Minor Reforms for Major Changes in Education

How a 'Patriotic Curriculum' can be implemented without a war with the teachers

Much has been said of what children are being taught in British schools, particularly primary schools. On the right, there is a persistent sense that the state is intent on instilling and imposing left-wing ideology onto the next generation. Reform UK’s 2024 General Election Manifesto called for ‘A Patriotic Curriculum’ which would ensure our children were ‘taught about their heritage’. In April, Shadow Education and Skills Secretary Suella Braverman stated that a Reform UK government would ‘introduce a new curriculum that will rekindle national pride and ensure that every child leaves school with an understanding of what a privilege it is to be British.’ What might surprise people is that there is very little in British National Curriculum documents that requires schools to teach anything which would be contrary to that aim.

Former Education Secretary Michael Gove alluded to this in response, stating that ‘the current curriculum has more British content’ than the 60% number talked of by James Orr when referring to exam requirements. The problem lies not necessarily with what is being taught, but how it is being taught, which Braverman calls ‘a progressive lens’. Schools up and down the country are all taught about the things Braverman thinks Britain should take pride in. But some school teachers will present the facts of our heritage with pride and love, whilst others will frame everything around an axis of racial resentment, gender politics and class warfare — with half-truths spun towards those ends.

To Braverman’s credit, she identifies that many issues stem from the curriculum being too flexible, allowing for left-wing teachers to insert their bias into otherwise benign lessons. The lessons which many parents find divisive, whether that is in History, PSHE or in other non-core subjects, make their way into the classroom through said flexibility. This either comes from loose, non-statutory guidelines or very open-ended objectives set out by the National Curriculum. PSHE, for example, is not even a statutory subject and only has a single line in reference to it in the Key Stages 1 and 2 framework.

The truth is that much of what is taught is not set by the state, or independently generated by teachers, but by private scheme providers. A handful of companies have become seen as the default option which schools pay to provide their services (such as digital resources, planning documents and printouts). An argument can be made for these companies being an example of entrepreneurial success, but they nevertheless hold huge, unaccountable power over what is taught in our schools.

It is possible to achieve greater results towards a patriotic education system by changing the workflow for teachers, rather than by expanding and shifting statutory and non-statutory requirements. Given the competing budgetary demands — tax cuts, increased defence commitments, public services and infrastructure spending — for a Reform government in the next Parliament, it will be difficult for Education to receive much serious attention at all in either resources or political bandwidth. Any improvements to schooling will have to come at the margins.

The Cost of the Lesson Plans System Currently in Place

Of a Department for Education (DfE) core schools budget of £64.8bn for 2025/2026, Learning Resources (not ICT equipment) and Educational Learning Resources combined account for around 2.5% to 4%, totalling between £1.62bn and £2.59bn. Almost all of this goes towards critical necessities for schools such as books, pencils and other stationery supplies. It is difficult to quantify what percentage of this is spent on schemes on average, but looking at the subscription pricing of a number of commercial curriculum providers could suggest that anywhere between £30m and £300m is spent nationally by DfE on private educational schemes per annum.

That is a tiny cost vis-à-vis the whole budget, yet it is still tens of millions or hundreds of millions of pounds a year going from taxpayers to private companies. In many cases, these companies act as oligopolies, with low marginal costs for expansion of use and guaranteed consumers in the form of schools made comfortable with a de facto standardised format. One example is phonics, where, in spite of dozens of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) systems being validated, only a handful of companies dominate the market. The same story is seen in almost every subject across our education system.

Since these subscriptions are funded from individual schools’ general budgets via the local authority — or in the case of Academies, from the General Annual Grant (GAG) — this leads to duplicate spending in individual licensing agreements across trusts and local authorities. Large academy trusts are at an advantage in this regard as they can centralise their resource budgets, leading to lower costs per pupil. This is indicative of what a state-led policy response should look like.

To cut this funding would either:

1. Require a public alternative to be built beforehand.

2. Require teachers and schools to be reskilled as independent producers of their own lesson content.

The former option would be much more frictionless and could provide the changes which voters want to see in education.

