Education is Failing - Can We Save It?
The Crisis in Education and Employability
Less than a month ago (ONS) in the UK, that nearly one million young people in the UK are not in employment, education or training (NEET). A week ago, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published data stating that:
children lost 6.8 million days of learning in the autumn term before the COVID pandemic (2019/20) due to suspensions and absences, but the figure was 11.5 million days in the same period in 2023/24. [The IPPR] also found for every child that is permanently excluded, 10 other children experience an “invisible” move that is not recorded in national data or overseen by local authorities or trusts.
Further to this the Education Policy Institute (EPI) in the last month which shows that children from the lowest income families are now up to 19 months behind their peers by the time they are 16 years old and by Simon Jenkins of The Guardian, reminded us that:
A soaring schoolchildren now report mental illness. A fifth of pupils in England are persistent truants. School suspensions and expulsions last year were a full third up on the previous record year.
Reports also confirm that could go bankrupt because of the spiralling costs of Special Educational Needs (SEND) pupils not attending school, and the Department of Education’s data states that . This equates to around 1.6 million pupils.
Meanwhile a department of work and pensions report published last week states that and the latest UK labour market statistics show that:
The UK unemployment rate was 4.4%, and 1.55 million people aged 16+ were unemployed. Unemployment levels increased by around 132,000 over the last year, and the unemployment rate also increased.
9.29 million people aged 16–64 were economically inactive, and the inactivity rate was 21.5%.
Alongside this, the skills gaps for the UK workforce ias the government reports that ‘the digital skills gap [alone] is estimated to cost the economy £63 billion per year’.
Levels of economic inactivity are rising in the UK and long-term employment prospects are bleak, especially for the young. As more companies announce staff redundancies and increased automation, our analogue, knowledge-obsessed, state education system is failing to prepare millions of young people for their future lives and the workplace.
With this comprehensive pattern in the data, much of it published in the last month, we have to ask ourselves:
Who is our current education system working for?
Crisis — What Crisis ?
You would think in the light of this data, most of it coming from the government itself, that those tasked with delivering the change needed in the UK education system would recognise a looming catastrophe and respond with radical proposals.
Despite the flock of canaries lying on the floor in the form of these recently published datasets, however, the author of the , Professor Becky Francis, states that only ‘evolutionary’ change is needed to update the current curriculum and address the challenges of the future.
For Professor Francis and her fellow panel members:
Education is inherently valuable and important for its own sake (p.5).
I am sure a great deal of work went into this interim report, but this statement is fundamentally flawed and highlights the fixed thinking in the rest of the document.
An education system which discourages the creative and imaginative capacities that children are born with and offers only a stifling and unimaginative model of learning in its place is the opposite of inherently valuable.
The prioritising of curriculum knowledge acquisition and its regurgitation through collective testing is detrimental to the lives of young people. As Sammy Wright has shown in his recent book, Exam Nation (2024), our system fails many pupils with its narrow focus on a ‘knowledge in/testing out’ culture of measurement.
Professor Francis and her fellow authors appear impervious to this reality, and the crisis it is creating, although they are aware of the arguments that Wright presents in his book:
We have also heard concerns that exams — coupled with the volume of content needing to be covered and their use in accountability measures — can lead to ‘teaching to the test’, with students spending too much curriculum time rote learning facts and model answer structures and revision at the expense of depth of understanding of the content. (p.41).
This is the core of the problem within our system. But instead of addressing it, Professor Francis merely suggests giving more time to ‘skills’, although where this additional time will come from in the already overloaded school day is not specified.
There is a crisis in UK state education and the employability that it is supposedly preparing people for, but from reading this report you would assume everything is fine, except for the SEND students. The truth is that our narrow curriculum-based system is a contributing factor for the rise in these students leaving the system, but it is also a barrier for all pupils to realise their potential and be successful.
Our outdated educational system is a major reason why so many young people are dropping out of schools, universities and the workforce. But this interim report leads one to conclude that is unlikely to change for the better.
An Analogue Curriculum for a Digital Age
The UK national curriculum was originally introduced through an act of parliament in 1988, with the first delivery of content starting from 1989.
When this system was created and implemented virtually all of the knowledge in the world was held in physical books in libraries and schools were equipped with VHS tape recorders. Significant changes occurred after its introduction.
In 1989 the internet was created and released to the public in 1993, and the first browsers came out the same year; Google was launched in 1998.
Cellular networks were established from the late 1980s; early ‘dumb’ mobile phones became widely available in the 1990s, with 3G networks emerging in the early 2000s; the first Apple iPhone was released in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.
Facebook was made available to UK students from 2005, WhatsApp launched in 2009, and Instagram followed in 2010. Netflix started in 1997 and launched in the UK in 2012. ChatGPT went live in 2022.
All of these technological developments came long after the core structure and content of the first UK national curriculum was created, and they have radically transformed how knowledge and skills are acquired in the twenty-first century.
Our national curriculum is by definition an analogue educational system designed for an age when the linear consumption of knowledge was the norm. It is wholly unsuited to the digital age it was not designed for. It needs revolutionary reform.
It is deeply disappointing, therefore, to see that the interim report from Professor Frances and her team supports the core of the UK’s outdated education system:
It is right that it is now refreshed to ensure that it remains cutting edge and fit for purpose” (p.5).
