The charge is by now familiar: GCSE English is too white, too male, and too dependent on a small canon of overused texts. Most GCSE English literature students still study the same few books: roughly three in four read Macbeth, more than four in five read An Inspector Calls, and A Christmas Carol remains one of the most widely taught nineteenth-century texts with about three quarters of students studying it.1 If teachers really cared about diversity, we are told, they would stop falling back on the usual titles and start teaching books that better reflect contemporary Britain.

At first glance, this seems hard to resist. Rachel Fenn of End Sexism in Schools has argued that optional attempts to diversify exam board text lists have changed very little because teachers keep choosing the same books year after year. If the menu expands but departments continue ordering the same meal, then the curriculum remains much as it was. And if only a tiny proportion of students study a whole text by a female author, and fewer still one by an author of colour, then clearly something is going on.2

But almost as soon as the argument is made, it starts to become incoherent. The mistake is to assume that a curriculum should be judged by how well it mirrors population level demographics. A curriculum is not a census or a diversity audit. Nor is it a display cabinet in which schools arrange texts to advertise their culture-war credentials. If the curriculum is a window rather than a mirror, its purpose is not to reflect the world back to children in a comforting likeness of themselves, but to induct them into forms of knowledge, culture and thought they would be unlikely to encounter otherwise.

When deciding which texts should be studied, the question is not whether a work improves representation, but whether it is worth teaching: whether it has literary merit, cultural significance, interpretative richness, and the power to enlarge students’ understanding.

It’s much easier to demand representation than to argue for significance. Easier to say a text belongs on the curriculum because of who wrote it than because it is so powerful, so illuminating, so influential that students would be intellectually poorer without it. But that is the standard that matters. If a work is to be added, the case for its inclusion should be made on its merits. If it’s to displace something already there, then the case must be stronger still.

This is not an argument for preserving the canon in formaldehyde. The canon should not sacred. Any serious culture argues about what should be handed on, and schools should too. It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether some writers have been neglected for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their work. It’s perfectly reasonable to challenge stale habits and inherited laziness. But if the curriculum is to broaden, it must broaden for intellectually serious reasons. And some texts matter in ways that are very hard to replace.

Shakespeare is not just another writer on a long list of possible options. His work is woven into the language, but the influence of the King James Bible may be deeper still. Its rhythms, cadences, imagery and phrasing have shaped English prose for centuries. Alongside the Book of Common Prayer, Homer, Beowulf, Chaucer, Milton, Dickens, Eliot, Austen and key political texts such as Magna Carta, Hobbes and Adam Smith, it forms part of the foundation on which so much later literature, public rhetoric and cultural reference depends. Without these works, much of what comes after becomes harder to understand. Remove them and children’s inheritance is diminished.

Observant readers may note that very few of these works are now routinely taught in schools. If we really believe the curriculum should introduce children to the best that has been thought and said, then where is Homer? Where is Sophocles? Where is Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy? Where are the Upanishads, the Analects, The Tale of Genji, the Arabian Nights? The difficulty is not merely that the canon is too narrow, but that our actual curriculum is narrower still.

In practice, texts are rarely selected for the curriculum solely because they represent the highest achievements of human thought and art. More often, they are chosen because they are manageable: short enough to teach in the available time, accessible enough for large numbers of students to grasp, and familiar enough to support predictable exam performance. That goes some way to explaining the dominance of Macbeth, An Inspector Calls and A Christmas Carol. All three are relatively brief, heavily resourced, and well adapted to the practical constraints of the system. And, of course, individual teachers rarely get to choose which texts they would most like to teach. These decisions are usually made at school or trust level, where considerations of consistency, resourcing and results tend to matter more than literary ambition. Their popularity reflects institutional convenience.

You may admire J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, or you may not. That is beside the point. Set before the First World War and first staged in the aftermath of the Second, it is a perfectly serviceable play, and in some respects more than that. But no one seriously believes it stands among the very highest achievements of human thought and art. Its place on the curriculum owes less to indisputable greatness than to a more practical combination of virtues: it is good enough, short enough, and well enough resourced to fit the demands of a system in which schools are held to account for students’ exam performance.

This is the point both sides of the argument tend to miss. Progressives are often reluctant to admit that not all texts are of equal significance. Some works have exercised greater influence, achieved more, shaped more, and so make a stronger claim on our attention. A serious curriculum cannot avoid such distinctions. But conservatives are prone to an equal and opposite error. They treat the existing curriculum as though it were simply the natural expression of merit, when in reality it is also the product of habit, convenience and institutional constraint. Texts survive not only because they are good, but because they are known, resourced and safe.

So what would it take to displace Priestly from the curriculum? What texts could conceivably compete and still satisfy demands for greater diversity? There are plausible options already offered by each exam board but vanishingly few schools take them up. To encourage them to do so, An Inspector Calls would need to be removed from specifications. Here are some options which, when compared against AIC, might look tempting.

If exam boards and publishers put work into making these texts affordable and well resourced and AIC was dumped from the syllabus, it’s hard to see that students would be worse off in terms of cultural richness. My personal pick would be Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden. I’ve used it before in Year 9 and it’s cracking fun and provides a splendid launchpad into Chaucer.

We’re all in favour of high standards, but standards of what? A text is not rigorous merely because it is old, nor lacking in rigour because it is modern. A school is not ambitious merely because it teaches familiar canonical works. Sometimes what passes for rigour is simply the comfort of the already known. Teachers know the familiar texts. They know the contexts, the critical commonplaces, the likely questions, the revision materials, the tried and trusted routines for turning reading into examinable prose. The path has been worn smooth. To teach a less familiar but equally worthwhile work well might demand more scholarship, more preparation and more confidence. It may be harder for the institution even if it is no easier for the child.

That is why so much talk of standards rings hollow. It confuses familiarity with seriousness. Schools should be ambitious and challenge does matters but this does not settle the curriculum question in advance. I for one cannot imagine a reality in which anyone can serious argue that Zadie Smith’s work is less rigorous than Priestley’s. .

So where does this leave us? With a harder argument than the one usually offered. Yes, the curriculum may be too narrow. Yes, schools may rely too heavily on a small group of overfamiliar texts. Yes, there may be writers and traditions that deserve much more serious consideration than they currently receive. But the answer isn’t to make representation the governing principle of selection. The real question is not whether the curriculum looks diverse enough. It is whether it is good enough.

That demands judgement. It demands criticism. It demands a willingness to say that some texts matter more than others, while also recognising that some of what we currently teach survives through custom rather than merit. A curriculum should not be designed to advertise virtue. It should be designed to expand inheritance.

It’s not possible for all children to see themselves reflected everywhere. To make this an entitlement is to reduce the curriculum to a checklist. They are, however, entitled to be taken beyond themselves, to experience worlds and ideas they might never otherwise encounter. Believeing the curriculum should be a mirror may only reflect our own preferences and prejudices. A truly liberating curriculum is a window into a wide world.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’

GK Chesterton, The Thing

Of course, Chesterton’s point isn’t really about fences. It’s about institutions, habits, customs, traditions whose purpose may not be obvious to the impatient eye. The fact that we don’t understand a thing is not evidence that it serves no function. Often it’s evidence only of our own shallowness. Before removing a barrier, one should first understand what danger it marks, what path it protects, what kind of passage it makes possible.

A school library is such a fence. Or is it?

