Excellence and equity, deferred: reviewing the draft Northern Ireland Curriculum 2028…

The DE has made equity the promise of its new knowledge-rich curriculum, and the case for clearer, sequenced content is real. But several of the elements that would actually deliver that equity, religious education, Irish-medium and special-needs provision, and the statutory assessment that should align with them, sit outside this consultation, and the equality assessment certifies the benefits of a system that has not yet been finished. The reform deserves engagement rather than rejection, but not a blank cheque for arrangements that consultees have not been shown.

Paul Givan launched the consultation on the draft Northern Ireland Curriculum 2028 on 16 June, describing it as a once-in-a-generation chance to put knowledge at the heart of every classroom from Foundation Stage to Key Stage 3. The move it proposes, towards a clearer, sequenced and knowledge-rich curriculum, is defensible, and the subject frameworks are a real improvement on the vagueness they would replace. The claim in the documents’ own subtitle, that this amounts to an entitlement to excellence and equity, is the part that arrives early. Several of the elements that would actually make the system equitable sit outside this consultation: religious education, Irish-medium provision, curriculum adaptation for special educational needs, a separate curriculum for special schools, a pre-school early-years framework and the assessment regime that should align with all of them. One of those gaps is not a matter of mere sequencing: the religious education syllabus is being rewritten in the wake of a November 2025 Supreme Court judgment that restored a declaration that the provision received by a pupil at a controlled primary school breached her and her father’s Convention rights. The Department is entitled to build a curriculum in stages. It is not entitled to ask the accompanying equality assessment to certify the benefits of a finished system while several arrangements central to its fairness and legal compliance remain unpublished and unavailable for scrutiny.

A credible diagnosis

The reasoning for change is strong. The 2007 curriculum was deliberately light on prescription, organising primary learning into broad Areas of Learning such as The World Around Us and leaving schools to supply the detail. The Independent Review of Education in 2023 made the case for review, and the Strategic Review of the Curriculum, whose final report appeared in June 2025 with twenty-one recommendations, then found that this vagueness had produced inconsistency between schools, heavier workloads for teachers left to devise progression, and widening inequality, particularly for pupils who depend most on what school provides. The draft framework answers with five principles, the central one being that the curriculum should be knowledge-rich, and it moves to a domain-led structure built around subjects rather than themes. Each subject now states, in a common formula, what “pupils should learn” at each stage, and the specification reaches down into the Foundation Stage with year-by-year content in early reading and mathematics, a notable change from Northern Ireland’s play-based early tradition. On its own terms, this is coherent curriculum design, and the overview presents England’s 2010 to 2014 reforms as supporting evidence that a more explicit, sequenced curriculum can lift outcomes.

Two features of the design warrant scrutiny before its merits are conceded. The first is its provenance: the Strategic Review’s final report, A Foundation for the Future, was written by Lucy Crehan, who then served as deputy chair of the Taskforce that turned its recommendations into this framework, under the chairmanship of Christine Counsell, a curriculum specialist closely identified with England’s knowledge-rich movement. The Taskforce submitted its draft on 5 June 2026, having overseen the development of a statutory curriculum for an entire jurisdiction through subject working groups in roughly eight months. Nearly 100 Northern Ireland teachers contributed through those groups, although they worked within principles and drafting assumptions already firmly settled by the Strategic Review and the Taskforce. None of that makes the work wrong, but it does mean consultees are testing, in fifteen weeks, a model produced quickly and with a strong, consistent prior conviction. The useful question is whether this one has been built to work for Northern Ireland’s particular system. The second is the capabilities document, the most sophisticated part of the design and the one that most resists scrutiny. It names nine capabilities, borrows the language of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and insists they are emergent: they cannot be taught directly and should not be directly assessed, because the work of relating them to subject content “has been done centrally”. That avoids the auditing that dogged skills-led curricula, but leaves consultees without a clear way to judge whether the promised capabilities emerge.

The curriculum that is not yet present

The consultation covers the subject frameworks and the capabilities. It does not cover the parts of the curriculum where Northern Ireland’s particular fault lines run. A religious education syllabus is being developed separately and will go to its own consultation later. Bespoke Irish-medium curriculum strands are a future workstream, as is guidance on adapting the mainstream curriculum for pupils with special educational needs. These are not marginal omissions, because the Strategic Review itself identified SEN learners, Irish-immersion contexts and disadvantaged pupils as the groups the existing curriculum served least well. The work needed to correct those weaknesses has therefore been deferred. An early-years framework intended to align pre-school provision with the beginning of formal schooling is likewise listed only as future work.

The position on special schools is more fundamental than deferral, and the documents are unusually candid about it. Under the proposals, the new curriculum will not be statutory for special schools. It will operate only as a flexible guide, and the overview concedes that this “in itself is not sufficient to meet the needs of the special school sector”, acknowledging that the framework may reproduce some of the difficulties these pupils experience under the present curriculum. A separate special-schools framework has been commissioned under Professor Noel Purdy. The scale remains considerable: more than 70,700 pupils have some form of special educational need, but 81.6 per cent are educated in mainstream classes, 7.5 per cent in specialist provision within mainstream schools, and 10.9 per cent, more than 7,700 pupils across 40 schools, in dedicated special schools. The latter will sit outside the statutory framework now under consultation, while the much larger mainstream SEN population must await separate guidance on curriculum adaptation. In both settings, the measures intended to turn a common entitlement into an accessible one remain unavailable for scrutiny.