An ‘evolutionary refresh’ of the national curriculum to make it ‘cutting edge’ will amount to little more than putting new carpets and furniture inside a crumbling ruin from a bygone age. It will be as ineffective as wrapping tinsel around a VHS video player.
Very soon these ‘spruced up’ elements will become outdated and useless once they are exposed to the harsh realities of our information saturated digital world.
We educate people around single subjects in isolation, we train the decreasing numbers of teachers in our universities in these individual subjects, taught by academics whose expertise is in individual subjects, and we produce professors of education who become experts in a narrow field of study.
The result has been to create generations of analogue academic thinking that has solidified and become impregnable to change within our school and universities. It is exemplified in the references to ‘knowledge’ on page 8 of the .
To question the current value and relevance of our analogue national curriculum with its focus on exam results as the measure of its success is not to be ‘anti-knowledge’, ‘anti-learning or ‘anti-school’. It is instead to believe that the particular way the UK national curriculum is structured around a strict hierarchy of compulsory subjects restricts choice and imposes a learning straight-jacket that fails to realise the full potential of the majority of young people.
The growing numbers of pupils who are disengaged from the system are testament to this. But even for the majority of young people that do attend school, their experiences are often equally dispiriting. As previously cited data shows, when they complete their studies school leavers today are far less likely to get a good job as an outcome than any other generation that came before them. This is one key reason why radical change is needed.
School is not entirely responsible for this. As Exam Nation shows us, family circumstances, poverty and social background have a huge influence on outcomes. But there are examples from other state systems that achieve much more for all their young people without a national curriculum and the obsession with exam results that dominates the UK education system.
If we do not challenge the misguided assumptions within the interim report then we are enabling the unquestioned continuation of a narrow subject-based and test-orientated approach that will fail generations of young people who will just walk away.
The World We Should be Educating Young People For
The brilliant drama Adolescence on Netflix, which has been commented on by the UK Prime Minster Keir Starmer, shows us the digital world as it is. Parents are increasingly baffled about the role of technology in their children’s lives and all adults who grew up without smartphones and social media are equally alienated from this experience.
It would be interesting to ask the Prime Minister, his education secretary or Professor Francis what they make of the second episode of Adolescence. Set in a frighteningly realistic UK school, it shows a world a lead character describes as a ‘holding pen’ where nothing is being learned.
While Adolescence was streaming, and the Prime Minister and members of the Houses of Commons and Lords were discussing the concerns it raises, a UK teenager was convicted for murdering members of his own family and plotting to kill thirty primary school children with a shotgun. Seeking to become the most notorious school killer resulting from his online obsession with the Sandy Hook tragedy in the US, he was stopped by chance before he could get to the school.
This is not the first case where a young man, heavily influenced by the online world and its distortions has been provoked to horrific and violent acts, often against girls, and it will not be the last. Adolescence has bought the negative impact that our digital society is having on young people into sharp focus, and not before time.
It is an indication of the gap between the real world and our education system that at the same time these events were happening, the interim report on the UK curriculum is published but pays little attention to how society has changed since the national curriculum was first introduced. Instead, the authors of the report suggest that we can best prepare future students for the world with more ‘breadth and depth’ (a very analogue term) in maths, STEM and some other subjects. This demonstrates just how out of touch the report is with the realities that Adolescence portrays.
The Chasm between Education and Workplace Skills
There is a growing recognition that the skills needed for success in the twenty-first century are different from those that were prioritised in the past.
Beyond literacy and numeracy, today’s students need to develop skills such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, empathy, communication, and adaptability.
But perhaps these skills have been needed for longer than we have cared to admit? It is cheaper (in the short term) to teach a knowledge-based curriculum that can be easily measured, as Exam Nation shows us. But the invisible cost to human potential and our future society from this short-sighted approach is inestimable.
Our educational system continues to focus on content knowledge that can be easily tested (and now, of course, replicated by AI), rather than these broader human capabilities. This creates a an ever-widening gap between what students are learning in school and what they will need to thrive in their current and future lives and careers, as some feedback given by parents and pupils in the include with the report suggests.
Closing this gap requires not just updates to curriculum and assessment but a fundamental rethink of the purpose of state education. Rather than viewing education primarily as a means of transmitting narrowly defined areas of knowledge and getting people through exams, we need to see it as a process of developing the already-present human capacities that young people have and nurturing these to enable them to navigate an uncertain future.
An analogue, content-led education system, will always be out of date. By focusing on delivering a supposedly ‘relevant’ diet, the writers of the interim report completely fail to understand the primary role of education to develop individual potential.
There is a very good reason for this.
Asking educational experts in the UK to provide a vision for a new system that is genuinely fit for the twenty-first century is always going to fail. They have too much invested in the system as it is. As puts it in response to the interim report’s insistence on teaching GCSE maths to the 40% of young people who fail the subject:
Making them learn maths is like teaching them to swim but banning the use of water. Yet to say this in education circles — I began my career in London’s Institute of Education — is like swearing in church.
The report includes accompanying data with feedback from UK teachers of curriculum content, albeit based on a tiny sample of 780 members the profession (0.166%). But even in this feedback 51% of teachers say there is too much content in the current curriculum and only 3% said that more is needed. We do not know what the last year think, but there seems little evidence that Professor Francis’ insistence on ‘greater breadth and depth’ of curriculum is justified.
