The 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review highlights a growing leadership challenge across FE and HE: curriculum coherence. Christine explores why embedding Maths, English and wider skills keeps failing, what Ofsted is really testing, and how leaders can move from intent to integrated curriculum design.
The 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review arrived at a moment of quiet reckoning across Further Education (FE), Skills and Higher Education (HE).
Its ambition is clear: a world-class curriculum for all learners. But while the language may feel new to some, the underlying message should not come as a surprise. In many respects, the Review confirms what inspection evidence, workforce research and practitioner experience across FE and HE have been signalling for some time.
The challenge facing the sector is not a lack of intent. It is whether the curriculum has been deliberately designed — and whether leaders have built the professional confidence required — to turn ambition into meaningful learning.
This is where leadership matters.
The issue isn’t intent — it’s curriculum coherence and leadership confidence
Across FE, Skills and HE, providers care deeply about inclusion, progression and employability.
However, what is often missing, is the confidence, and permission, to design curriculum in ways that genuinely integrate these aims, rather than retrofitting them afterwards in response to inspection, funding or policy pressure.
This is particularly visible in how Maths, English, Digital Skills, Sustainability and Employability are positioned. They are widely acknowledged as essential, yet too often treated as bolt-ons rather than as integral parts of curriculum architecture.
Embedding fails when Maths, English and wider skills are treated as add-ons rather than designed in from the start. When this happens, learners experience fragmentation and staff are left trying to “embed” without the curriculum structures, shared language or leadership backing to support them.
This matters because Ofsted’s current focus, across FE and increasingly HE-adjacent provision, is no longer on whether topics simply exist. It is on whether the curriculum is coherent, purposeful and well sequenced, and whether learners can clearly explain what they are learning and why it matters.
These are curriculum architecture questions, not delivery fixes.
Who weak curriculum coherence affects most — and why that matters
The consequences of poor curriculum design are not evenly distributed.
Research from Impetus on the Youth Jobs Gap highlights that disengagement is rarely driven by a single factor. Instead, it is shaped by compound disadvantage, where low prior attainment, SEND, poverty, place, confidence and limited social capital intersect.
For learners experiencing compound disadvantage, fragmented or abstract curriculum design does not simply fail to engage, it actively increases the risk of withdrawal. When Maths, English or digital capability feel disconnected from real life, work or progression, motivation drains away quickly.
If the Review’s ambition is to create a curriculum for all, then inclusive curriculum design must start from this reality, not from the experience of learners who already know how to succeed in formal education.
This is a leadership responsibility, not a learner deficit. If curriculum coherence is weak, inclusion will remain rhetorical.
What FE and HE can learn from the Curriculum of the Workplace
This is where the UVAC paper Work and Learning offers a powerful and timely lens for both FE and HE. UVAC argues for curriculum design that prioritises those most likely to disengage, championing:
- transdisciplinary learning
- relevance through application
- and “learning that travels” — knowledge and skills that transfer across contexts.
For FE, Apprenticeships and Skills provision, this resonates strongly with long-standing practice. For HE, it reinforces a growing recognition that curriculum must connect more clearly to work, identity and application.
The curriculum of the workplace provides a natural meeting point between FE and HE thinking, particularly in programmes shaped by dual professionalism, where educators must hold both occupational expertise and pedagogical judgement.
For leaders, this raises a practical question: are we creating the conditions for dual professionalism to thrive, or are we stretching it thin? Coherent curriculum planning, protected collaboration time and shared design language are not luxuries — they are infrastructure.
Learning that travels includes Maths and English, digital confidence and sustainability — not as discrete subjects, but as capabilities learners draw on across work, life and learning.
Why embedding Maths and English fails without curriculum coherence
Embedding Maths and English is often framed as a delivery challenge. In reality, it is a design responsibility.
When curriculum does not clearly articulate:
- where Maths and English sits
- why they matter in this programme
- and how they support occupational competence,
staff are left trying to embed in isolation, often without shared planning time, professional confidence or a coherent curriculum narrative.
Inspection evidence increasingly reflects this:
- learners unable to articulate how English or Maths connects to their vocational learning
- staff describing good intentions without a shared curriculum story
- embedding becoming performative rather than meaningful.
As highlighted in InTuition’s Summer edition 2025, the problem is not lack of commitment.
It is lack of coherence and the confidence to design differently.
What the 2025 Review — and Ofsted — are really asking of curriculum leaders
Read together, the Review and current inspection themes point in the same direction.
Curriculum quality is being judged less by what is included and more by how intentionally it has been designed to work as a whole, including coherence, sequencing, relevance and staff confidence.
This aligns closely with research on teacher agency and professional learning, which shows that quality improves when educators, including those working across FE, HE and industry, are trusted to exercise professional judgement within a shared framework.
This is not about lowering standards. It is about inclusive curriculum design that enables more learners to access, apply and succeed, particularly those least well served by traditional models.
Building curriculum coherence across FE and HE: what needs to shift
Building a curriculum for all requires a shift in mindset:
- from bolt-ons to integrated design
- from delivery to learner experience
- from compliance to confidence
- from subject silos to dual professionalism.
It requires recognising curriculum as a confidence-building system, for learners and for staff, rather than a checklist of content.
This is where leadership sets the conditions.
Looking ahead: pedagogy, professional confidence and coherent curriculum design
If curriculum is the architecture, pedagogy is how it is lived.
As FE and HE move into the next phase of reform and inspection, the focus must now turn to how confident, inclusive pedagogy brings curriculum intent to life, particularly for learners who are most likely to disengage.
That includes how Maths, English, digital capability and sustainability are woven through curriculum and teaching, not as themes to be “covered”, but as ways of thinking and acting in the world.
A curriculum for all is not created through policy alone. It is built through inclusive design, shared responsibility and professional confidence.
If you’re reviewing curriculum design, preparing for inspection, or rethinking how Maths, English and wider skills are embedded, this is the moment to move from intent to design.
If you’re reviewing curriculum design, preparing for inspection, or rethinking how maths, English and wider skills are embedded, this is the moment to move from intent to design.
I work with leaders and curriculum teams across FE, HE and Skills to turn inclusive curriculum design into confident, inspection-ready practice. If that’s on your agenda this year, let’s talk.
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