The English Curriculum and Assessment Interim Review: Inclusion, Settlement, and the Future of Education

This article introduces the concept of epistemic settlement as a novel analytic category, offering both a systematic coding frame and a transferable vocabulary for comparative curriculum analysis. It does this through a critical analysis of the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review: Interim Report. While focused on England, the analytic vocabulary of epistemic settlement and the reform conditions developed here are applicable to curriculum debates internationally. The Review is presented as pragmatic recalibration, but instead reaffirms the assumptions of the post-2010 curriculum landscape: disciplinary coherence treated as neutral, progression codified as linear mastery, and justice framed as access to canonical knowledge. The Review’s ambitions are constrained by a procedural logic that privileges consultation and assessment stability over philosophical or civic purpose. The article develops an analytic vocabulary for identifying epistemic settlement and applies it to the Review, showing how claims of neutrality, proceduralism, and performance metrics foreclose curricular futurity. Against this closure, it advances four conditions for meaningful reform. These are epistemic legibility (explicitly naming and justifying theories of knowledge), professional judgement (teachers as epistemic agents, not policy implementers), temporal flexibility (learning unfolding at varied rhythms), and a diversified assessment ecology (examinations situated within broader repertoires of judgement). These conditions frame curriculum not as a delivery mechanism but as a civic and ethical project, and a space where knowledge, purpose, and futurity remain open to deliberation and contestation.