In “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost notes, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Walls - or fences - do not merely stand in place. They have to be mended, justified, rebuilt. And before rebuilding them, Frost’s speaker wants to know what he is “walling in or walling out.” The poem’s famous closing line, “Good fences make good neighbours,” has the ring of inherited wisdom, but Frost is alert to the deadening effect of repeating such maxims without thought. While Chesterton warns against tearing down what we do not understand, Frost warns against preserving what we’ve left unexamined.

So, should a school library be a wall built to keep reality out, or a threshold, a place where difficult ideas can be encountered in forms that are mediated and intelligible? The question is not whether boundaries should exist - any civilised institution depends on them - the question is who draws them, and whether those doing the drawing know what they are walling in or walling out.

According to reports from LBC, senior staff at at a school in Greater Manchester used AI to earmark around 200 books for removal from the school library. Among the titles said to have been targeted were 1984, Twilight, Michelle Obama’s Becoming and other books that would once have seemed perfectly ordinary features of a secondary collection. The librarian objected and refused to remove some of the titles. She was then investigated on safeguarding grounds and later resigned.

The trouble apparently began when the headteacher took issue with Laura Bates’s Men Who Hate Women, a work of nonfiction in which Bates goes undercover to expose misogynist networks and incel culture. The librarian had placed it in a “Life 101” section for older students after training on incel culture. Yet this seems to have been treated as a safeguarding problem. The objection, in substance, was that the book exposed readers to misogynistic beliefs. Instead of ‘going away and thinking’ moves were made to immediately demolish the fence.

Without claiming to know the full complexities of this particular case, it is more useful to treat the story as a parable. A library doesn’t protect the young by pretending such beliefs do not exist. Instead, it stands between the child and the vast disorder of culture and says: begin here. Here are books that may enlarge you; here are stories, arguments and ideas that will stretch your sympathies, refine your judgement, and unsettle your certainties. A library doesn’t just house books, it organises ideas and offers readers a way into a world it would be impossible to navigate unaided.

In the end, this is less a story about AI making foolish mistakes - machines make foolish mistakes as a matter of course - what matters is that school leaders appear to have used a chatbot because it relieved them of the responsibility of judgement. No one had to say: I’ve read this, considered its purpose, weighed its risks, and decided it does not belong here. Instead, software could classify, categorise and produce a plausible sounding rationale. Whilst we can hope that a human would be unlikely to decided that children should be protected from books by Michelle Obama or George Orwell, it’s wrong to say AI censored those books. AI did not censor anything. AI was used so that school leaders wouldn’t have to speak plainly about what they were doing.

Schools are now thick with devices for evading responsibility while preserving the appearance of control. Rubrics stand in for discernment. dashboards mimic understanding, safeguarding language stretches until it can contain almost any anxiety. AI slips easily into this world because it offers what institutions increasingly crave: not wisdom, but cover.

To judge is to expose oneself. It is to say, this has worth but that does not. Those judgements may be disputed - they may even be wrong - but the answer to that difficulty should not be to pretend that judgement has been replaced by process.

Literature and serious nonfiction allow the young to encounter cruelty, grief, prejudice, desire, fanaticism and moral confusion at a distance that makes reflection possible. Reading does not merely shelter innocence. It tutors it out of innocence into understanding.

Seen in this light, the decision to remove Men Who Hate Women is instructive. The book is not an advertisement for misogyny but an account of it. To object to it because it contains misogynistic beliefs is to confuse exposition with endorsement, diagnosis with infection. Perhaps the headteacher’s concern was that the book might prove off-putting to boys, or cast them under a general suspicion. If so, that too would need thinking through rather than reacting to. What, we should always ask, are we walling in or walling out? If a school excludes books that explain the world’s ugliness, what remains inside the wall is not safety but ignorance.

The same irony clings to the reported removal of 1984. Orwell suffers from over-exposure, but here the symbolism is hard to miss. A bureaucracy leans on a machine to classify literature according to acceptable content, then insists nothing improper has occurred because the exercise was merely an audit.

If the reporting is accurate, a librarian, a person whose job is precisely to exercise informed judgement about books and readers, became the problem when she resisted. If we see librarians as obstacles to safeguarding we’re in trouble. A good librarian mediates risk and makes safeguarding more intelligent.

Of course schools must curate. Not every book belongs in every setting. Age, context and selection all matter. But this only strengthen the case for human judgement. The more delicate the judgement, the less suitable it is for automation.

Chesterton reminds us not to tear down the fence before we understand its function; Frost reminds us not to rebuild reflexively. Both perspectives invite better thinking We should always be willing to ask, What is this barrier for? What freedom does it protect? What dangers does it protect us from? What does it lallow in and what does it exclude?

A school library, at its best, is a disciplined opening into reality. It should never seek to keep the world out but to arranges it ways that children can make sense out of. If that purpose is lost, books become safeguarding risks, libraries become compliance zones, students become liabilities. and school leaders become custodians of procedures they no longer believe in enough to defend.

The saddest thing about this episode isn’t that AI botched the task, it’s that it was given the task at all. If we want the authority of judgement without the burden of having to judge we shouldn’t be surprised when institutions recede into timidity, evasion and absurdity. Schools cannot educate by outsourcing discernment. Someone, in the end, has to be willing to read, to think, to decide, and to stand behind decisions.

AI can sort, classify and deliver its decisions in fluent prose. What it can’t do is understand why the fence is there and the risks of destroying it.

If you prefer, you can listen to us here.

If you work in education for any length of time you develop a reflex flinch whenever someone announces they have found the ‘best schools.’ That phrase usually signals one of two things. Either a lazy league table based on raw grades, designed for anxious parents. Or a glossy case study collection that quietly airbrushes away context, attrition and luck.

The latest work from the We Are In Beta Community is not that. As such things go, it’s much more serious and honest, which is precisely why it ought to make us more cautious about the word “best,” not less.

For the past few years they have scoured the data in order to locate schools where disadvantaged pupils do unusually well at GCSE. This matters because the national picture is grim. Disadvantaged pupils record an average Attainment 8 score in the mid-thirties, while their peers sit closer to the mid-forties, which means the typical disadvantaged child leaves school roughly a grade behind in every subject. Progress 8 has never closed the gap either. In most regions the figure for disadvantaged pupils sits well below zero and has done so since the measure was introduced.

To make sense of this you need to know what counts as ‘disadvantage.’ The term refers to students who have been eligible for free school meals in the past six years, those who are looked after by the local authority and those who have recently left care. It includes children whose lives are shaped by financial strain, unstable housing, caring responsibilities or the long shadow of early trauma. They do not form a neat group, but they tend to face obstacles that make the work of learning harder.

Schools that serve largely advantaged cohorts often look successful for reasons that have little to do with what actually happens inside the building. These students arrive with extensive vocabularies, steady routines, well-informed parents, regular middle-class dinner table conversations, reliable access to books and technology, funds to hire tutors to make up for their school’s deficits and the quiet confidence that comes from a lifetime of enrichment. They move through the system with a safety net woven from family resources, cultural capital and the expectation that education will work for them.

Disadvantaged students do not have that protective web. Their success depends far more heavily on what the school provides. If they achieve strong results it is rarely because of the conditions outside the gates. It is because the school has created the structures, relationships and habits that allow them to thrive in spite of everything else they face. Which is why schools that secure excellent outcomes for their disadvantaged cohorts are almost certainly doing many things right. They are overcoming the gravity that pulls so many similar students away from success, and that deserves careful attention rather than easy celebration.

