How do school leaders think the curriculum has fared over the last two years ?
We asked school leaders to consider some of the biggest changes and challenges over the past two years and whether they had had a positive or negative impact , or neither , on the curriculum .
All phases
There is widespread feeling that budget pressures are negatively affecting the curriculum in both primary and secondary schools , with more than eight in 10 ( 83 %) leaders believing this to be the case . A lack of funding is hitting the secondary curriculum hardest , with nine in 10 ( 91 %) secondary school leaders indicating that this challenge is having a negative effect here .
Primary
Overall , we see a primary school system that is struggling to fund the curriculum sufficiently , and to fund and retain the staff to teach it , yet being held to higher account for how pupils perform against it .
While one-quarter ( 24 %) of primary leaders think that the introduction of the new primary curriculum has been positive , more than four in 10 ( 44 %) say it has had a negative impact and just over a quarter ( 27 %) say it has made no difference .
Negative feeling about the new primary performance measures is more prevalent . Six in 10 ( 61 %) primary leaders believe this change is having a detrimental impact on their curriculum ; two in 10 ( 21 %) say it is making no difference .
Teacher recruitment and retention challenges are negatively affecting the curriculum in more than four in 10 ( 44 %) primary schools but making no difference to it in a similar proportion ( 40 %).
Secondary
In secondary schools , more than two-thirds ( 67 %) of school leaders think that reforms to GCSEs have detrimentally affected the curriculum , and the impact of teacher recruitment and retention challenges is once again a worry for more than six in 10 ( 63 %) leaders . This is to be expected , since the latest initial teacher training statistics show that , in some core EBacc subjects , too few teachers are entering the profession in the secondary phase . Recruitment of modern foreign language teachers , for instance , has missed the teacher supply model targets 20 for five of the past seven years , with figures hovering between 83 % and 95 % of the target since 2013 / 14 .
Teacher retention problems might well be explained by the increased workload burden that school leaders report their teachers are facing as a result of curriculum and performance measure changes . Nine in 10 school leaders overall believe that teacher workload has been negatively affected by these changes , with primary and secondary leaders in agreement ( 90 % and 91 % respectively ).
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