Why Outdated Structures Persist: The Knowledge Consumption Model
Despite the enormous natural capacity for a sponge-like, non-linear imaginative learning that , the analogue consumption model of curriculum is deeply embedded in our education system from primary school.
Young people are positioned as passive recipients of knowledge as they move through the system, rather than active creators of understanding. This is the core failure of state education, and it is the reason that those delivering the system think the problem is just one of outdated material. Our education experts comprehensively fail to understand that learning should centre around the person learning, not the content.
In the UK, our children now live in a world where what they consume is increasingly detrimental to both their physical and mental wellbeing. Their food often contains unhealthy ingredients, and, as Adolescence shows, they also imbibe growing levels of damaging material from social media networks.
Is it any wonder that we now have an obesity crisis in the young caused by an overconsumption of sugar and processed foods and a growing mental health crisis resulting from the intake of negative online messaging?
The UK national curriculum and testing culture is driven by the same principle of knowledge consumption and its results are even more damaging because it squanders human potential, sometimes for a lifetime. It is no coincidence that the word diet is often used to describe a curriculum.
Students around the UK, and the world, still spend most of their time sitting in rows, facing forward. Similar to how we sit to eat food or on sofas to watch television, they sit at desks and in lecture halls consuming content delivered by a teacher or professor.
Young people are taught in an analogue linear format to absorb information, memorise it, and reproduce it for the standardised assessments set to test the same body of collective, pre-determined knowledge. This approach is always behind the curve of real-world innovation, however well-intentioned the ‘breadth and depth’ of curriculum might be.
It is a process that is as consistent and easy to measure as it is uninspiring and disengaging for many young people. This is why more of them are walking away. It is equally demotivating for our teachers, whose passion to educate is diminished by the need to focus on tests. .
The approach fails to develop the individual who cannot adapt themselves to this structure and is often at odds with the creation of a positive learning environment. This model was designed for an industrial age, where the goal was to produce either organised workers who could follow instructions and perform tasks or the managers who could organise this workforce within well-established employment pathways.
The interim report’s insistence that students should study core subjects that many fail to at least GCSE level states:
There is strong evidence that securing mastery in a subject is vital for raising standards and enabling future expertise. (p6)
This sentence is true only if you think that the passing of tests proves standards. If you teach more maths and science to students, test what you teach, and make those who fail retake the test, then more people will pass. And if your measure of rising standards is that more people pass the test then you achieve this goal. Congratulations.
But this does not prove that the test will ‘enable future expertise’. I got an ‘A’ grade in A level accounts at school, but I still needed an accountant to complete my tax return when I was self-employed. The world had changed, and my knowledge was forgotten years later.
What no education secretary, professor of education, or anyone fixated upon the notion that passing a test is proof of raising standards will ever acknowledge is that the test itself may well be irrelevant to the ‘future expertise’ required by those taking it. Its only ‘value’ is as a measurement in a league table.
Apart from the students who might go on to a PhD in the subject, 99% of the pupils taking the test may never use that knowledge again, while the chance to learn something useful that they might apply throughout their lives has gone.
And while the report says that critical skills are important, it misses the point that the school day is limited, and the more time you spend on the ‘breadth and depth’ of irrelevant knowledge for the sake of a test, the less time you have to develop the more important life skills our young people need. This is shown in Exam Nation.
The writers of the report may respond that they want to update the curriculum to address this problem, but the approach is flawed for two reasons.
You do not teach young people how to think and learn by telling them what to think and learn. Focusing on content means your curriculum is always outdated, which is why we need to teach skills suited to the person we are teaching, not just content.
But this approach is much harder to test, especially in creative, practical and group-based subjects which are often the best ways to teach the skills that are truly needed.
The response in the interim report to the changes in society since the national curriculum was first created is so meagre that it clearly demonstrates the gulf between how far the government will actually go in changing our current UK education system and the transformation that is needed. Despite the plethora of statistics given at the start of this piece demonstrating how the system is increasingly failing large groups of pupils.
We need to change the fundamental structures of UK education to achieve the human potential of all our young people; including those in school, those excluded or choosing to leave, those with SEND challenges, those who are NEET, and those who cannot find or are losing jobs because they do not have the twenty-first century skills they need.
Even though the interim report pays lip service to this idea:
The curriculum needs to respond to social and technological change. The rise of artificial intelligence and trends in digital information demand heightened media literacy and critical thinking, as well as digital skills (p.6).
it is nonetheless the case that an analogue national curriculum designed to get people to pass exams will not produce the critical thinking it espouses — it does the opposite.
The system encourages compliance with the knowledge offered by the teacher or professor, and our narrow testing approach discourages the kind of independent creative thinking that is needed.
