UK to add climate change to the curriculum
The UK Government will introduce fake news spotting and developing climate change awareness to the curriculum.
Responding to the recommendations of Professor Becky Francis’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, the government has confirmed steps to ensure every young person has a cast-iron grip on the basics of reading, science and maths, ‘alongside the knowledge and skills required for life and work over the next decade’.
Primary-aged children will gain skills like how to spot fake news and identify misinformation and disinformation, helping them develop the critical thinking to challenge what they see and protect them from online harms.
Some of the key changes are:
- Making citizenship compulsory in primary education, ensuring all pupils learn media literacy and financial literacy, law and rights, democracy and government, and climate education early on.
- Replacing the narrowly focused computer science GCSE with a broader, future-facing computing GCSE and exploring a new qualification in data science and artificial intelligence for 16-18-year-olds.
- Changes to school performance measures – removal of the EBacc and reforms to Progress 8 – to encourage students to study a greater breadth of GCSE subjects, including the arts, humanities and languages alongside English, Maths and Science.
- Supporting schools to develop a triple Science offer, ahead of introducing a statutory entitlement for all GCSE pupils.
The new curriculum will be implemented in full, for first teaching from September 2028. Government will aim to publish the final revised national curriculum by spring 2027.
