The Curriculum is changing: Here’s why your data strategy must change too
The publication of the Department for Education’s new Curriculum and Assessment Review, the first comprehensive review in over a decade, is a landmark moment for every school in England. Chaired by Professor Becky Francis CBE, this final report, Building a world-class curriculum for all, is more than a policy document; it’s a strategic mandate for Trust Leaders and Senior Leadership Teams (SLTs) to future-proof the education they deliver.
While the fundamental structure remains intact, the report delivers a surgical, necessary refinement. It addresses the painful reality that, despite the brilliance of the current framework, it is failing to close the stubborn socio-economic attainment gap. Moreover, the curriculum is not yet fully equipped to prepare today’s pupils for a world increasingly shaped by Artificial Intelligence and complex digital environments.
This shift in focus, from content coverage to implementation fidelity and equity, means that your data infrastructure is now the single most critical tool for success. If the DfE is demanding an increase in oracy and better media literacy, you must have the means to track and quantify these non-traditional metrics effectively.
For Trust CEOs and Data Leads, the question is not if you will adopt these changes, but how you will monitor their success across every school in your Multi-Academy Trust.
Here, we break down the three most critical demands of the new curriculum and demonstrate how Deesha is the unified data platform built to provide the strategic oversight you now require.
1. The Attainment Gap: Shifting from Reactive to Predictive Data
The review panel was unambiguous: the education system must do more to support young people with SEND and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The persistent attainment gap is identified as a critical failure point.
The Review’s Demand
Focused attention on equity and proactive progress monitoring for all pupils, ensuring 'high standards' truly means high standards for everyone.
The Data Problem for MATs
Most trusts still rely heavily on summative assessment data (exam results, end-of-term scores) unified through static reporting tools. By the time this data is manually pulled from separate MIS, attendance, and behaviour systems, the gap is already wide and the opportunity for timely intervention is lost. This is a reactive data model that only documents failure.
The Deesha Solution: Unified, Proactive Insight
Deesha fundamentally changes the data model by creating a single, unified source of truth. We break down the technical barriers between all your disparate systems, from finance and staffing to attendance and behaviour, and unify them into one intelligence layer.
This holistic view allows Trust Leaders to:
Predict Risk: Use historical trends and unified behaviour/attendance data to proactively identify pupils at risk of becoming persistently absent or underachieving before the issue appears in a traditional report.
Quantify Impact: Directly link expenditure on specific interventions (finance data) to subsequent improvements in attendance and attainment (pupil data), ensuring your equity spending is genuinely effective.
Empower SLTs: Give Senior Leadership Teams the timely, clean data they need to enact an early intervention strategy, allowing them to close the gap at the classroom level, not just report on it at the board level.
Source: Pearson School Report 2025
2. New metrics for a new world: Tracking soft skills with structured data
The report correctly identifies that the curriculum must evolve to prepare pupils for a world dominated by rapid change and digital complexity. This necessitates a focus on oracy (spoken communication) and enhanced critical media literacy.
The Review’s Demand
The introduction of an oracy framework to complement literacy and numeracy, alongside a mandate to prepare learners for the age of AI.
The Data Problem for MATs
Oracy, media literacy, and other crucial soft skills exist outside of traditional assessment systems. They are tracked through teacher observations, intervention logs, and often, handwritten notes or disparate spreadsheets. This is unstructured data that is currently invisible to the Trust’s central strategic dashboard. You cannot manage what you cannot measure.
The Deesha Solution: Making the unmeasurable, measurable
Deesha is built to ingest and harmonise this essential unstructured data. We allow MATs to create custom, structured data capture fields within Deesha itself or through connected third-party tools.
Oracy Monitoring: If a teacher records a simple 1–4 score on a pupil’s oracy progress or a specific intervention note, Deesha extracts, structures, and aggregates that metric.
Strategic Oversight: This allows the Trust to generate a clear, cross-school report on the uptake and efficacy of the new Oracy Framework. You can instantly see which schools are excelling at implementation and where resources need to be focused to embed these new skills successfully.