In previous years WAIB have been able to use Progress 8 for disadvantaged pupils, with a very high threshold of plus 0.5, as their guiding light. This has allowed them to identify the schools where disadvantaged pupils are not just doing well but doing significantly better than similar pupils elsewhere. This year, though, the landscape has shifted. The Class of 2025 never sat KS2 SATs, which means the baseline that gives Progress 8 its meaning has disappeared. Covid removed the foundation on which every national progress measure depends. Most commentators have simply shrugged and waited for the next cohort to restore the familiar metrics. This meant that WAIB had to work round the problem and search for another way of finding the schools where disadvantaged pupils have beaten the odds.

In Part 1 they construct a “contextual attainment factor” that estimates what the KS2 profile of a school’s 2025 cohort might have been, based on recent intake patterns. They then compare the Attainment 8 scores of disadvantaged pupils with this estimated baseline and pick out the top five per cent. Seventy five schools emerge, disproportionately from the London boroughs Newham, Tower Hamlets, Ealing, Southwark and Westminster, with disadvantaged Attainment 8 scores that sit significantly above what a similar school might typically manage.

In Part 2 they take a different approach. Here the interest lies in improvement rather than absolute attainment. They identify one hundred and two schools where the Attainment 8 of disadvantaged pupils has risen in both 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025, and not by trivial amounts either. On average these schools have added the equivalent of nearly half a grade per subject for disadvantaged pupils, two years in a row, against a national backdrop of slight decline. A smaller group have added the equivalent of a full grade or more per subject over that period.

Taken together, these analyses are far more thoughtful than anything a league table can offer. They keep their focus on disadvantaged pupils rather than headline averages and they are frank about the limits of the data, the thresholds applied and the likelihood of false negatives. The candour is refreshing. For that alone, school leaders would profit by visiting the We Are In Beta site, reading the full pieces and spend time with the data sets and case studies that sit behind them.

Yet once you have done that, an awkward question lingers. What exactly do we think “best” means here?

At one level the answer seems obvious. If you care about social justice, then strong attainment for disadvantaged students is an important part of the story. These are the students who have least margin for error. They are also the ones for whom qualifications tend to make the greatest difference to life chances. It is entirely right to ask which schools do particularly well for them, and to study what those schools do.

The risk comes if metrics start to colonise meaning. Attainment 8, even when adjusted for context, is still a narrow way of thinking about what schools are for. It captures exam performance and rewards entry to a range of subjects, especially when schools play the Attainment 8 ‘bucket’ game cleverly. It can hint at curriculum ambition but beyond that, its grasp weakens.

Consider all the things a good school might do for a disadvantaged child that scarcely appear in this kind of data. A school might maintain a rich arts or technical curriculum that gives a teenager a sense of competence and identity, even if it means limiting total entries to eight subjects rather than padding the timetable with marginal qualifications. Another might prioritise mental health support, steady relationships with social care and a careful post-16 transition. Work like this can keep a young person engaged who might otherwise fall into NEET status, yet its signal in the attainment data may be little more than a faint ripple long before the crisis point arrives.

Some schools make ethical choices that national metrics barely notice. A school that avoids entering borderline pupils for qualifications selected more for points than for purpose, may depress its Attainment 8 profile slightly. A school that keeps a high proportion of students with significant SEND in mainstream lessons may appear weaker on paper than a neighbour that trims its cohort. Yet these decisions can be the ones that matter most for the young people concerned. Which of these deserves to be called the better school for disadvantaged children is not something Attainment 8 can answer.

Destinations are an obvious missing piece. It would be fascinating to cross-reference the We Are In Beta lists with the future destinations of these cohorts. How many pupils go on to sustained post-16 education or training? What proportion progress to A levels that keep doors open, compared with narrow combinations that look impressive but lead nowhere? How many secure apprenticeships that match their interests and talents? How many drift between short courses and low-paid work? A school whose disadvantaged students average a grade higher at GCSE but then cluster in fragile or low-level destinations might deserve a different kind of scrutiny from a school whose grades are modest but whose students land and stick in demanding post-16 routes.

Then there is pastoral care; the lived experience of being a vulnerable child as part of a school community. Does someone notice when you start arriving late and quieter than usual? When you struggle, do adults take the time to understand what sits beneath the visible behaviour, or does the system respond only to what it can see on the surface? Are families treated as partners or problems? What happens when you are bereaved, or when a parent is arrested, or when your housing becomes unstable? None of these questions can be answered by Attainment 8, however contextual.

You can see We Are In Beta straining towards this complexity in the way they frame their findings. They acknowledge that their work can only ever offer hints of “brilliant practice” and that hundreds of schools will sit just outside their parameters, or achieve quiet miracles that grades simply do not capture. They repeatedly invite readers to look underneath the numbers, to the stories and strategies in individual schools. They never claim that a place on the list makes a school a paragon in every respect.

However, it is very tempting for policy makers and commentators to ignore these caveats and treat the seventy five and the one hundred and two as trophies. Here, they will say, are the proof schools that show what is possible. Everyone else should copy them. This line of thought can turn very sour, very quickly. It takes a descriptive statistical outlier and reimagines it as a moral rebuke. If they can do it, why can’t you. That story usually forgets to mention that some of these schools are in trusts with deep central capacity, or in boroughs with unusually dense networks of support, or with staffing stability that other areas would kill for.

None of this invalidates We Are In Beta’s work. In fact it makes it more important. Good research should prompt better questions rather than provide final answers. Here are some that feel worth asking.

If you lead a school that appears in the contextual attainment list, can you show that your disadvantaged students also do well in their next steps? Do they take and complete ambitious post-16 routes, or do the grades represent achievement without understanding? Can you demonstrate that your pastoral systems are robust enough that success is not being bought at the cost of quiet casualties?

If you lead a school that appears in the strong improvement list, do you know which specific actions have driven those gains? Was it a curriculum rethink, a behaviour reset, a new approach to attendance, a shift in KS3 provision, something else entirely? And how do you know? It is, after all, very difficult to be sure what actions contain ‘active ingredients and which are simply ‘minty freshness’ or other distracting superficialities. Are you confident that these changes are sustainable, or have you extracted a burst of performance by squeezing staff harder than is healthy?

If you lead a school that does not appear anywhere, are there aspects of your work with disadvantaged pupils that you would still gladly put in front of the country as examples to follow? Maybe you’re proud of your careful transition support, your thoughtful work with looked after children, your intelligent adaptations that allow pupils with significant SEND to sit in demanding classrooms instead of being parked in interventions? None of these show up neatly in an Attainment 8 spreadsheet, yet they are precisely the things that define who we actually are when no one is ranking us.

The value of the We Are In Beta analysis lies in the fact that they take the outcomes of disadvantaged pupils seriously, and do so with more methodological care than most. They offer school and trust leaders a coherent starting point for learning from others. They are also, if read with the right kind of suspicion, a reminder that the phrase “best schools” is empty until we ask, best at what, best for whom, and at what cost.

If you want the detail, go to the We Are In Beta site and read Schools with sustained improvement in attainment 8 for disadvantaged students in 2025 and Year on year disadvantaged attainment: what did we notice about 102 schools who keep getting better each year? Explore the lists. Watch the sessions with leaders. Then look back at your own context and decide which lessons actually travel. The metrics can point you towards interesting places but only you can decide what “best” needs to mean.