The Status Quo in Practice

Schools pay private companies to provide teaching resources and lesson plans for a variety of reasons. Standardising lesson formats across a school or Key Stage helps children become comfortable with a rhythm of teaching. They broadly ease the burden on teachers and provide clarity and support where knowledge gaps may exist for teachers. Yet despite teachers’ self-reporting curriculum schemes as primarily assisting with workload, 84% of teachers do not feel that they can complete their assigned workload during contracted hours. As the National Education Union put it in their report on the impact of standardised curricula, ‘Teachers who use standardised curriculum packages (SCP) reported no better workload than those who don’t, whilst also reporting having less of a say over what is taught, and how it is taught. In other words, these packages relate to reduced teacher autonomy, for no meaningful workload gains.’

Education is increasingly a standardised, digital operation — besides bespoke lessons which will always require unique physical resources for engagement with children. Working from the premise that it is inevitable that education is heading in this direction, it is logical to conclude that the state should have a greater say in how lessons are standardised. That way, through consultation and active dialogue with school leaders and classroom teachers, the right balance between teacher autonomy and standardisation can be reached, which takes these issues into account.

There are teachers every year who create great lesson resources for their students, irrespective of what alternative might exist to exploit instead. An opportunity exists to give schools across the country an easy way of sharing their lesson plans. After all, they teach the same national curriculum, teachers would just have to determine whether a resource is right for their students and the requirements set by the school (which they already do).

The Proposal

A potential solution to all of the issues outlined could be a combination of democratisation and centralisation.

Democratisation — A National Resource Forum

A national forum system where schools can upload and share their versions of lesson resources with other schools could become a self-perpetuating system with very little overhead costs. Such a system could be created entirely by the Civil Service or by the state approaching Google, Microsoft, or another company.

The potential exists for this internal central database to essentially make private scheme provision redundant. A rating and comments system could exist so teachers can see which resources were well regarded by other schools, with the ability to filter files by subject, topic, year group, or exact lines from the National Curriculum the resource is intended for. Creating a market system without financial incentives could encourage schools to allow their teachers more autonomy to create curated resources. Teachers have fun creating their own lesson materials when given the opportunity. It feels good to have personal ownership of lessons, and providing an accessible outlet to share that with other teachers and schools could compound that fulfilment.

To the ends of the ‘Patriotic Education’ desired by Reform, this in isolation raises the challenge of the left-wing preferences of teachers. Without a wider remit to begin to change the nature of school staffing, reforms can only operate at the margins. Working within these constraints, the careful selection of the assessment metrics for resources in value-subjective disciplines provides a ‘nudge’ to teacher behaviour without the extra noise of introducing ‘anti-woke’ statutory guidelines. One example of such a metric could be ‘well-balanced interpretations’. Teachers would have subtle incentives to play along.

Centralisation — A National Scheme Provider

If the goal is ultimately to replace the role the aforementioned private resource/scheme providers play in our education system, it would be wise for the state to provide a baseline option for schools to work with. Besides some subjects which require specialised digital and physical resources, and may be more appropriately produced by private companies, there is no reason to believe the state should not be more directly involved in the provision of lesson content.

In a small way, the state already began this process with the creation of Oak National Academy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The organisation provides free educational resources for pupils aged from 4 to 16. In 2023, around 25% of secondary school teachers and around 17% of primary or special school teachers used Oak National Academy. For some perspective, note how much pushback the government received for turning it into an independent public body. The British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), which represents commercial curriculum agencies, called the move an ‘unlawful state subsidy’ which threatened ‘market collapse’ and sought judicial review to prevent its continued existence. Oak National Academy currently represents only a supplementary tool, but this could be expanded into a legitimate alternative to commercial schemes, which schools are otherwise comfortable with and used to.

Enabling the state learning resources scheme to become the default source of lesson planning would enable ministers to exercise more sensitive handling of questions of ‘bias’ along the lines of a ‘well-balanced’ or ‘knowledge-based’ curriculum. Most teachers engage simply with what is directly in front of them.

What would it cost?

With funds currently being funnelled to private companies, it is possible in the short term for a version of the policy described to be cost-neutral. Allocation of this portion of school budgets would have to be redirected in a targeted way to avoid misinformation and paranoia regarding ‘budget cuts’ to schools.