This is the one time the phrase ‘critical thinking’ appears in the whole review document and the word ‘creative’ only appears once, on page twenty-six of the report in the feedback statement from parents and young people stating what they want to see more of in class. In fact this addendum report proves that what parents and young people want from the school experience is very different from what they get under the current national curriculum:
We have also heard consistently from children and young people and their parents that they want more focus on the applied knowledge and skills that will equip them for later life and work; such as financial education, careers knowledge and politics and governance. For example, our polling shows that 34% of key stage 4 learners and 43% of their parents would have liked more focus on finance and budgeting, and 32% of key stage 4 learners and 36% of their parents would have liked more time on employment and interview skills (figure 7). The National Parent Survey data further confirms these trends: nearly half of parents think that too little time is spent on skills related to financial management (48%); and around a third would like more attention to life skills (32%); and preparation for the job market (32%). (p.26).
And yet despite this evidence, the report still focuses of bringing more ‘breadth and depth’ to an academic curriculum that is not relevant to most people’s real lives.
An analogue education system is intrinsically incapable of addressing a digital world and developing the human skills needed to thrive within it. Adding more ‘breadth and depth’ to the analogue model that focuses on academic subjects does not change this fact.
To adapt Philip Larkin’s phrase, it merely ‘deepens the coastal shelf’ of an outdated approach. We need a restructure and redesign of education for the world as it is today, not as it was in 1988.
The statistics I referenced in my introduction show that our young people are leaving the education system in ever greater numbers, . Ultimately all that will be left in our analogue state education system will be ministers and professors of education and an AI robot churning out knowledge to an empty room.
Why not instead learn from different education approaches that actually work?
Learning from the Best
What is noticeable by its absence in this interim report is the lack of reference to other best-practice models of education that exist around the world.
rather than the spoon feeding of knowledge for tests. There are also many examples of schools across the world, , that are working in completely different ways and achieving better outcomes for more of their pupils, often despite difficult social backgrounds.
A recent BBC UK documentary programme, , highlighted the divide between the UK system and the learning model of Finland. Even in terms of dubious PISA figures, Finland does better than the UK and, only recently, came top on the 2025 World Happiness Report for the ninth time in a row. When asked why the country had achieved this accolade, the Finnish Prime Minister named three things, one of which was education.
How many other Prime Ministers of countries really believe that their education systems are making their population happier?
The system in Finland and neighbouring Scandinavian countries have key features that distinguish them from the UK approach. Young people start school much later, usually from age seven, enabling them to enjoy a creative imaginative life as a child for longer. The educational structures are also designed to provide a child-centred approach to allow the young person to develop at an individual pace suited to them. There is little formal testing early on, no league tables and historically low dropout rates.
When I attended a conference in Norway in the early 2000s, I met a group of professors of education from Finland and neighbouring Scandinavian countries who spoke to me with an air of benign sympathy and explained how their governments had taken the conscious decision to radically alter their education systems many years before. They tore up the failed model and embraced a person-centred approach, training all teachers to master’s level and giving them a high salary and social status to match. In the UK, by contrast, more teachers are leaving the profession, including experienced professionals who are choosing instead , amongst other things.
The recent decision of the Oxbridge boat race committee to expel three rowers from competing because they were ‘only’ doing a PGCE says a lot about the current esteem that the teaching profession is held in the UK.
Simply put, Finland has produced a much better state education system than the UK by not having an analogue national curriculum, constant testing and league tables. As The State We’re In: Education identifies, state education in Finland is so good that there is virtually no private education sector in the country (with or without VAT!).
We should ask why our own education experts appear disinterested in these models? Why is it that despite the evident success of others who work very differently from us and achieve better results, that we do not think we have anything to learn from them?
Why do our education professors not want to be educated?
This is easy to understand, I think. Our professors of education are both the products of the very system they are now reviewing, and their careers are based on a detailed knowledge of this system. To change our system too much might undermine their status in a world they know and understand very well. Ultimately this hampers their judgement and blinds them to the real alternatives that exist outside of our system.
The paradox of all this is that in the excellent recent work of such thinkers as , , , , and the late , to name but a few, we see effective applications of the very scientific knowledge that the report advocates as valuable, but itself fails to learn from.
The millions of adults who have learned from these writers’ application of scientific thinking to better understand and cope with their lives could have learned about these ideas much earlier in life and to their great benefit in school, but they did not. The insights and life supporting skills these authors offer are needed more than ever, but this does not accord with the narrowly focused notions of traditional analogue curriculum knowledge which sit firmly inside the comfort zone and fixed mindset of our educational experts.
The Standardisation Effect
Despite significant technological and societal changes, our educational structures remain rooted in the past. The academic year still follows an agrarian calendar, designed to allow children to help with the harvest; the school day is still structured around discrete subjects taught in isolation from one another, despite the interdisciplinary nature of real-world problems.
And all children in a particular age group are treated as a homogenous mass — regardless of known developmental diversity.
This is an inconvenient truth for governments who want to get all students into one easily manageable grouping wherever possible. The persistence of outdated structures is not due to a lack of awareness of their limitations, however. Educators, researchers, innovators, employers and policymakers have been calling for reform for decades.
Instead, it reflects the inherent limitations of educational policy and the governments who create them. I mean all UK governments, who repeatedly fail to address the imperative to deliver systemic change. Their mindset is fixed.
One of the most significant challenges in education today is the tension between standardisation and personalisation. Standardised testing has become increasingly prevalent, driven by a desire for accountability and measurable outcomes. . However, this focus on standardisation has come at the expense of personalised learning experiences that cater to the diverse needs, interests, and learning styles of individual students. .
