What does education need next?

A contribution to the SSAT's 'Beyond manifestos'—a collection of reflections on the priorities for the English education system in the run-up to the 2024 election

The passing of the Education Reform Act in 1988 marked a significant change in education policy in England. Up until that point, providing education to pupils of compulsory school age (and further education) had been mainly regarded as a matter for local authorities—a principle that was formally laid down in the 1944 Education Act. Between 1944 and 1988, additional national legislation made provisions regarding the education of pupils with special educational needs, and school governance, but in the main, central government was seen as having only a minor role.

The 35 years since 1988 have seen a bewildering range of national initiatives regarding what pupils should learn, how they should be assessed, how schools should be governed, organized, run, and inspected, and how teachers should be trained. And while there have been some notable successes, such as the teaching of reading in primary schools, the overall picture is of a system where improvements in some areas are offset by stagnation and setbacks elsewhere. The performance of 11-year-olds on national tests has improved, but their performance as measured by other assessments has been flat. The proportion of secondary school pupils gaining good grades at GCSE has gone up, but the performance of pupils in England on international tests such as those administered by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is below where it was when PISA was first introduced in 2000. Most worryingly, the most recent PISA results (from 2018) show that approximately 20% of 15-year-olds lack the level of competence in reading and mathematics required to participate effectively in society—about the same as it was in 2006.

There are, of course, many reasons why the policies of successive governments have failed to have much of an impact on pupil achievement, but it seems to me that the over-riding issue is a failure to understand the idea that any change in how we educate young people will almost certainly involve trade-offs; some things will be better, and some things will be worse.

Those who propose ways of improving education are usually very clear about what will be better if the changes they are proposing are made, but they are usually silent about what will be worse. Sometimes this is because they naively assume that there will be no trade-offs, and sometimes it is because they are aware that there may be trade-offs but believe that acknowledging their existence will somehow weaken the argument for change.

The result of this failure to consider trade-offs is generally a series of what are sometimes called “unintended consequences”. In some, rare, cases, these are consequences that were genuinely impossible to foresee, but much more often they are simply a result of the failure to ask the simple question, “And then what?”

A good example is the decision to publish in school “league tables” the proportion of students reaching a particular threshold of achievement, such as five good GCSE grades including English and mathematics. In many schools, this resulted in a focus on year 11 students who were likely to achieve results falling just below the threshold, with those clearly above, and those falling too far short, given less attention.

Another example concerns the suspension of students. There is little doubt that suspending a pupil from school often has a serious impact on that pupil’s education, and as a result, many have advocated an end to all suspensions. Not suspending a pupil is almost certainly better for the pupil than suspension, but we also have to consider the trade-off — the impact of that pupil’s continued presence on the education of the other pupils in the class. This does not mean that pupils should, or should not be suspended, but rather that the presence of disruptive pupils creates a situation in which there is no good outcome. What we can do is acknowledge that something will be worse no matter what we do, and weigh the positives and the negatives of different courses of action.

One particularly powerful tool for thinking about trade-offs in education is to decide what we would do if the earth’s rotation on its axis slowed down so that there were one more hour in the day. We then consider what we would do less of if the earth’s rotation speeded up, and there were now only 23 hours in each day. If this is not the same as we would do with one more hour, there is nothing to stop us from making the switch now. For example, if someone with one more hour in the day would spend more time with their family, and would, with one less hour, spend less time at work, there is nothing to stop that person from taking that hour from work, and giving it to their family immediately. The same idea can be used for curriculum prioritization. If, in a secondary school, a subject is allocated an extra 20 minutes each week, what would be added? If time available was cut by 20 minutes, what would be taken away? If these things aren’t the same, the change can be made immediately.

So, what does education need next? Quite simply an agreement that any time a change is proposed, the proposer should answer two questions:

1. What will be better if the changes are made?

2. What will be worse if the changes are made?

Any proposals for which the answer to the second question is “nothing” should immediately be rejected as unserious. There will always be trade-offs. We can’t avoid that. What we can do is make sure that the trade-offs are the result of careful planning and discussion so that the consequences are anticipated, and intended.

The full collection of essays is available here: Beyond Manifestos