King’s College London (KCL) is pressing ahead with a far-reaching, centrally driven overhaul of assessment across the university under a framework centred on “inclusive”, “diverse” and “culturally responsive” approaches to which all assessments must adhere. Internal documents seen by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) indicate that the scale of the overhaul is far greater than previously understood, raising serious questions about academic freedom.
The changes form part of a university-wide reform programme, known internally as TASK (Transforming Assessment for Students at King’s), which is intended to reshape how students are assessed across disciplines. Under the framework, greater emphasis is placed on alternative forms of assessment alongside traditional exams, with departments expected to align their assessment practices with institution-wide principles.
According to quality assurance documentation at the Russell Group university, “all assessments must adhere to the TASK Framework”, embedding the approach within formal academic governance rather than leaving it to the discretion of individual departments or lecturers. Before new or revalidated programmes are approved, it is the responsibility of the Faculty Education Committee to “ensure” that the principles of TASK “have been adhered to”. Where those requirements are not met, the advice of the Executive Dean must be sought before approval proceeds.
Separate agenda papers presented to KCL’s Academic Board in February 2026 indicate that the overhaul is gathering pace across the university. In a “Student Futures Update”, the university said it had introduced a “best-practice framework” to make assessments “fairer, more inclusive, and more consistent”, and that a “full-scale review of assessments” had resulted in “over 1,400 changes implemented this academic year”, with “a further 3,000 changes proposed for next year”. Rather than a limited pilot or a series of isolated reforms, the material points to a systematic, institution-wide restructuring of how students are assessed.
Further detail about how the framework is being communicated to staff has emerged from a recent presentation, in which academics were told to give students a “choice in assessment formats”, while discouraging “over-reliance” on exams and introducing “more options” for how work is assessed. One slide, under the heading “equality, diversity and inclusion”, advised staff to “focus on ideas, not grammar”, and stated that assessment should be “culturally responsive” and “reward the use of culture, language and identity”. Marking, it added, should be “inclusive” and “embrace linguistic diversity”. In a separate announcement, students were told that some essays would be capped at 1,300 words, down from 2,000, in order to reduce academic stress.
Information provided to CAF by a KCL insider in September 2025 suggested that these proposals form part of a wider initiative around “inclusive marking practices”. A parallel strand, described as “culturally responsive assessment”, included calls to “decolonise the curriculum” and “validate diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences”.
One KCL academic, speaking anonymously to the Mail, warned that the framework could make marking disputes more difficult to contain. “A student could object to the grade they get on the basis that their ‘culture and identity’ hasn’t been respected,” he said.
Dr Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter and director of CAF, said the changes reflected a broader shift in how universities understand academic standards. “These attempts to dumb down assessment in the name of ‘inclusivity’ are being pushed by university managers against the will of academics and students themselves, the best of whom hunger for an education that is deep and rigorous,” he added.
The issue is not simply one of traditionalists recoiling from progressive educational philosophies. Individual academics have always exercised wide discretion in how they design, teach and assess their courses, and experimentation in pedagogic methods is often itself a product of academic freedom. A lecturer who chose to place less weight on formal writing, to “focus on ideas, not grammar”, or to incorporate forms of assessment grounded in a student’s “lived experience”, would be entitled to do so. Even if others regarded those choices as misguided, there would be no question of restricting academic freedom.
The real concern in this case arises from the shift in locus of control. What is presented as a set of pedagogical preferences appears, in practice, as an institution-wide framework to which all assessments “must” adhere. Once embedded in that way, such approaches cease to be optional innovations and instead begin to shape, and potentially constrain, the standards by which academic work is judged across disciplines.
That matters because no method of teaching or assessment is neutral, with each resting on its own theoretical assumptions. There is an important distinction between cultivating an environment in which a range of assessment formats may emerge, and redefining the criteria by which knowledge and argument are evaluated so as to privilege particular approaches over others.
Once a university, through an institution-wide framework, begins to frame assessment in terms of “validating” particular forms of knowledge or “rewarding” expressions of identity, it is no longer simply facilitating pedagogical innovation, but signalling, and in some cases prescribing, what kinds of knowledge, argument and expression ought to be recognised and given weight.
As the Office for Students has made clear, decisions about the curriculum must “safeguard the autonomy of individual academics to teach and communicate lawful ideas that may be controversial or unpopular or that some (or many) find offensive”. That protection is not reserved for those who favour “inclusive” approaches (as defined by KCL), but also extends to those whose pedagogical judgments proceed from more traditional, liberal or discipline-specific assumptions about what constitutes clarity, rigour and intellectual merit.
Little wonder, then, that one King’s academic told CAF that the proposals were experienced as an “imposition of ideological constraints which ought to have no place in university assessments”. That captures the central problem. Concepts such as “culturally responsive assessment” may well be intellectually defensible. But neither they, nor any other pedagogical technique, should be advanced through institutional mechanisms that narrow the ability of individual academics to dissent from them.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.