Standardised testing encourages a one-size-fits-all approach to education, where success is narrowly defined in terms of test scores rather than broader measures of learning and development.
It creates perverse incentives for teachers to “teach to the test” rather than to foster deeper understanding and critical thinking. This is one key reason for the moral panic over AI.
The emphasis on standardisation has led to a narrowing of the curriculum, with subjects that are not as easy to ‘test’ — such as art, music, drama, dance, and physical education, alongside practical subjects such as carpentry or construction, that teach students to build and make things — .
The report itself downplays the decline in the subjects that are specifically focused on nurturing creative and practical human beings — .
A narrow focus on ‘academic’ subjects deprives students of a well-rounded education and fails to nurture the diverse talents and interests that are essential for a thriving society.
In the responses to the report many parents and young people are asking for greater emphasis on creative and practical subjects at the heart of the learning experience.
But the fixed conventional thinking of those who support the narrow structures of our analogue curriculum fail to understand exactly why these subjects are so important in the real world that parents and students inhabit.
It was Einstein who said that ‘all great scientists are also great artists’, and his violin playing was a key part of his thought processes. Indeed, Einstein’s experience of the education curriculum is interesting in the context of the interim report.
What Students Know that Education Experts Fail to Grasp
Einstein dropped out of school and later received a failure grade from his university physics professor. He was regarded as a mediocre student incapable of grasping the complexities of the mathematics and physics curriculum. His professors were fairly withering about his abilities and, like so many teachers fearful of having a student who might spoil their results outcomes, he was ‘encouraged’ to change his subject choice away from physics, but Einstein resisted these efforts.
Imagine if his professor had succeeded? How different would our world be now? How many teachers in the hundred years since Einstein was a student have managed to put pupils off studying a subject they think is too difficult?
How many students are quietly ‘withdrawn’ from a subject for the sake of a league table?
In fact, as Einstein himself made clear, he did not want to study the university’s outdated curriculum based on Newtonian physics that was already nearly three hundred years old when he arrived as a student. It was the curriculum his professors felt comfortable with because it was what they knew well.
But Einstein believed it failed to account for so much and a few years after university, in his ‘’, he would prove exactly why this was the case. Much to the amazement of his physics professors.
Little has changed in the last one hundred years in terms of how expert curriculum knowledge is managed within education. Teachers and professors teach what they have studied and researched, however outdated it might be. Doing anything different makes them very insecure and if a pupil is not compliant with the approach the curriculum requires this must be the fault of the student and, like Einstein, they are considered a failure by the system.
Most of our potential Einstein’s are buried under a limiting system that destroys the creative thinking essential for brilliant discoveries and never manage to emerge. The only reason the current approach persists is because we cannot provide data on squandered potential — it is lost in every sense of the word.
The emperor of an outdated narrow analogue curriculum has no clothes. But this does not prevent each new government education department and the professors who advise them heaping further imaginary garments of ‘updated’ standardised curriculum upon students under the guise of ‘quality and standards’ or ‘breadth and depth’.
What today’s students, and indeed all of us, need to understand is the challenge of how our own mind’s work, and how to understand, empathise and cooperate with others who may well think differently to us. We need to be supporting our young people to develop their sense of what constitutes a meaningful existence in a world without many sure foundations, and to cope with what is thrown at them day by day.
But we do not do this. We stick to narrow, subject-based curriculum that teaches the ideas of the past and tests this already outdated knowledge because we remain paralysed, unable to respond to the world as it really is.
Governments and professors of education are fixated on knowledge that can be packaged — because that is how they were taught and how they can explain themselves to the outside world. They focus on targets, tables, and narrow definitions of achievement that signify nothing.
The writers of the Curriculum and Assessment Review Interim Report are incapable of thinking outside of this fixed box of educational norms and want the rest of us to accept the same restrictive boundaries of an analogue national curriculum because it is easier for them to manage people inside systems. In the end, when pushed, people stick to what they know and feel safe with, because they mistakenly think this will protect them from what is much more difficult and frightening — fundamental change.
That is exactly the problem with our ‘chimp’ brains. They prevent us from doing the things that would liberate us because of the fear of change and the threat of the unknown. If you have studied certain concepts as a successful professor of education, completely immersed yourself in your discipline and the philosophy which accompanies it, then the last thing you want is to create an education system that challenges everything that forms the bedrock of your own academic career.
And similarly, if you are a government minister who will be judged on whether more pupils are getting A stars or your PISA standings are going up or down by comparison to the other countries of the world, then this is what matters to you.
The fact that to prioritise measuring over meaning requires an education system that is not relevant to people’s lives is secondary to this priority. After all, who wants to be bottom of the PISA pile when you meet your fellow ministers at a UNESCO education conference cocktail evening?
The representation of school life and the world of young people is more authentic in Adolescence, The State We are In: Education and Exam Nation than in a single syllable contained within the interim report on UK education published last week.
Adolescence should be seen in the same way as Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It should make all those involved in creating our education system sit up and take notice of the need for radical change. A mere update of our analogue curriculum will do nothing to solve the core challenges in our schools or in our digital society.
One of the reasons why fewer young people are engaging with state education is the growing gulf between what and how they are taught in schools and the world they live in.
The interim report and its priorities represents more of the same of the failed analogue model and this will only make things much worse in the future.
