Abstract
The Government’s Building a World-Class Curriculum for All Review (DfE, 2025) sets out an ambition to equip every learner with the digital, media, and critical literacy skills needed for a changing world. Yet beneath this progressive rhetoric, the review preserves the same behaviourist architecture that has long constrained authentic inquiry. Terminal handwritten examinations remain the dominant assessment mode, coursework and project-based learning are absent from nearly all subjects, and there is once again no mention of school libraries or school librarians.
This short paper situates that silence within the findings of my PhD research, which demonstrated how the 2012 curriculum reforms erased the instructional role of school librarians in teaching information and digital literacy skills (IDLS). This presentation concentrates specifically on the policy contradictions inherent in the current reform trajectory. It addresses the central question: How will the new curriculum simultaneously promote digital competence while entrenching behaviourist assessment, and what are the implications for authentic information and media literacy learning?
The session applies a discourse analysis to the 2025 Review, exposing the tension between its aspirational language of “preparing learners for a digital world” and a policy environment that still rewards standardised answers over critical inquiry. By examining these linguistic and structural barriers, this session explores how the continued omission of school librarians from national policy discourse perpetuates the de-professionalisation of the role.
A revised force-field map of enablers and barriers to school librarian involvement will be presented, aligning these with the Review’s principles of “breadth, inclusion and preparation for a digital society”. The talk exposes the systemic consequences of excluding school librarians from assessment reform, arguing that the growing information-literacy gap observed at transition to higher education stems directly from this school-level policy neglect.
The presentation concludes by inviting participants to consider how re-integrating school librarians as pedagogical partners is essential to bridging the gap between behaviourist mandates and the development of independent, critically literate learners.
References
Department for Education. (2025). Building a world-class curriculum for all: Curriculum and assessment review final report. HM Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report
Department for Education. (2025). Government response to the curriculum and assessment review: Building a world-class curriculum for all. HM Government. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/690b2a4a14b040dfe82922ea/Government_response_to_the_Curriculum_and_Assessment_Review.pdf
International Baccalaureate Organization. (2025). Diploma Programme: From principles into practice. https://ibo.org
Pavey, S.J. (2025). The marginalisation of school librarianship in England: The fading influence of school librarians as information and digital literacy educators [Doctoral thesis, Edinburgh Napier University]. (awaiting publication)
Vuorikari Rina, R., Kluzer, S., & Punie, Y. (2022). DigComp 2.2: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens-With new examples of knowledge, skills and attitudes (No. JRC128415). Joint Research Centre (Seville site). https://doi.org/10.2760/115376
