curriculum change are slightly indirect. The national curriculum sets the floor that maintained schools must teach to, but academies typically follow it closely because of qualification alignment, Ofsted expectations, and the importance of curriculum coherence for pupils who transfer between schools. Any meaningful change to the national curriculum tends to ripple into academy curricula within a year or two.

Working backwards from the published roll-out plan, here is a rough timeline for what to do when. The load-bearing dates are 2027 (revised curriculum published) and September 2028 (first teaching), so most of the work between now and then is preparation rather than redesign.

Curriculum change creates a particular kind of workload anxiety. People imagine they will need to rewrite everything they have spent years developing, and the imagining is often worse than the reality. As a head of department or middle leader, one of your most useful jobs is to translate noise into signal for your team.

What you can usefully say to colleagues now: The Review has reported, the broad direction is set, the detailed subject specifications land in 2027, and first teaching is September 2028. Nothing requires us to redesign our scheme of work this term. We will look at it properly once the revised programmes of study are published, and we will not be making knee-jerk changes based on headlines.

That steady message is genuinely valuable. Curriculum change tends to draw a lot of opinion and not always a lot of evidence. Keeping your department focused on doing the current curriculum well, while staying alert to the published direction, is a reasonable position for the next academic year.

The most useful sources for genuine curriculum change updates, as opposed to speculation, are the Department for Education's curriculum pages, Ofqual's bulletins for assessment changes, and the subject associations for your subject area. Subject associations tend to be the fastest to translate official documents into something practical for classroom teachers.

For cross-curricular updates, the major teacher publications and union briefings do a reasonable job of separating signal from noise once they have had time to read the source documents. The first 48 hours after any release usually contains a lot of speculation and not much substance, so it is generally worth waiting for the second round of coverage rather than the first.