This matters particularly now: following the Curriculum and Assessment Review, which reported on 5 November 2025, a revised National Curriculum is due to be published in 2027 for first teaching from September 2028, with updated GCSEs for first teaching from 2029.
What is changing
The Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis and commissioned in July 2024, published its final report on 5 November 2025. The government published its response the same day, accepting the large majority of recommendations.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 5 November 2025 | Final report and government response published |
| 2027 | Revised National Curriculum published |
| September 2028 | First teaching of the revised curriculum |
| 2029 | Updated GCSEs first teaching |
| 2027 onwards | New V-level qualifications planned |
GCSEs and A Levels are retained. The themes carried through the response include curriculum overload at key stages 3 and 4, a curriculum better reflecting the diversity of pupils in English schools, the volume of GCSE assessment, vocational and technical routes alongside academic ones post-16, and the cumulative effect of high-stakes testing on wellbeing. The review recommended scrapping the EBacc performance measure, and DfE proposed reform to Progress 8.
Detailed programmes of study are not due until 2027. Any vendor claiming today to be aligned to the revised curriculum is describing something that does not exist yet.
What schools should do in the meantime
The most useful preparation is not anticipating specific content changes. It is making your curriculum something that can be remapped without a rebuild.
- Hold the curriculum as structured data, not as departmental documents. A curriculum in 40 Word files is remapped by 40 people; a curriculum in a system is remapped once.
- Keep the sequencing rationale explicit, since that is what carries forward even when content changes.
- Keep assessment tied to curriculum references rather than to a page in a scheme of work, so a content change does not orphan your assessment history.
- Do not rebuild your curriculum in 2026 in anticipation. The programmes of study are not published. Schools that rebuild now will rebuild again.
Objective-level mapping
This is the technical question worth putting to any platform, and it is rarely asked.
| Mapping level | What coverage reporting can tell you |
|---|---|
| Subject | Almost nothing |
| Topic or unit | That a topic was addressed. Not which parts, or to what depth |
| Objective | Exactly which expectation was taught, when, by whom, and whether anything assessed it |
Edves maps at objective level, which is what allows coverage reporting in three categories: taught and assessed, taught but never assessed, and not reached. The middle category is usually the largest and the most actionable.
Assessment beyond national tests
Key stage 2 SATs, GCSEs and A Levels give a school a small number of high-quality data points at fixed moments, and nothing in between or in non-assessed subjects. Under an achievement evaluation area asking what pupils know, remember and can do, that gap matters.
Curriculum-referenced internal assessment fills it — provided the references are consistent enough for the data to mean anything across a department. See assessment and progress.
Beyond England
Curriculum is devolved. Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, the Curriculum for Wales and the Northern Ireland Curriculum are separate frameworks with their own structures and assessment arrangements, and the Curriculum and Assessment Review applies to England only. Edves supports mapping to each; schools outside England should confirm specifics during a demonstration rather than assuming the English structure applies.
Independent and international schools
Schools running IB, Cambridge International or other curricula alongside or instead of the National Curriculum can track more than one specification against the same pupil, with each reported separately rather than merged. This matters where a pupil is being prepared for two different assessment structures in the same subject.