The Learning Experience that Students Need
My own granddaughter, now 14, is by any measure a successful school pupil at present, who is passing her tests and getting good grades. She is in the top sets for all the ‘important’ subjects such as maths and science and appears to be able maintain good mental health so far, in a world that bombards her daily with the pressures that so many teenage young people face. But already around 80% of her GCSEs are predetermined.
And yet she understands, as I am sure that scores of other teenagers inside our education system understand, what professors of education advising the government fail to grasp.
The curriculum she is being taught has little relevance to the life she lives now and will have even less of a role to play to the world that will greet her when she graduates out of the education system.
My granddaughter recently asked me if I could check if her maths homework was correct. The exercise involved identifying particularly values in equations by either dividing or multiplying one side of the equation to provide a formula along the lines of ‘x=…’. I did my best to try and remember the method, but just to be sure I confess that I took a photograph of the equation and asked ChatGPT if it could solve it for me. It gave the same results and workings as my granddaughter so I could confirm she was right.
My granddaughter then asked me if I had ever used such equation solving skills in my own life and I had to confess that I had not given them any thought in the forty years since I took my last ‘O’ level maths exam. Despite having managed departments and projects with multimillion pound budgets, often using spreadsheets of finance data, I had never needed these equations (in spreadsheets prepopulated by the finance department). And now AI can create spreadsheet formulas so perhaps this skills will become redundant for all except our professors of mathematics.
Her experience of school as she has described it to me is little changed from my own at her age even before the national curriculum was created. The experts in curriculum and testing who are responsible for creating the programmes she and I both studied as teenagers remain chained to the dogma of a knowledge-in / testing-out regurgitation model that has become increasingly outdated over time.
This approach continues to fail not just the students with diverse learning needs who drop out, but also those who are able to negotiate the system like my granddaughter so far. People who do fulfil their potential more often than not do so despite the majority of their school experience.
The exceptions are when a pupil encounters an individual teacher who took a different approach that galvanises them or they drop out to find success on their own like Einstein and so many of our successful .
I also think that the fact she has developed her own passion for music performance over recent months has helped my granddaughter to manage some of the pressures that face any teenage girl these days. The creative subjects define our humanity, but they will always be on the margins of our analogue national curriculum obsessed with maths and STEM.
To be expected to learn mathematical and scientific concepts that 99.9% of them will never use after school instead of learning skills to negotiate the challenges they face in their lives or focus on things they are good at and have a passion and aptitude for is understood to be absurd by young people like my granddaughter.
Literacy and numeracy are important, and those with a strong passion and capability for maths and STEM should develop their full potential. But a one-size-fits-all analogue national curriculum focused on everyone knowing the same facts to a prescribed level is wasteful of our diverse human talents. The blind acceptance of these outdated structures is disintegrating, and dropout rates are rapidly increasing as a result.
Young people really need to learn about how we have a ‘chimp’ mind, where a ‘dictator within’ and a ‘fixed mindset’ can often sabotage our own best efforts to make our way through the world successfully. They would benefit from the skills to cooperate with others who might be thinking and feeling differently by learning empathy through emotional intelligence. And by teaching grit and resilience we can help them to negotiate as yet unknown challenges in the future.
The problem our schools should be focused on helping our young children to comprehend is how to develop the skills and capabilities within themselves to survive and thrive in a digital world. Our analogue national curriculum with its obsession with the formula for x and other irrelevant content for the lives of most young people fails them in this regard again and again.
Learning to cooperate together as diverse human beings for a better world is not ‘woke nonsense’. It is the most important core curriculum any young person can learn. Everything else, including interdisciplinary subject knowledge made relevant for the real-world and the future uncertainty of the workplace flows from this.
The fact that these things are not considered worth mentioning in a report focused on creating an education system that is fit for the future demonstrates the problem our learning structures create. They narrow the horizons for our young people and, as Ken Robinson once said, they squander human talent ‘pretty ruthlessly’.
The Digital Transformation Gap
The digital revolution has transformed virtually every aspect of our lives, from how we communicate and access information to how we live, work and entertain ourselves.
Yet our education system has failed to embrace this transformation, and it is constantly behind the curve. This analogue system leads to a growing gap between the digital experiences of young people inside and outside of schools.
While many schools have invested in technology, too often this has involved digitising traditional practices rather than fundamentally rethinking how learning happens. Interactive whiteboards may replace chalkboards, but the underlying pedagogical approach remains unchanged.
Now we are using AI to generate curriculum content and materials for teachers, along with automated test and assessments. Yet we complain when young people use the same technology for their answers, without any sense of irony. Psychologists tell us that our children copy us, so of course they use AI.
It is the same paradox when we teach environmental awareness while at the same time advocating for a data-rich AI future that is consuming planetary resources.
In an attempt to gain a foothold in the latest technology for their pupils, schools and universities are increasingly outsourcing this role to companies without fully considering the risks. Because we have an analogue, consumption-based education system, introducing advanced technology such as AI that can easily answer narrow assessment questions for the learner leads to a decline in critical thinking.
Instead of learning to manage the technology on their own terms from a position of confidence, we are educating young people to passively accept the tools within a relationship which is ultimately one sided, in favour of commercial tech companies.
