In the loftiest Left-wing academic circles, Professor Becky Francis is a celebrated figure thanks to her learned papers on gender stereotypes in the classroom.
But within a matter of months, the professor will become a familiar name to a much wider audience: every parent worrying about their child’s performance at a state school.
For Francis has been recruited by the new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to conduct a sweeping review of the national curriculum.
Judging by the professor’s previous pronouncements in a long career working in the further education sector, parents have good reason to be worried about the reforms she will inevitably come up with.
Make no mistake, Francis has been brought in to liberalise the curriculum. As well as being a professor of education and social justice, she’s a Labour Party member who wears her politics on her sleeve.
Pictured: Professor Becky Francis, CBE – Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation. She has been recruited by the new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to conduct a sweeping review of the national curriculum
The Labour party has put Francis in charge of overseeing the curriculum. Pictured: Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivering a speech on Thursday at 10 Downing Street in central London
A long-standing opponent of the charitable status of private schools, she has already expressed concern about the pressure on teachers.
‘I know how stretched schools, colleges and their staff are. So it’s particularly important to me to consider how any changes could contribute to staff workload and to avoid unintended consequences,’ she said last week.
On her watch, the conventional orthodoxy on education will be turned upside down, with less reliance on rote learning and even less emphasis on exam grades.
Don’t take my word for it, just note what Francis wrote with co‑author Louise Archer in her 2006 book about schools, Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement: Race, Gender, Class and ‘Success’.
In the preface, they say: ‘Our intention is to help lever social justice concerns back into mainstream educational debates that have been dominated by the neo‑liberal language of ‘quality’ – in which concerns with ’equality’ have been evacuated and consigned to the margins.’
So the new education supremo is more concerned about equality than quality. Improving grades will take second place to tackling so-called injustice.
In the book, Francis also despairs over what she regards as the then Labour government’s ‘obsession with academic achievement’.
She wrote: ‘This is amply illustrated by the proliferation of testing regimes, academic league tables and the regular high profile publication of achievement statistics, from children’s earliest years through to GCSEs.
‘Indeed, we would assert that achievement is not just an educational issue for the current government it is the educational issue.’
A long-standing opponent of the charitable status of private schools, Francis has already expressed concern about the pressure on teachers (Stock image)
Francis appears to be criticising the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had coined the memorable soundbite ‘education, education, education’.
It remains to be seen whether the leopard has changed its spots. Sir Keir Starmer is well-known to be a fan of Labour’s most successful modern-day leader. The new PM is not only regularly on the phone to Blair but also seconded staff from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change to his office while in Opposition.
But Francis appears to be very much an unreconstructed Leftist. In the book mentioned above, Francis quotes the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault who, in 1961, wrote Madness And Civilisation, a cultural history of insanity.
She quotes him as saying he supported a ‘discursive social constructionist approach to race and ethnicity’ and a ‘theorisation of sex, gender and sexuality as non-essential, fluid, contested, processual and produced through discourse’.
Such impenetrable prose is far from encouraging.
As a specialist in ‘education inequalities’ and ‘gender stereotypes’, the new curriculum tsar is a critic of the traditional notion of boys playing with toy soldiers, girls with dolls. In 2006 she said: ‘The very clear message seems to be that boys should be making things, using their hands and solving problems, and girls should be caring and nurturing.
‘The marketing of toys has a significant role in reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes about what is appropriate for girls and boys which will feed into later choices about which subjects to study at school and which career paths to consider.’
So, will the author of A Feminist Critique Of Education and Feminism And The Schooling Scandal make boys second-class citizens in her new curriculum, despite their consistent underperformance and poorer behaviour in comparison to girls?
In 2022-23, 24.9 per cent of girls achieved grade 7 or A equivalent in their GCSEs, compared with 19.1 per cent of boys, a highly significant disparity of nearly 6 per cent.
In the same year, boys were slightly more than twice as likely to be permanently excluded from school and nearly twice as likely as girls to be suspended.
Only last year, Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, said the failure of boys to keep up with girls in their exam results ‘should be a matter of national concern’.
Another clue to the unelected adviser’s thinking came in 2019 at an event hosted by the charity Gender Action.
Francis said that ‘gender discrimination and gender inequality are ongoing issues day to day in schools, both in terms of kids’ experiences of school and their outcomes’.
This firebrand thinker appears to have had a highly conventional middle-class upbringing. Francis, 54, is the daughter of a recycling entrepreneur father and an Oxford-educated mother, who grew up in a village near Bath where she attended the local comprehensive, doing just well enough to stay on for A-levels.
A feminist Left-winger, she got involved in student politics when she studied English literature at Swansea University. After gaining a doctorate in education and women’s studies from North London University, she entered academia and rose to become Professor of Education and Social Justice at King’s College London.
Since January 2020, she has been Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a charity which is trying to raise the standards of the poorest children in English schools. In 2023, she was made a CBE for services to education.
But has she actually spent any time teaching children? In response to this question, a spokeswoman for EEF would say only: ‘Throughout her academic career, Becky regularly lectured on and delivered courses on topics related to education.’
In her new curriculum role, she will scrutinise all teaching materials used for pupils aged five to 18 and go on a nationwide fact-finding tour, talking to parents and teachers. Her recommendations will be published next year.
By then, Tom Bennett, the last government’s behaviour tsar, is likely to have left his position, as his contract expires next year. Bennett encouraged uniforms, silent corridors, frequent suspensions and isolation booths. Under Labour’s more touchy-feely regime, we can expect the suspensions and isolation booths to be reduced.
The concern over a gender specialist being put in charge of the curriculum by the Education Secretary comes after Phillipson dismayed many by blocking the Higher Education Freedom Of Speech Act, which was due to come into force next week.
Under the Act (passed last year with cross-party support), universities and students’ unions would face fines if they failed to uphold free speech. It was prompted by the treatment of academics such as Kathleen Stock, who was hounded out of the University of Sussex for the thoughtcrime of believing in biological sex and questioning transgender ideology.
But Phillipson caught everyone unawares when she announced she was putting on hold the entire legislation, a move not signalled in Labour’s election manifesto.
And as the surprise announcement came in the form of a written parliamentary answer, there was no opportunity to debate it on the floor of the Commons.
The irony was not lost on Conservative MPs. One senior Tory said: ‘The person in charge of the curriculum seems more concerned about gender equality than exam results, which should worry all of us. In the same week the Education Secretary drops the Freedom of Speech Act only days before it was due to be implemented. She does so by means of a written statement to ensure there is absolutely no debate. Another sign this government does not like free speech and does not like to be challenged.’
Having undermined Tory reform of the tertiary education sector, Labour now looks set to impose its will on schools via a doctrinaire academic with an aversion to testing and a fixation on equality rather than achieveme