You can also listen to the podcast here.

The Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Becky Francis, is the most ambitious attempt to rethink England’s education system since Gove’s 2014 overhaul. It promises, with characteristic Whitehall solemnity, a “world-class curriculum for all.” But beneath the elegant phrasing lies a familiar battle: knowledge versus skills, rigour versus relevance, freedom versus control.

The document brings to mind that famous Punch cartoon of the curate’s egg: “Parts of it are excellent.” Like the hapless curate, we are invited to be grateful for partial goodness while politely ignoring the rest. Some sections - particularly the renewed emphasis on disciplinary clarity and the cautious dismantling of the EBacc - are genuinely encouraging. Others are so hedged with qualifications, committee-think, and caveats that their promise dissolves into ambiguity. The result, like the curate’s breakfast, is a mixture of the wholesome and the rotten: good in parts, but maybe not digestible as a whole.

The review claims to offer “evolution not revolution.” In truth, it reads like a negotiated peace treaty between warring tribes, with each allowed to declare victory while, perhaps, nothing fundamental changes. The aim of “build[ing] a world-class curriculum for all” is lofty, laudable, and depressingly familiar. We’ve heard variations of that phrase in every major reform since Kenneth Baker’s 1988 National Curriculum. Each time, the rhetoric of excellence conceals the same underlying problem: no-one agrees what “world-class” means, let alone how to measure it.

The review’s headline promises read like a greatest-hits compilation of contemporary virtue. A “digital national curriculum” to ensure resources are free and accessible. “Stronger diversity and representation” in all subjects. A new National Oracy Framework to complement reading and writing. “Greater teacher involvement” in shaping the programmes of study. Even “sustainability” makes an appearance. On paper, who - aside from the Daily Mail - could object? Yet as ever, the difficulty lies not in the principles but the practice.

Take the proposal to embed diversity across all subjects. The sentiment is unimpeachable, but the mechanism is vague. Without clear exemplars and rigorous criteria, “diversity” risks becoming another checklist of representation rather than a genuine enrichment of curriculum knowledge. The same goes for oracy. The review’s language nods toward citizenship, inclusion and wellbeing but offers little to prevent yet another round of laminated frameworks and hollow talk about “talk”.

The idea of a digital national curriculum - freely available online - sounds revolutionary, but will it just mean schools are expecting to bear the cost of printing everything they need? Unless the materials are intellectually coherent and expertly sequenced, we’ll simply have a better-branded version of Oak National Academy: open access to mediocrity.

“Professional autonomy within entitlement” may be the review’s most poetic phrase, and also potentially its most meaningless. It reads as if it were written by a committee desperate to sound generous without actually relinquishing control.

The report describes the national curriculum as an entitlement — a shared baseline of knowledge and skills to which every young person should have access, “irrespective of background.” Within that entitlement, teachers are told they should retain “professional autonomy” to “exercise their judgement and innovate,” ensuring learning is “locally relevant” and “brought to life in the classroom.” The review is at pains to insist that “greater specificity should not mean greater volume of content” and must not “substantially restrict teachers’ flexibility to choose lesson content and how to teach it.” Teachers are even described as “curriculum makers,” responsible for “interpreting and transforming the content” of the national curriculum into meaningful classroom experience.

It all sounds admirably empowering. But this language of freedom is hedged about with so many qualifications that it feels less like trust and more like supervised independence. The curriculum, the report warns, should be “a baseline, not a limit,” yet must also be “teachable within the time available.” These careful caveats give the game away. A baseline can only remain a baseline if someone decides where it ends. Every attempt to define it more clearly tightens the leash a little further.

The same cautious logic runs through the review’s treatment of assessment. GCSEs, we’re told, have become too bloated, too time-consuming, too burdensome. England’s teenagers sit more hours of high-stakes exams than almost any of their peers elsewhere in the developed world. The review suggests a “slimming down” of subject content and assessment volume: not to dilute rigour, but to restore proportionality. On the face of it, that sounds sensible. But unless “slimming down” means a genuine reduction in the number and scale of GCSE papers, not merely another reallocation of marks or rebranding of specifications, nothing much willl change.

The same ambivalence haunts Progress 8. The review recommends retaining its basic structure while renaming the EBacc buckets under the friendlier heading of “Academic Breadth.” Ministers, however, appear less restrained. In an almost immediate response, the Department for Education rejected the review’s advice, announcing instead a “sweeping reform” of Progress 8; altering the subject groupings to boost participation in the arts and technical disciplines. On one level, that sounds welcome: the arts deserve breathing room after a decade of marginalisation. Yet in practice, the risk is that we exchange one distorting metric for another.

Progress 8 was designed to measure the value a school adds, but over time it has become a proxy for institutional worth, a single composite score that flattens everything it touches. Re-engineering the buckets without questioning the principle leaves the same logic intact: what matters is what can be counted. Schools will still face the same perverse incentives to steer pupils toward combinations that maximise points rather than meaning. The appearance of breadth will mask the persistence of narrowness.

By rejecting the review’s call for stability, the DfE has signalled its preference for gesture over substance. The danger is not just administrative turbulence - new data systems, revised performance tables, frantic curriculum rejigging - but a deepening cynicism in the profession. In practice, the DfE’s proposed new Progress 8 model risks reproducing the very distortions it claims to fix. Schools will inevitably adjust subject offerings to maximise eligible qualifications, prioritising what counts over what matters. “Breadth” may become an accounting category rather than an educational principle, narrowing genuine intellectual variety. Teachers could find themselves spending more time navigating performance mechanics than refining curriculum or honing their craft, while pupils in disadvantaged schools remain structurally penalised by intake effects the model fails to correct. The likely outcome is superficial reform — new buckets, new lists, the same underlying incentives — leaving curriculum substance and professional agency much as before.

The review quietly euthanises the EBacc. Officially, it recommends renaming the EBacc “Academic Breadth” and removing it as a headline accountability measure. As the DfE have already accepted this recommendation, this means it’s dead, though not yet buried. The move will delight arts advocates, who have long argued that the EBacc has narrowed the curriculum. But its replacement may preserve the illusion of breadth while continuing to judge schools by the same proxy metrics.

Having symbolically freed schools from one narrowing framework, the review immediately builds another. Under the banner of “future readiness,” it extends the curriculum’s reach into digital literacy, sustainability and moral education. Here the tone shifts from curricular coherence to cultural engineering. The review reads less like an educational blueprint and more like a manifesto for “21st-century schooling,” weaving terms such as “AI-readiness,” “citizenship from Year 1,” and “universal virtue” throughout, as if education could be programmed to produce the morally and digitally optimal child. The interim report states that “the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and trends in digital information demand heightened media literacy and critical thinking skills, as well as digital skills.”

For example, the government’s press release responding to the review declares that primary pupils will learn “how to spot fake news and identify misinformation and disinformation”, and that there will be exploration of “a new qualification in data science and AI for 16–18 year-olds”.

The ambition is admirable: yes, we do live in a world of generative AI, global instability and environmental urgency, and yes, schooling should prepare young people for that world. But here lies the tension. If children are being prepared not just for citizenship but for optimised virtue, for being adaptive algorithms of virtue, then the education system becomes less about forming citizens and more about manufacturing compliance.

