Credit: Mat Wright for UCL IOE.

8 October 2025

By Norbert Pachler, Zhu Hua and Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Charles Forsdick, University of Cambridge

Language education in school has significant transformational potential in terms of learners’ right to a well-rounded education and the enhancement of their life chances, as well as their ability to lead a fulfilling life and make a meaningful contribution to society. With a view to realising this vision for all children and young people, the DfE’s Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) provides a welcome opportunity to reassess the place of language education in primary and secondary schools. (more…)

30 September 2014

By Alice Bradbury

If you want to change what teachers teach, should you change the curriculum, or change the assessment? For the last three years, all six-year-olds in England have had to take a Phonics Screening Check test, which they can either pass or fail. The introduction of this test by the coalition government was controversial, as there is much debate over the use of phonics in the teaching of reading. This year’s results have just been heralded as a victory for phonics as a greater proportion of children passed. However, if we look back at the evolution of this policy, as I have done in a paper presented last week at BERA and now published in the Oxford Review of Education, we can see that the purpose of the Phonics Screening Check has always been surrounded by confusion.
(more…)