Because the learning model we use is largely one of passive consumption this is replicated when the majority of students use AI.
The rush to get AI and advanced technology into the curriculum of schools and universities is, I think, similar to the overconsumption of food and information. It is a relationship based on the consumption of the knowledge provided by the tool, rather than a carefully managed use of technology by a confident and well-informed human being.
We are now using this technology in the same way as we use sugar and processed foods as a quick fix to get an energy boosting high, or to placate our children when we want to feed them quickly. The results of this approach to technology will be equally damaging in the long term. This is a problem that Adolescence illuminates.
The gap between our analogue education system and the technological change happening today is particularly concerning given the growing importance of digital literacy in the modern workforce. Students who do not develop the skills in school that they need to not only understand technology, but also to ensure it is used for their benefit, will find themselves at a significant disadvantage in their future careers.
Children are born with the skills of creative and critical thinking, innovation, and imagination, but our analogue educations systems that strive for standards that can be easily measured and compared through fixed tests stifle these skills.
And then, perversely, we complain that those who successfully graduate at the end of this education system do not have the human skills that our future society needs, and employers have to spend their dwindling resources re-educating their workforce.
The Human Imperative
Picasso said: ‘every child is born an artist’. We could rephrase this to ‘every child is born a creative and imaginative individual with unique learning interests and strengths’. So where do these skills go?
Very simply — as Ken Robinson and others tell us repeatedly — we educate our children out of these skills — and it is for this precise reason that not all education is intrinsically good. In fact, quite a lot of our education is now intrinsically bad.
There are surely enough examples from the past and present where children have been taught a biased version of knowledge that has distorted the truth about the world.
As the report itself suggests, one of the most pressing challenges facing education today is the persistent inequity in opportunities and outcomes. Despite decades of reform efforts, significant educational and employment disparities remain, based on factors such as socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and geography.
This is one area I agree with the report on. But it fails to grasp a fundamental point:
Disadvantaged and SEND young people are often the individuals most alienated by the system of fixed curriculum and testing that the report itself supports, because it forces them to learn in a way that is contrary to their strengths.
When the author of this response worked with young people who had been expelled from mainstream education, often because of special educational needs, it took little time to reengage them and experience a word that is not in the report — joy.
If you focused on what the young people cared about and wanted to learn outside the straitjacket of mainstream school, curriculum and testing, this allowed the students to design their own approach to learning which drew on their strengths and interests. The result was positive and engaging, not controlling and narrow.
Fixed curriculum and narrow testing are antithetical to this approach and many diverse learners fail to achieve their potential as a result of the core system.
These disparities are evident in everything from access to high-quality early childhood education and well-resourced schools to opportunities for advanced coursework and extracurricular activities. They are also reflected in achievement gaps on standardised tests, graduation rates, enrolment and completion.
The interim report, for example, references the new qualifications designed to encourage technical skills, UK T levels, There is a refusal to acknowledge that such courses fail to do what in many ways BTECs and other courses do very well indeed. This is because they are not seen as ‘academic’ in comparison to ‘A’ Levels and are wrongly perceived as inferior, merely through prejudice.
Addressing these inequities is not just a moral imperative but an economic one as well. In an increasingly skills-based economy, ensuring that all students have access to high-quality, relevant and useful education is essential for individual opportunity and collective prosperity. This will never be achieved through the narrow standardisation of curriculum and testing.
The Wellbeing Crisis
Alongside these structural challenges, there is growing concern about the impact of education on student wellbeing. Rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues among children and young people have been rising in many countries, with academic pressure often cited as a contributing factor.
The intense focus on academic achievement, and narrow definitions of ‘success’ and ‘excellence’, particularly as measured by standardised tests, can create unhealthy levels of stress and competition — necessary to support a model based on national and international league tables — but disastrous for nurturing the individual learner.
There is also significant evidence that culture of judging educational achievement through narrow based testing is paralysing young people with — an essential experience in any genuine learning environment.
This is exacerbated by the increasing pressure to gain admission to selective colleges and universities, which has led to an arms race of advanced coursework, private tutoring, extracurricular activities, and test preparation. At the same time, many schools lack the resources to provide adequate support for students’ social and emotional development. School counsellors are often responsible for hundreds of students, making it difficult to identify and address mental health concerns before they escalate.
We also know from existing research that our increased interactions with the technology are . Certain forms of interaction can disrupt our sleep patterns, our ability to concentrate, impact on our emotional wellbeing and in some respects render us less responsive to the world around us. There are ways to manage these challenges but many of us, and especially young people, are only learning gradually how to negotiate this online world.
One area of analysis that is of particular interest in the relationship between learning, technology and wellbeing is how the opportunity to fail in private ways is diminishing now that almost all aspects of our lives are being lived online. When young people push the kinds of developmental boundaries that have been normal for adolescents of previous generations, the online world and its saturation in their lives means that there is a constant risk of being filmed and repeatedly humiliated. The opportunities to gain experience, develop and move on from mistakes that are subsequently forgotten is diminished.
How many of us adults have not thought about some of the things we did when we were young and not been glad that ubiquitous mobile phones and social media networks were absent for us in those moments. These are pressures that young people have now as a reality in their daily lives and we cannot just carry on with our traditional educational approach without acknowledging this transformation and its impact, as Adolescence shows us.