When the review suggests that examinations are “the fairest way to mitigate risks posed by generative AI” then we enter distinctly bureaucratic territory: an exam system cast as the defence mechanism for a machine-mediated future. The line itself may only a bureaucrat could write yet it reveals a deeper anxiety. The policy - maybe reasonably - appears to assume that young people must be shielded from AI’s risks via standardisation and control.

In short, while this section of the review promises relevance and modernity, it also raises serious questions about purpose, agency and pedagogy. Will schools become sites of critical empowerment or of adaptive conformity? The language of digital literacy and moral duty may simply mask yet another wave of instrumental schooling.

The real problem

The 2025 Review is not wrongheaded; it’s just weary. It inherits every unresolved tension of the past thirty years and repackages them as “balance.” Its approach - “evolution not revolution” - mistakes compromise for wisdom. Evolution, after all, is ruthless: what survives is what works, not what pleases everyone.

And this review really has tried to please everyone. The result risks bringing into being a curriculum that promises coherence but delivers clutter, a policy that praises teachers but doesn’t trust them, a system that claims to serve children while serving its own stability.

We’re ofered everything and nothing: an elegant list of aspirations with only the faintest outline of how they might be realised. A little bit of powerful knowledge, a dash of formative assessment, a sprinkle of oracy and AI, and a generous helping of moral confidence. The result feels less like a settled strategy than an open invitation; an opportunity, perhaps, for teachers to reclaim some of the professional space that has been slowly eroded over decades of prescription. If, this time, the rhetoric of trust is matched by genuine freedom to interpret and shape the curriculum, then this review might yet mark not another revolution, but the start of a slow restoration.

On to some of the details that we’re most interested in: English, drama and oracy…

What is English for anyway?

The review opens with a question so deceptively simple it verges on philosophical: what is English for? Its call for a “clearer purpose” and a firmer distinction between English and literacy is, on the face of it, precisely what the subject needs. For too long, Key Stage 3 has functioned as a holding pen for GCSE preparation, a “GCSE-in-waiting” curriculum of extract analysis, transactional writing, and recycled exam rubrics. The promise to restore disciplinary coherence, to make English once again about literature, language, and expression, could mark a genuine turning point.

Yet the devil, as always, is in the detail. “Clarity and specificity” sound like virtues, but in education they have a habit of hardening into prescription. The question is whether this new clarity will liberate teachers to design richer curricula, or simply codify the narrow, exam-shaped orthodoxy we already have. English cannot rediscover its intellectual vitality if every interpretive choice must be justified against an external framework of entitlement.

The review’s proposals for English Language strike a similarly uneasy balance. It calls for the qualification to be refocused on “the nature and expression of language,” taking in “multi-modal and ephemeral texts.” In principle, this could allow students to study language as a living system, how it changes, persuades, and constructs meaning across forms. But the phrasing is worryingly vague. “Multi-modal and ephemeral” sounds less like a disciplinary reawakening than a bureaucratic euphemism for analysis of TikToks. We have been here before: the late-1990s enthusiasm for media texts and real-world communication promised relevance but delivered banality. If English Language is to recover academic seriousness, it must reconnect with linguistics - the analytical study of language - not dissolve into a survey of passing trends.

On the question of texts, the review treads a cautious, almost managerial line: keep Shakespeare, the nineteenth-century novel, and poetry, but supplement them with “more diverse and representative” works. The impulse is admirable, but without a coherent rationale or shared sense of standards, diversity risks degenerating into arbitrariness; one school’s enrichment becoming another’s dilution. In the absence of a living tradition, the canon can all too easily collapse into a collage of novelty and good intentions.

True inclusivity does not mean replacing the past but enlarging it: making space for “the best that’s been thought and said, by everyone.” That requires cultural confidence and scholarly seriousness, not moral posturing. A canon designed to mirror our moment will expire with it. If English is to remain a discipline rather than a slogan, it must concern itself not with what is fashionable, but with what endures.

Drama and the disappearing craft

The reinstatement of drama as a formal strand of English has been widely welcomed, but it carries a whiff of nostalgia. The review praises drama for “building confidence and preparing pupils for later life,” a phrase that could have been lifted from a school prospectus. It also calls for “greater clarity about expectations for performing, creating and responding to dramatic works,” and for a review of drama qualifications to ensure assessment “balances performance, creation and written work.” At primary level, it proposes that drama be given greater specificity within the Programmes of Study so that pupils develop “solid foundations to support transition to Key Stage 3.” All of this suggests good intentions, recognising that drama has been allowed to atrophy and needs restoring to the mainstream.

Yet good intentions are not a plan. Without serious investment in teacher expertise, this reform risks being tokenistic: a smattering of role-play activities and half-hearted assemblies masquerading as drama education. The review acknowledges the decline in specialist teaching but offers little about how to rebuild it. Done well, drama is not therapy but discipline. It teaches interpretation, empathy, and the embodied life of language. But drama teaching in England has been hollowed out over the past decade, sacrificed to accountability and squeezed by timetables. To revive it meaningfully would require not just curriculum words but institutional will: teacher training, resources, and the confidence to value performance as thought.

The promise of equal status for arts GCSEs, including drama, is welcome, but unless schools are trusted - and funded - to prioritise rehearsal, performance, and creative endeavour, this revival will remain rhetorical. Without time and expertise, the new “strand” of drama will be exactly what the review insists the curriculum should not be: an entitlement without substance.

Oracy: finding our voices, or losing our way?

The proposed National Oracy Framework is cut from the same hopeful cloth. In principle, it is hard to argue against the importance of spoken language. The ability to reason, persuade, and listen is the cornerstone of civic and intellectual life. The review presents oracy as a long-overdue rebalancing of literacy: “a key foundation for learning, wellbeing, and citizenship.” It promises guidance for all key stages, with an expectation that “oracy should be systematically taught and practised across the curriculum” and assessed through teacher judgement rather than formal testing. It even hints at oracy being integrated into inspection, suggesting that schools will be expected to evidence “a coherent approach to spoken language development.”

The ambition, at least on paper, is commendable. The review argues that “spoken language enables pupils to articulate their thinking, communicate effectively, and develop confidence and agency,” and that high-quality talk supports vocabulary, comprehension, and social development. In a culture that too often treats talk as an interruption to learning, this could be revolutionary. A curriculum that explicitly values oracy might help redress years of silent classrooms, closed questioning, and the tyranny of the mini whiteboard.

But the practice of oracy in schools has too often slid into performance and bureaucracy: laminated sentence stems, forced turn-taking, and rubrics that celebrate the simulation of dialogue rather than the substance of it. Too many oracy initiatives have become about visible participation rather than intellectual progress; children rehearsing social scripts of agreement, not wrestling with ideas.

The review speaks of oracy as a complement to reading and writing, but gives little guidance on how it might be taught beyond slogans about “voice” and “agency.” Without clear curricular sequencing - when, how, and for what purpose students speak - the framework risks becoming yet another policy veneer: a collection of classroom routines rather than a discipline of thought.

That ambition could be transformative, if oracy is conceived as the bridge between thought and written expression, debate, interpretation and Socratic exchange. Yet if it descends into a set of tick-box competencies, it will do more harm than good. Talk is not valuable because it is spoken; it is valuable because it advances thought. The danger is that oracy becomes another category to be demonstrated rather than developed.