Beyond the Standard: By unifying soft skills data with traditional academic metrics, Deesha provides the only holistic view of pupil progress that aligns with the DfE’s vision for the future of learning.
The next strategic step: Elevate your Trust's data maturity
The Department for Education's call for enhanced oracy and critical media literacy is a strategic challenge. It proves that the future of education cannot be managed by spreadsheets or disparate data silos. The era of the unstructured data blind spot is over.
If you are a Trust Leader or an SLT member who has spent years frustrated by the lack of strategic oversight, unable to link pastoral notes to attainment, or intervention spending to attendance, then you understand the core problem: Your current EdTech stack is built for reporting, not for prediction and action.
Deesha was not built by coders chasing a trend; it was built by experienced educational strategists who deeply understand the complex operational reality of running a Multi-Academy Trust. Our mission is to move every MAT from a fragmented data environment to true data maturity.
We are the unified data platform that specifically solves the problems raised by the DfE Review: we help you close the attainment gap by making your oracy data visible and actionable, ensuring every single curriculum initiative, from the Early Years to Key Stage 5, is implemented with fidelity and measurable success.
We are Deesha: The intelligence layer that turns complex data into simple, integrated strategy.
Stop managing your curriculum implementation in the dark. It is time to see the entire picture of pupil progress, financial efficiency, and staff performance from one central source.
Learn about our vision: Understand the strategic principles that guide our development and how our roots in educational consultancy led us to build the definitive EdTech solution for MATs.
Meet the founders: See the passion and expertise driving our commitment to solving the most complex data challenges faced by Trust Leaders in the UK and internationally.
Discover data maturity: Explore our full framework for achieving organisational data maturity and how Deesha delivers the strategic oversight required for outstanding governance.
Ready to move beyond dashboards and into strategic data leadership?
3. Curriculum Overload & Implementation Fidelity
The panel directly addressed the tension between breadth and depth, recommending clarity, sequencing, and, notably, the removal of the EBacc performance measure.
The review’s demand
Improved clarity and specificity in sequencing to allow for mastery of core concepts, and the freedom to pursue a broader, more balanced curriculum without the constraint of the EBacc measure.
The data problem for MATs
The removal of the mandatory EBacc measure is a freedom, but also a responsibility. Trusts must now internally define and monitor their Academic Breadth (as the report suggests replacing EBacc with this concept in Progress 8). The main challenge becomes implementation fidelity: is the new, refined curriculum sequence being taught consistently across all schools, and is the removal of the EBacc pressure leading to genuinely better engagement in other subjects?
The Deesha solution: monitoring implementation from the Centre
Deesha turns curriculum policy into an actionable monitoring process:
Standardised Reporting: We help your curriculum leads design Trust-wide, standardised reports that track key indicators related to the new, refined content sequencing.
Replicating Best Practice: By seeing which schools are achieving better pupil engagement or mastery scores following a curriculum change, Deesha highlights the exact schools, departments, and metrics driving that success. Trust leaders can then quickly identify and replicate best practice across the entire MAT, saving time on costly, generalised CPD.
Strategic Alignment: Deesha ensures that the decisions made in the boardroom (or in response to the DfE review) are being executed correctly and measurably in every classroom.
The strategic mandate: Your data infrastructure is the new foundation
The DfE's Curriculum and Assessment Review is not just a call to update subject content; it is a strategic roadmap for a more equitable and future-ready education system. However, a world-class curriculum is only as effective as the data infrastructure supporting its implementation.
For Trust Leaders, the strategic imperative is clear: you must move beyond dashboards that only report history. You need a unified data platform that is proactive, holistic, and capable of monitoring the new, complex metrics (like oracy and critical thinking) demanded by this review.
The task is not just to comply with the review, but to leverage it to build genuine, sustainable data maturity across your Trust. Deesha is the technology built to help you lead that charge.
Ready to ensure your Trust’s data strategy aligns with the new curriculum demands and guarantees data readiness for the future?