The author of this paper has had experiences which show this impact. When working as an academic registrar in a university I was required to undertake investigations when students were found to be in breach of the regulations. Before the pandemic, I was involved in cases where students were starting to use social media to make ill-advised comments about their peers and/or their tutors, which had serious implications even leading to expulsion. And during lockdown some students made humorous videos reflecting the pent-up frustrations of young people contained by the limitations of social distancing during their time at university which themselves breached the rules they were mocking.
In any other context in the past, these behaviours would have belonged to a private sphere of ill-judged behaviour in the context of youthful exuberance, and it would have been unlikely they would have become public knowledge let alone be the subject of a university investigation. For my generation we might have said some negative things about our tutors down the pub, perhaps things we didn’t really mean, but this would not have been recorded or written in a chat group and would have been forgotten the next day.
However, in the context of an online world where everything is recorded for posterity, such throwaway immature remarks can now have far more series consequences and cannot be regarded merely as ‘innocent mistakes’ from which the young person can learn.
It was clear when I investigated these activities that the students involved had not given a great deal of thought to the outcomes of their actions. They were fundamentally unprepared for the manner in which these behaviours would be viewed, and the consequences to which they would lead. I felt a great deal of sympathy with the young people, as none of them had malicious intent in their actions. Nevertheless, the existence of the online evidence and the rules which needed to be followed, especially during the pandemic, left me with little room for leniency.
The online world has clearly created new forms of risk, particularly for young people, which has been evidenced in recent cases of tragic suicides from students who have provided compromising photographs of themselves to those they believed to be friends, only to be the subject of blackmail threats. In essence, as the drama Adolescence shows us, the impact of the online world on the lives of young people is becoming a source of increased personal risk and we are not teaching them to manage this.
I believe that this educational crises could become bigger than the climate crisis, the mental health crisis, the obesity crisis, the workplace and demographic crisis and the economic crisis because it is impacting on the core development and learning experience of young people who will need to respond to these other challenges in the future.
If we educated our young people in what really mattered to them, encouraged them to take risks in a safe environment, to learn from their mistakes and develop a mature and confident outlook as a result, they would be able to work cooperatively in focused ways that would equip them with the skills needed to address these other challenges more effectively than the generations that have gone before them.
Conclusion: Reimagining Education for the Future
Despite these challenges, there are reasons for optimism. Around the world, educators, researchers, policymakers, and communities are working to reimagine education for the future. They are developing new approaches that prioritise student agency, engagement, and wellbeing while ensuring that students develop the skills they will need to thrive.
But these are happening despite (and often in direct opposition to) centralised education systems — not because of them, and the UK is at serious risk of being left behind because of the slavish adherence to our analogue curriculum.
These take many forms, from project-based learning and skills competence to creative community schools and personalised learning pathways. What they share is a commitment to moving beyond the old industrial model of education toward student-centred, equitable, and future-focused approaches.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for all its disruption and hardship, has also created an opportunity for reflection and reinvention. As schools and education systems have been forced to adapt to remote and hybrid learning, many have questioned long-standing assumptions and practices. This openness to change could provide a foundation for more fundamental transformation in the years ahead.
But by nailing its colours firmly in support of a fixed national curriculum, standardised testing and the nebulous phrase ‘academic excellence’, the interim report is taking our education firmly in the wrong direction — away from these innovative possibilities.
It is clear that incremental reforms and a slow evolution of current systems is not sufficient to address the many challenges we face. We need a fundamental reimagining of education — its purposes, structures, practices, and relationships.
This reimagining must be guided by a clear vision of what education can and should be: a process that empowers all students to develop their full potential, contribute to their communities, and shape a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world.
Realising this vision will require the collective efforts of all who have a stake in education — students, families, educators, policymakers, researchers, employers, innovators, artists, artisans, changemakers and communities.
Important ideas such as Emotional Intelligence, Empathy, a Growth Mindset, Integrity, Grit, Acceptance, Entrepreneurship, Creative Innovation, Design Thinking and Wellbeing are some of the concepts that are central to the lifetime experience of individuals as distinct from the traditional measures of school test results which have a limited shelf life.
Yet these life-defining skills have little or no place in the core UK school curriculum and even less status within outdated notions of ‘quality’ and ‘standards’.
It should be no surprise to us that the educational experts forming the panel of the current interim (and ultimately the final) review of the UK education system, acting as they do with the best intentions informed by their experience of the world as it was, should broadly support the existing structure of the current education system in line with the government. But we all know where the best intentions end up taking us.
From such groups there is rarely, if ever, a willingness to question deeply held assumptions, (particularly about the ‘intrinsic value of education’), take risks, or learn from failure. Such groups always have a lot invested in not changing the current approach too much.
This should not surprise us. To be expert in something means having a lot of insight, but also not wanting to change the thing you know too much, due to fear of the unknown.
Because otherwise how do you remain a valued expert if the thing you understand is fundamentally altered by your proposals?
To create an education system that is really fit for the future requires more voices than the carefully selected individuals of an interim government report who are chosen precisely because they will not rock the boat of policy too much.
The future for our young people depends on our ability to reimagine the landscape of learning to meet the undeniable challenges and opportunities that face us both now and in the future.