If the framework truly aims to “equip all pupils with the spoken language skills needed for learning, work and life,” as the review claims, then it must start not with laminated objectives but with intellectual curiosity. The goal should not be to get children talking more, but to help them think better.

Grammar, writing, and the illusion of application

One of the more encouraging proposals in the review is its call to move theoretical grammar out of primary school and reposition it at Key Stage 3, with a renewed focus on grammar in use. This is not a minor adjustment but an implicit admission that the experiment of early grammatical formalism - the endless parsing and labelling tested through the GPS exam - has largely failed: children are no more able to use syntax with confidence then before it was introduced. The review notes that pupils have been “drilled in terminology without secure understanding of how grammar supports writing.” It therefore recommends that the current Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test should be “reviewed and revised” to assess “application in composition” rather than “recall of terminology.”

Recognising that knowledge of grammar is not the same as control of it is an important step. A child who can identify a fronted adverbial is not necessarily a child who can write a coherently. In principle, then, this reform could help realign writing instruction with meaning; less about naming parts, more about understanding how syntax shapes style, emphasis, and tone.

Yet the promise comes with a familiar hazard. “Application” is a slippery word. Too often it becomes a euphemism for something anemic, the kind of “use” that asks children to sprinkle conjunctions or vary sentence lengths without any understanding of why. Grammar is not useful because it’s practical; it’s practical because it reveals how meaning works. Its purpose is conceptual, not mechanical. Without teachers who understand that - who can show how grammatical choices create effects, modulate rhythm, and control reader expectation - any shift in sequencing will produce the illusion of progress: a better-packaged misunderstanding.

The review is right to observe that grammar should be “taught and revisited in context, through reading and writing,” but it leaves unaddressed the most pressing question: how? Grammar teaching in England has been undermined by a generation of curricular incoherence. Many teachers have never been trained to analyse syntax or recognise rhetorical function. Without a national investment in subject knowledge - not just in the what of grammar but the why - the reformed GPS test will change the assessment landscape without changing classroom reality.

What’s needed is not just a different test, but a different philosophy: grammar as a way of thinking about language, not a checklist of linguistic features. If a grammar curriculum is to be meaningful it must allow children to look at the options available when connecting conepts and understand what the effects of choosing this over that might be. If this review can help recover that intellectual ambition, it might yet redeem one of the great lost opportunities of English teaching. But if “application” becomes another buzzword for jazz hands writing portfolios, we’ll have achieved little more than a more sophisticated form of confusion.

A curriculum between worlds

Taken together, the review’s proposals for English, drama, and oracy sketch a subject caught between worlds. It wants coherence but fears prescription; freedom but demands specificity; breadth but distrusts hierarchy. There is much to welcome :the ambition to restore disciplinary depth, the recognition of spoken language, the attempt to reconnect form and function in writing. Yet the overall impression is one of fragmentation: English refracted through competing frameworks, each with its own vocabulary of virtue and its own bureaucratic machinery of proof.

If the review can resist the institutional reflex to codify every good idea - to turn creativity into compliance and trust into checklists - it might yet allow English to recover its intellectual and moral centre. But if it cannot, the subject risks becoming what it most despises: a discipline defined not by what it explores, but by what it records. That would be the final irony: a subject devoted to expression, silenced by endless exam drills.

And the podcast is available here.

Bridget Phillipson’s Labour Conference speech had all the feels: a moving supermarket anecdote about a “lost boy” saved by an inspirational FE teacher, soaring rhetoric of freedom and opportunity, and a checklist of breakfast clubs, nurseries and teacher pay rises. All good things.

But beneath the sentiment lies a surprising silence. Phillipson talked about tomorrow’s “artists and scientists,” but never once mentioned the Francis Review, the live debate on what children should actually be learning in schools. The omission is telling. Labour runs the risk of filling children’s bellies while starving them intellectually.

She began her - surprisingly short - conference speech with a story. Alan, an FE teacher from Sunderland, bumps into a former student in a supermarket. Years earlier, Alan had given this “lost boy” a chance on a building project funded by the last Labour government. Now the boy has his own business, a wife, a home, and a future. He tells Alan, without you, none of this would have happened.

It’s a touching moment. But what does it tell us about education policy?

The story rests on a familiar structure: one trouble child, one timely intervention, one heroic teacher. It flatters our instincts about redemption and individual goodness. Yet it tells us little about the conditions that make such transformations likely. What about the boys Alan didn’t bump into at the supermarket? Does the anecdote prove that government schemes change lives, or simply that opportunities are more likely to rely on luck and personal relationships? If Alan is the hero, what role does curriculum play in this narrative? What about the thousands of children who will never meet an Alan (and the thousands of boys Alan may have taught who don’t now own their own businesses?)

Phillipson pitched education as liberation: freedom to choose your path, freedom from poverty, ignorance and fear, freedom to be more than just a worker. It was a resonant appeal to human flourishing. She listed what Labour has delivered so far: breakfast clubs, nurseries, Family Hubs, pay rises, apprenticeships. All good things, but not the stuff that turns children into artists and scientists. It all sounded rather less Tomorrow’s World and more The Tomorrow People1: promising superpowers but delivering little more than cereal and childcare.

What she didn’t mention, not once, was the Francis Review. This is the real engine of opportunity: the question of what children should learn and how knowledge should be sequenced. Without it, talk of “the people of tomorrow” collapses into aspiration without architecture. The Review ought to be Labour’s intellectual centrepiece. Instead, it risks drifting into bureaucratic fudge: shuffling qualifications, mouthing slogans about “skills for the future,” and quietly hollowing out the knowledge-rich curriculum children need.

So, is the curriculum review in trouble? There are signs it might be. It should have been out already and certainly needs to be published within the next month. Becky Francis faces an unenviable task: the first full rethink of curriculum and assessment in more than a decade, with every decision freighted with political symbolism. She’s already admitted the curriculum is “overstuffed,” and that adding new priorities means taking others out. That’s a zero-sum game, and one that guarantees disappointment. Try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one.

Without a clear steer from Phillipson, the review risks suffering Second-Guesser Syndrome. In the absence of a coherent philosophy from the Secretary of State, Francis’s committee must attempt to intuit what ministers want. Do they prize a knowledge-rich canon, or a skills-based future orientation? Should the curriculum lean classical or vocational, academic or applied? Without a north star, the review is forced to navigate by conflicting lighthouses — subject associations, unions, think tanks, parents, employers — each signalling a different route to salvation. It is a recipe for polite paralysis.

Subjects, too, are bracing for neglect. The gravitational pull of policy will favour the core and the instrumental: literacy, numeracy, STEM (or, at least S&M) citizenship, digital skills. Worthy priorities, but ones that risk crowding out the arts, languages, philosophy and the humanities: those very disciplines that make “artists and scientists” possible in the first place. A curriculum designed to keep everyone happy will end up making everyone intellectually thinner. Intriguingly, Phillipson’s own phrasing - putting “artists” before “scientists” - might hint at an appetite to turn the tide, to restore the arts to the centre of the curriculum after years of marginalisation. But that may be reading too much into a line written for applause rather than policy.

The review’s guiding mantra, “evolution, not revolution,” sounds safe, even sensible. But it may prove the greatest mistake of all. The world outside school is not evolving gently. Artificial intelligence, climate change, global interdependence, shifting labour markets are revolutions already in progress. A curriculum that merely evolves risks obsolescence by design. Worse, “evolution” can easily become code for “no real change,” a soothing slogan for bureaucratic timidity.

