The future of SHAPE in England’s narrow post-16 curriculum

The English post-16 curriculum is exceptionally narrow. That was the claim put forward by the Department of Education (DfE) last year in its consultation document on a proposed Advanced British Standard, which reflects what is becoming the consensus view among many educational experts: students in England take fewer subjects compared to many of their peers across the world, and this lack of breadth is a problem. Most A-level students in England take only three subjects after age 16: in other OECD countries, students usually take up to seven. As the DfE and many others in the sector have argued, a narrow curriculum post-16 risks constraining students’ higher education choices and limiting their opportunities for work.

But could the English post-16 curriculum be getting even narrower? New research published today, commissioned by the British Academy and conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research, suggests the answer is yes. By exploring trends in subject choice at Level 3 education in England over the past twenty years, this research has found that students are taking fewer subjects than ever - and a much narrower selection of subjects. Analysis of the data shows us that:

• Students are taking fewer qualifications.
• Students are increasingly taking subjects within one subject group only (i.e. only STEM subjects, or only Social Sciences subjects).
• There has been a decline in the percentage of students taking Humanities and Arts subjects. The decline in Arts uptake has been happening incrementally over time. But the take-up of Humanities began to drop sharply from 2015/2016 when AS and A-Levels were decoupled.
• Trends at A-level and at Level 3 more broadly are similar, though we do see a shift in students studying Arts subjects towards vocational Arts qualifications over A-levels.

In the past twenty years, there have been multiple overlapping policy changes in the post-16 landscape. All will likely have had some effect on student subject choice. But the most significant appears to be the decoupling of AS and A-levels in 2015/2016. Decoupling was part of a broader suite of reforms to A-levels, designed to make them more rigorous. These reforms included a shift towards exams over coursework and the end of modular assessments. But the most significant change was to detach the AS-level qualification from the A-level. This meant assessments sat during the AS-level no longer counted towards the overall A-level qualifications. The AS-level was virtually eliminated as a result, and students went from studying on average four or five subjects to, for the most part, studying only three.

We see numbers across all subjects go down around the time of decoupling as students take fewer qualifications. But fewer qualifications per student have noticeably been followed by declining subject breadth, with students increasingly choosing to study subjects within only one subject group. This impact seems to have hit some subject groups harder than others. The decline in Humanities subject take-up has been particularly dramatic. This decline is not driven by one or two individual subjects: instead, we see a decline in take-up across all humanities subjects, particularly ‘traditional’ options like English, History and Languages.

Of course, when looking at student subject choice, we also need to take provider subject offerings into account. We found that, although almost all providers are offering A-levels in each major subject group, students have less access to individual subjects compared to 2007/2008, as providers have tended to reduce the range of subjects they offer. Worryingly, almost all Arts subjects – except for Art and Design Studies – have seen dramatic decline in availability across providers. While Humanities subjects as a group are still offered at almost all providers, many individual subjects have experienced a decline in availability. Provision of languages subjects is particularly low, and certain languages, such as French and German, have seen significant decline in provision since 2007/2008.

Student choice and provision are in some ways a ‘chicken and egg’ situation. It is difficult - almost impossible - to ascertain whether provision of a subject is in decline because of decreases in student take-up, or if take-up is declining because of decreasing provision. Most likely, the answer is a complicated mixture of both, impacted by additional external factors we know affect provision, including teacher shortages and schools stretched for resources. Declines in provision give us most cause for concern; a worrying reality where students can’t study the subjects they wish to pursue in their local area. Reductions in provision inevitably impact students’ access and ability to study subjects, particularly students in disadvantaged areas where providers are most struggling to make a broad subject offer to students.

If there is a decline in the humanities and arts in  post-16 education, then it is unsurprising that we see a corresponding and worrying squeeze in the higher education and research sector as well. Students’ subject choices at the higher education level do not happen in a vacuum. The difficulty with treating the higher education system as a market is that it can make it seem like students can choose to study anything they like at age eighteen with no constraint, and providers can react accordingly. Instead, we need to think of higher education within the context of the whole educational pipeline. Trends in subject choice earlier on in the pipeline are bound to affect the overall picture in the higher education sector. The choices students make in their school years directly shape the choices they can make at age eighteen: the broader the curriculum, the greater the opportunities open to students in the next steps of education, work or training.

Failure to address the decline in humanities and arts throughout the pipeline will have huge knock-on effects for SHAPE (social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy) subjects in UK universities and on the skills young people take out into the workforce and the wider world. This is not a skillset gap that the UK can afford, given how much of our economy is reliant on skills gained through the study of SHAPE subjects. And this is before we consider the impressive societal value that humanities subjects provide.

This is a moment of opportunity. The new government has announced a review of the secondary curriculum, aiming to deliver a broader curriculum that exposes students to a wide array of different subjects and equips them with the skills they need to succeed. We know there is more work to be done to understand the contexts in which students make subject choices, and what choices are available to them as part of the provider offer. But we also know how important it is that curricular breadth should be at the heart of thinking about any future post-16 education system. Our report provides an evidence base, through a robust piece of independent research, from which the British Academy will build further and explore the policy interventions that may be needed to ensure provision and the health of our disciplines. We will continue to advocate for a broad and balanced curriculum, one which allows and encourages all students, in all areas, to study a range of disciplines. Our students’ skills, and so much of our societal growth, depends on it.