Assessment is a different kind of absence. A statutory assessment policy framework was published in April 2026, before the draft curriculum, establishing a pathway from Year 1 to Year 10 that includes baseline, phonics, reading fluency, literacy, numeracy and science assessments. It also promises dedicated assessments for Irish-medium education. Qualifications reform is moving separately: the present AS structure is to be replaced by a two-year modular A level, with the earliest teaching under the new specifications expected from September 2029. The assessment framework exists; what the curriculum consultation does not show is how its newly specified sequences will align with an assessment architecture already settled in outline. The ordering remains awkward because statutory assessment was designed before the curriculum content against which pupils will be assessed was finalised, while qualifications at Key Stage 4 and beyond are being overhauled before the Key Stage 4 and post-16 enrichment curriculum has been written. Curriculum, assessment and qualifications must ultimately cohere, yet consultees are being asked to consider them through separate documents, timetables and processes.

Equal treatment is not yet equity

The Equality Impact Assessment is where these threads meet, and it deserves the closest reading. Across almost every Section 75 category, it records “no direct adverse impacts”, and the reasoning is consistent: the framework applies equally to all pupils and does not differentiate between groups. The assessment then concedes, in the same pages, that the present curriculum does not serve SEN pupils, Irish-immersion learners and disadvantaged children equally; that data on sexual orientation, political opinion and dependants are limited; and, most tellingly, that “the overall equality impact of the policy will depend on effective implementation”, which it places “beyond the scope of this policy-stage EQIA”.

The difficulty lies in the EQIA’s method. Equal application is not the same as substantive equality. A common curriculum can advance equity by guaranteeing every child access to the same body of knowledge, and that is a genuine good. It can also create differential burdens wherever immersion, disability or developmental pace requires different sequencing, resources or means of access. An assessment that identifies no direct adverse impact because the framework treats everyone identically has, in effect, defined away the question it exists to answer. The Department may yet resolve these tensions through the SEN, Irish-medium and special-school workstreams, but the present EQIA largely assumes that it will, and certifies the result in advance.

The religious-belief finding is the clearest illustration, and it cannot be read apart from a judgment that the consultation documents never mention. In November 2025, the Supreme Court restored the High Court’s declaration that the religious education and collective worship provided at a Belfast controlled primary school attended by a pupil known as JR87 breached her and her father’s rights under Article 2 of Protocol 1, read with Article 9, of the European Convention on Human Rights. The finding that this provision was not conveyed in an “objective, critical and pluralistic” manner had already been upheld by the Court of Appeal and was not open to reconsideration before the Supreme Court. The question was whether the statutory right of withdrawal nevertheless prevented a breach. The Court held that it did not, describing provision that is not objective, critical and pluralistic and the pursuit of indoctrination as two sides of the same coin.

The Court did not quash the statutory regime, but its judgment makes compliant reform unavoidable. The proposed syllabus must therefore be judged against that standard, while its stated brief is to be “critical, objective and pluralist, whilst retaining a central focus on Christianity”. A central focus on Christianity is not necessarily incompatible with Convention requirements; the decisive questions will be how Christianity is presented, whether other religious and non-religious worldviews receive meaningful treatment, and whether pupils are enabled to examine religious claims critically. None of that can be assessed until the syllabus is available. The EQIA’s conclusion that there is no direct adverse religious impact is therefore its least secure finding, made while RE sits outside the consultation and before the syllabus that must satisfy the judgment has been published.

Implementation is part of curriculum design

A curriculum framework is only as good as the system that delivers it, and the documents are clear that delivery remains a plan rather than a guarantee. The Department promises a systematic, multi-year professional learning programme from 2026–27, a digital resource hub of free and adaptable materials, and “significant investment” in curriculum-aligned resources. These are the right commitments, and the reduced workload the framework promises depends heavily on them. The documents provide a broad timetable for preparation and capacity-building to June 2028, followed by phased statutory implementation over three years, but no published costing, committed budget, workforce calculation, or detailed schedule showing when the promised resources will be available at scale. A separate consultation also proposes a Northern Ireland Centre for Educational Excellence and Improvement to coordinate curriculum implementation and professional learning. The timetable and the proposed institutions are visible; the funding and staffing to deliver them are not.

Conditional support

These omissions do not invalidate the proposals. The knowledge-rich turn is defensible, the subject frameworks are better than what they replace, and a clearer entitlement should help pupils who have been failed by the present system. Support should nevertheless depend on clearer answers regarding the capabilities that will not be directly assessed, the Northern-Ireland-specific elements that are not part of this consultation, and the funding required for implementation. Approving the statutory core should not amount to endorsing equality and delivery arrangements that consultees have not yet seen. A curriculum that promises excellence and equity must ultimately be judged on the parts it has, for the moment, left out.

Sources: Department of Education (2026) Consultation on the Northern Ireland Curriculum 2028 and the accompanying draft framework documents, comprising the overview An entitlement to excellence and equity, The Capabilities, the Foundation Stage entitlements, the Equality Impact Assessment and the Rural Needs Impact Assessment; Crehan, L. (2025) A Foundation for the Future: Developing Capabilities Through a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum in Northern Ireland (Strategic Review of the Northern Ireland Curriculum); Department of Education (2026) ‘Givan launches consultation on new Northern Ireland Curriculum 2028’, 16 June 2026; Meredith, R. (2026) ‘Education minister proposes new curriculum for NI schools’, BBC News NI, 16 June 2026; In the matter of an application by JR87 and another for Judicial Review (Northern Ireland), UK Supreme Court, 19 November 2025 (UKSC 2024/0095); Department of Education (2026) Policy Framework for Statutory Assessment in Northern Ireland, 15 April 2026; Department of Education (2026) ‘Education Minister unveils reforms to GCSEs and A Levels in Northern Ireland’, 3 March 2026; Department of Education (2026) Leading Together for Excellence: A TransformED NI Strategy for Teacher Professional Learning (consultation), 11 May 2026.