Francis herself is a serious thinker, and her instinct to proceed cautiously is understandable. But a system shaped by risk-aversion will default to minimalism. What’s needed is clarity of purpose, not just consultation. As it stands, the Francis Review risks being a holding pattern rather than a horizon.

She could have said something like this:

The Francis Review is not some dry consultation. It is the question of our time: what knowledge do our children need if they are to become the scientists and artists, the carers and campaigners of tomorrow? The inheritance of our culture, the sciences that push the boundaries of what is possible, the arts that make life worth living: these are not luxuries, they are entitlements.

But she didn’t. Breakfast fills bellies; curriculum feeds minds.

Starmer, too, added his own twist, abandoning the 50% university target, first initiated under Tony Blair, in favour of two-thirds of young people securing either a university place or a “gold-plated apprenticeship.” But what makes an apprenticeship “gold-plated” without the intellectual foundation that a rich curriculum provides? Without this, the promise of parity between academic and vocational routes risks being gilded rhetoric over hollow substance.

Phillipson’s speech was long on sentiment and short on substance. Until Labour can say clearly what children will actually learn, and why, “the people of tomorrow” remain a rhetorical flourish rather than a policy vision. Education begins not with the heart-warming story or the free breakfast, but with the question that Labour still seems unwilling to face: what, precisely, is worth knowing?

You can also listen to the podcast here.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Education has released a report entitled Inquiry into The Loss of Love of Learning.’ As well as being an uncomfortable mouthful, the report raises a curious question: should children love learning? At first glance, the answer is surely “yes.” Who would oppose the idea of children loving to learn? But as soon as we press on the word “love” the ground begins to shift beneath our feet. Do we mean delight, joy, curiosity, or passion? Or do we mean something more enduring, like commitment or devotion? Love is slippery. The danger of sentimental language is that it obscures more than it reveals.

The APPG inquiry finds that many children’s curiosity and engagement are being squeezed out by a system dominated by high-stakes tests, narrow curricula, and teacher burnout. Attendance is fragile, wellbeing is low, and creative subjects are sidelined in favour of examinable ‘basics.’ Students describe anxiety around exams and a sense of irrelevance in what they study. Teachers, meanwhile, feel stripped of autonomy and overloaded by accountability, with attrition rates climbing.

The report’s central claim is that love of learning is not a luxury but a barometer of system health. Where it is absent, structural pressures are at fault. It calls for a lighter, less rigid curriculum, rebalanced assessment with more formative elements, restored professional trust for teachers, and renewed investment in arts, play, and wellbeing.

The Education Divide

Peter Hyman, co-founder of School 21, former Downing Street strategist and current government advisor of education, describes what he calls the education divide, a rift that both reflects and intensifies wider social fractures. For the affluent, schools are often designed to foster cultural capital and safe spaces for curiosity. Debate is tolerated, dissent is rehearsed, and difference is contained. For the disadvantaged, the emphasis falls on compliance. Here the dominant message is: follow instructions, pass the test, stay out of trouble. In one world, questioning authority is a habit of mind; in the other, it risks being read as disruption.

This is not simply about who loves learning and who does not. It is about whether schools themselves communicate that learning belongs to everyone, or whether they reinforce the impression that real learning is reserved for those already privileged enough to afford it. The hierarchy between academic and vocational routes makes the point more sharply: university is valorised, while technical or craft pathways are too often seen as consolation prizes. No wonder some children conclude that learning is not for them.

The squeeze of accountability

The APPG report notes what many teachers have long felt: the high-stakes culture of Ofsted inspections, performance tables, and exams has squeezed the joy out of education. Children may love learning when it feels voluntary, but once reduced to a series of test-prep drills, their experience of school becomes something more akin to endurance than love.

But hang on, if a love of learning has been lost, when precisely was it possessed? To claim that something has been lost implies there was once a golden age when children brimmed with unquenchable curiosity and schools nurtured it. But history is thin on evidence. Victorian classrooms were hardly hotbeds of playful exploration; the cane did not encourage wonder. Mid-twentieth century schooling was often about discipline, conformity, and preparation for work. Even the much-romanticised 1960s and 70s, with their “child-centred” reforms, saw plenty of disaffection, truancy, and complaints about falling standards. Certainly when I was a school boy during the 80s I can’t recall more joy, wonder or nurturing of curiosity. The only reason I turned up at school was to hang out with friends and wish I was brave enough to chat up girls.

Perhaps “loss” is a rhetorical device. What’s really being described is a shift in how the system makes its trade-offs. Accountability regimes, league tables, and exam metrics have intensified since the 1990s, crowding out space for whimsy and idiosyncrasy. Maybe t’s not that a love of learning once flourished and then died, but that the conditions which might allow it to thrive have been systematically eroded?

If there was no golden age, we should stop pining for one and ask what makes love of learning more or less likely in the present. That moves the question from sentiment to structure. On that score, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory is useful. They argue that intrinsic motivation (a plausible stand-in for ‘love of learning’) depends on three conditions: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Remove these and motivation dries up. The implication is striking: love of learning is not an innate spark possessed by the fortunate few. It is a product of system design. A system that strips autonomy, undermines competence, and isolates students will kill off curiosity. The challenge is to design classrooms where autonomy, competence, and relatedness can survive, even in a climate of high-stakes accountability.

Joy today or joy tomorrow?

But perhaps we should not expect children always to love what they are doing in school. We should, perhaps, contrast joy through mastery with joy through exploration. Progressives often prize exploration, the thrill of discovery, while traditionalists insist on mastery, the satisfaction of grasping difficult content. Both forms of joy are real, but they operate on different timescales. Exploration is immediate; mastery is delayed. The question is not which form of joy is “better” but whether our system can design a curriculum that balances the two.

Cognitive science adds another twist. David Geary distinguishes between biologically primary knowledge (things we are predisposed to enjoy, like gossip or play) and biologically secondary knowledge (things we have to be taught, like algebra). Expecting children to “love” algebra is a bit like expecting them to love tidying their bedroom: it may be possible, but it is not natural. Perhaps the aim - certainly if we want children to be able to delay gratification - is not to manufacture delight in the moment, but to teach children how to endure frustration in order to reap the delayed satisfaction of mastery.

Robert Bjork’s work on desirable difficulties sharpens this still further. The very conditions that make learning feel less enjoyable in the short term often make it stick in the long term. Struggle, spacing, and interleaving depress performance today but enhance retention tomorrow. What might feel like drudgery may later be reinterpreted as love. The love of learning, in this sense, is retrospective. It arises when students look back and realise that the hard things they once disliked are now theirs to command.

The language of love

Perhaps the problem is not with learning, but with love. Aristotle distinguished between what is pleasant and what is good. Education, he would remind us, is not about gratifying desire but about cultivating virtue. In What is the Educational Task? Arousing the Desire for Wanting to Exist in the World in a Grown-Up Way, Gert Biesta takes this further, arguing that education should interrupt desire, not satisfy it. Schools should not aim to give children what they already want but to expose them to what they could not otherwise imagine wanting. In this frame, a child who learns but never “loves” may not be a failure at all, but someone who has been taught that knowledge is worth pursuing for reasons deeper than mere momentary preference.