In the medium-long term, it will save money by being a static archive of lesson content and eliminating duplicate spending by schools to buy the same services. Funds which would otherwise be going to commercial scheme providers year on year could be used to continually update and replenish content, with costs-per-pupil lowered. This would save taxpayer money leaking out for private (often international) profit to renew license access to mostly recycled, copyright material.

The Political Equation

Returning to the primary motive of Education Policy as seen in Reform UK, it is important to evaluate the proposal from a political or ideological perspective and to assess its efficacy through this lens.

A poll of National Education Union (NEU) members from December 2025 found that 23% supported the Green Party and 18% supported the Labour Party. At the 2024 General Election, 60% voted Labour and 10% voted Green. Union membership inherently skews the result, but it is nevertheless indicative of the political sensibilities of teachers generally.

People who work in the public sector, union members, young women and mothers all tend to be more liberal or left-wing. However, rarely does this express itself as overt or intentional partisanship in workplaces. Most people are not political in that way, but they often incidentally push their politics by ingrained assumptions and general sensibilities. Trying to impose an explicitly ‘right-wing’ curriculum will only radicalise people who would otherwise be content to teach lessons in the easiest, most efficient way possible, which gets the best out of every pupil.

To achieve in this environment an expression of the national curriculum which right-wing voters and politicians would be happy with may seem impossible, but it is not. Tweaks could be made to the National Curriculum, like removing certain statutory lines or changing non-statutory nudges, but otherwise the real change will arrive through the promotion of a state option — one which is not mandatory but one for which adoption is incentivised.

Nationalisation of specific companies and their absorption into Oak National Academy could also increase the incentives to opt in. This would be entirely feasible given the scale of the DfE budget and the relatively small size of these companies. Making the state-provided option the most appealing one for quality of service and resources would naturally improve voluntary adoption, and with it, apathy towards content which would otherwise be deemed ‘right wing’. An argument could be made for BBC Bitesize to be taken into ministerial control under the same premise, especially given how often it is used by educators.

Likewise, taking Britain’s five exam boards into a single public body would accomplish a similar outcome. Currently, they are outside of governmental control but have huge influence on what topics are taught nationwide through the papers they write and the questions they set (with discretion granted to them by the National Curriculum). The DfE (and ultimately the Secretary of State for Education) could control this aspect of education, without heavy intervention in the minutiae of day-to-day lessons.

Closing thoughts

Implementing some or all of these would put school leaders and teachers in a position in which they are encouraged to create their own resources, and therefore be more accountable for what turns up within their lessons, whilst also providing them a helpful, state-approved default baseline to build upon and work from. For the parts of our education system which would come under greater control from Whitehall, the same story emerges.

There are real concerns about ‘standardisation’ stripping the soul out of education in Britain. A bipartisan consensus could be reached on a new formulation for teacher autonomy, one in which what is taught in schools is more directly decided by parents and voters. An education system which ensures that lesson content is more the responsibility of the teacher and state, rather than the purview of private companies relied on for ease, is one which Reform UK could build for mutual benefit to teachers across the country.

All of this would be a legitimate push for government efficiency and waste in the public sector. It could be argued along the lines of restoring democratic accountability that voters should have a say in what is being taught to their children. The justification does not have to be distinctly right-wing in character, even if the intended outcome is.

If you remove the incentives and are subtle in your approach, you can achieve far more change than crashing into your ideological enemies, demanding explicit surrender — as most governments, especially those as preoccupied as the next, may not be able to incur the costs of such an approach. Where successes can certainly be found is quietly creating a few barriers for ‘woke’ teaching, whilst also saving the taxpayer some money. You can get a patriotic education system, one which truly lives up to the statutory requirement found in the Key Stage 1 and 2 framework document of ‘increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including myths, legends and traditional stories, modern fiction, fiction from our literary heritage’.

It will be hard to argue against any of what has been proposed without sounding like a very partisan, ideologically-obsessed individual more concerned about politics than educational standards. Otherwise, it is Reform UK’s Shadow Education and Skills Secretary who will be characterised as such.

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This article was written by James Fairbank, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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