Quality education for all
The decision to review the curriculum and statutory assessment systems in England opens up new possibilities for addressing our greatest challenge: that of ensuring that all children and young people are included. This relates to a global debate that has been going on over recent years.
In 2016, a series of Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by all United Nations Member States. Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all’. This led to the publication of the Education 2030 Framework for Action, which emphasises inclusion and equity as laying the foundations for quality education.[1]
Key propositions
My experience of attempts to address this agenda, in this country and internationally, suggests that the following propositions can help move things forward[2]:
1. Inclusion and equity must be seen as principles that inform all educational policies.
These principles are particularly important for the curriculum and assessment processes. Given the need to engage many stakeholders, clarity of purpose is crucial. With this in mind, policies for curriculum and assessment should be guided by the UNESCO mantra: 'Every learner matters and matters equally.'[3]
2. Barriers to the presence, participation and achievement of learners should be identified and addressed.
Progress in relation to inclusion and equity requires a move away from explanations of educational failure that focus on the characteristics of individual children and their families. Instead, we must move towards an analysis of the contextual barriers to participation and learning experienced by learners within schools – and, of course, the curriculum and assessment systems that can generate such barriers.
3. Schools should become learning communities where the development of all members is encouraged and supported.
Reforming education systems in relation to inclusion and equity requires coordinated and sustained efforts within schools, recognising that changing outcomes for vulnerable students is unlikely to be achieved unless there are changes in the attitudes, beliefs and actions of adults.
4. Partnerships between schools should be developed in order to provide mutual challenge and support.
School-to-school collaboration can strengthen improvement processes by adding to the range of expertise available to be tapped. In particular, partnerships between schools have enormous potential for fostering the capacity of education systems to respond to learner diversity. More specifically, they can help to reduce the polarisation of schools, to the particular benefit of those students who are marginalised at the edges of the system and whose progress and attitudes are a cause for concern.
5. Families and other community partners should be encouraged to support the work of schools.
The development of education systems that are effective for all young people will only happen when we change what happens outside a school as well as inside. Indeed, there is encouraging evidence of what can happen when what schools do is aligned in a coherent strategy with the efforts of other community players – families, employers, community groups, universities and public services.
6. Locally coordinated support and challenge should be provided.
Developments regarding inclusion and equity must be led by schools, for schools. This means that policymakers must recognise that the details of policy implementation are not amenable to central regulation. Rather, these should be dealt with by those who are close to their contexts and, therefore, in a better position to understand them. Locally coordinated support has an important role to play, not least in acting as the conscience of the system – making sure that all children and young people are getting a fair deal.
Breadth, choice and design
The curriculum has a key role in creating the conditions within which reforms based on these ideas can be implemented. In particular, it needs to emphasise breadth. In this respect, an emphasis on the expressive arts is a crucial way of engaging all learners. The curriculum should also ensure that children and young people have a degree of choice regarding what and how best they learn. This means that their voices must be heard.
At the same time, practitioners must have the freedom to design learning experiences that are relevant to local contexts and the interests of all of their students, whatever their cultural backgrounds. Put bluntly, the days when (unqualified) education ministers dictate to practitioners how to teach must end – it is time to give 'teaching back to teachers'. At the same time, partnerships between schools can provide pathways for sharing expertise.
Using data
Evidence is the lifeblood of inclusive school development. Therefore, deciding what kinds of evidence to collect and how to use it requires considerable care, because within education systems, what gets measured gets done.
Our system collects far more statistical data than ever before in order to determine effectiveness. This has led to new pressures, as policymakers have become preoccupied with measuring school outcomes in terms of narrowly defined test scores and comparing progress with that of other countries through systems such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
This trend is widely recognised as a double-edged sword precisely because it is such a potent lever for change. On the one hand, data is required in order to monitor the progress of children, evaluate the impact of interventions, review the effectiveness of policies and processes, plan new initiatives, and so on. On the other hand, if effectiveness is evaluated on the basis of narrow and even inappropriate performance indicators, then the impact can be deeply damaging.
Whilst appearing to promote the causes of accountability and transparency, the use of data can, in practice, conceal more than it reveals. It can invite misinterpretation and, worst of all, have a perverse effect on the behaviour of professionals.
Leveraging change
The challenge, therefore, is to harness the potential of evidence as a lever for change whilst avoiding these potential problems. This means that the starting point for making decisions about the evidence to collect should be finding agreed definitions of inclusion and equity. In other words, we must measure what we value rather than valuing what can more easily be measured. Therefore, evidence collected within the education system needs to relate to the presence, participation and achievement of all students.
This article is part of our series on curriculum reform edited by Graham Handscomb.
Mel Ainscow CBE is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Manchester.
References
- https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/education-2030-incheon-framework-for-action-implementation-of-sdg4-2016-en_2.pdf
- Ainscow, M. (2025) Reforming education systems for inclusion and equity. London: Routledge Leading Change Series (in press)
- https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000248254