There is also a category error to guard against. To love learning is not the same as to like school. It is perfectly possible to hate school while still hungering for knowledge. Equally, it is possible to enjoy school while never experiencing the transformative power of mastery. Love of learning cannot be reduced to a slogan about making lessons fun.

What, then, should we do? The APPG report offers familiar remedies: rebalance assessment away from the punitive, restore teacher autonomy, guarantee a broad entitlement to arts, play, and philosophy. These are worthy aims, but they miss the deeper question: what is the purpose of education? Do we want citizens who can argue, dissent, and think? Or workers who can comply, perform, and serve? If the former, then love of learning is not an optional extra but a democratic necessity. If the latter, then love of learning will remain a luxury for the privileged.

This leaves us with an unsettling conclusion. Love of learning cannot be legislated, nor can it be demanded. It emerges only in conditions where autonomy, competence, and relatedness are protected, where mastery is valued as highly as exploration, and where dissent is not mistaken for disruption. The real question is not whether children should love learning, but whether our education system deserves to be loved.

As always, you casn either watch…

Listen to the podcast, or read all about it…

At researchED’s national conference Becky Francis, chairing the government’s curriculum review, promised two things that sit uneasily together. On the one hand, no dumbing down and no infusion of issues or campaigns. On the other, a guarantee that every young person will see themselves in the curriculum, and that it will challenge discrimination and extend young people’s horizons. These are handsome aspirations, but the risk is that the review is trying to steer by two compasses at once. If both point north, all is well. If they do not, something will have to give.

The phrase “see yourself in the curriculum” has become a slogan, and like most slogans it can encourage either agreeable nodding or hostile suspicion rather than careful thought. What precisely should a fourteen-year-old or a six-year-old be able to see? Their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, or cultural background? Or do we want children to see a portrait of themselves as a future citizen, apprenticed to bodies of knowledge that predate them and will outlast them? Should the curriculum reassure children that their particular identity is acknowledged, or should it instead invite them to encounter lives unlike their own? The distinction matters. The first reading makes the curriculum a mirror. The second, a window. Mirrors flatter and invite introspection. Windows invite us to look out and consider our place in the wider world.

Once you declare that everyone must be reflected, the logic of representation takes over. Each decision about content becomes a census. It is not that inclusion is a bad intention but it is a poor principle of selection. A curriculum built to check faces in the glass can easily lose coherence. Narrative gives way to name-checking, substance yields to variety, then variety thins to tokenism. We stop teaching Pythagoras’ theorem because Pythagoras is, depending on your priors, too male, too pale, too stale. But the only defensible reason to teach Pythagoras is that his theorem unlocks the geometry of distance: it lets you measure what you cannot reach, square a room, site a ladder safely, survey a field, navigate by coordinates, and compress a diagonal into a single number. In school it births the distance formula, feeds trigonometry and vectors, and lies behind everything from computer graphics to GPS and root-mean-square error.

So far, so straightforward. A maths curriculum without Pythagoras would be absurd. But do we really need Shakespeare? Wouldn’t children be better off with a more diverse array of writers? Again, the answer is not as obvious as it first appears. Reading the canon can – and should – transcend barriers of gender, race, class and centuries. Maya Angelou recalled the shock of recognition when she first read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate

Sha has said, “That was me – absolutely me – wishing to be anything other than black and poor and a girl in the dirt roads of Arkansas.”1 Her identification was so intense that she assumed Shakespeare must have been “a Black American girl in the South.” When told otherwise she was incredulous: “No white man could know what I feel.”2

This is the point. To claim students can only connect with writers who share their identity is to mistake surface for substance. Angelou’s experience shows that the canon’s power lies in its capacity to reveal our common humanity. If we place that shared humanity before our perceived differences and suddenly Shakespeare is not a barrier but a bridge.

It is vital to insist that the canon is not the preserve of any one class, ethic group or gender. It is a shared cultural heritage that has something to say to us all. As Alan Bennett says,

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.3

Experience our shared heritage can – should – transcend barriers of gender, race, class, and centuries. Angelou’s description of feeling Shakespeare’s hand extending from the past to take her own is the most visceral I know, but there are many others I’ve watched children experience over my career.

Of course, there are obvious rejoinders. Dead white men have had a long innings. Why not enrich the canon with voices that were long ignored? Indeed. Honest history and cosmopolitan taste demand it. But enrichment is not the same as displacement and representation is not the same as value. Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison wrote that,

Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.4

Let’s agree that the curriculum is always selected, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly; all interests are vested and all choices are partial. Literature was certainly part of the British Empire’s ‘civilizing mission’ to make its colonial subjects more amenable to rule, and the literary canon is now regularly condemned as patriarchal and colonialist. Instead of teaching the thoughts and works of an elite, should we instead prioritise the voices of the more marginalised? Should we de-emphasise what is traditional in favour of what is politically progressive?

We can also examine the quality of acurriculum through the lens of shared knowledge. Does the knowledge we aim teach permit entry into wider conversations? And if it does, what might be lost? The challenge is described by ED Hirsch Jr:

Because of an inherent and inescapable inertia in the knowledge that is shared among hundreds of millions of people, the Core Knowledge plan was necessarily traditional ... It appeared to perpetuate the dominance of the already dominant elements of American life, while the aim of many intellectuals in the 1990s was to reduce that dominance and privilege, and valorize neglected cultures and women. ... The aim of giving everybody entrée to the knowledge of power ran smack up against the aim of deprivileging those who are currently privileged. [my emphasis]5

This is a difficult tension to resolve. On the face of it, building a curriculum around the thoughts and deeds of historically marginalised groups looks like a really good idea. Who wouldn’t want children to know about the achievements of women and people of colour? There are two problems here. The first is, as we saw in the previous chapter, refusing to teach literature written by ‘dead white men’ won’t help anyone to understand why people of colour and women have been historically marginalised. When we express our righteous indignation that some knowledge is valued over other knowledge, and decide to teach this other knowledge in the name of liberty and social justice, what we’re actually doing is denying children choice. The second problem is that teaching an English curriculum focussed on the writing of marginalised groups would, by definition, not be shared knowledge. As Hirsch puts it, “If we tried to teach children a fully non-traditional knowledge set, they could not master the existing language of power and success.” This kind of curriculum denies students access to the shared knowledge that all should have both a right to inherit and the means to critique.

The central question is not “does this author look like my class?” The question is “what does this text unlock?” Powerful and shared cultural knowledge is not “for people like us.” It must be for everyone. The danger of a mirror-first curriculum is that it strands children inside their prior selves. You cannot extend horizons by staring at your own reflection. Deciding that children do not need to know things that someone somewhere might consider elitist or offensive condemns them to the margins of society. Our dilemma is to navigate the tight confines of the school curriculum to find ways to teach the knowledge “shared among hundreds of millions of people” as well as to teach knowledge that deprivileges “those who are currently privileged.”

Then there is the promise to challenge discrimination. Here too words matter. Schools should of course stand against cruelty and bigotry. They should also cultivate discrimination in its older, healthier sense: the capacity to tell better from worse, true from false, compelling from flimsy. When we load the curriculum with campaigning aims, we turn literature into a sermon and history into propaganda. Shakespeare can illuminate jealousy, loyalty, malice and mercy. That is not the same as instructing children to squeeze an anti-racism worksheet out of Romeo and Juliet. If the thoughts we want to inculcate children with are decided in advance, reading becomes a scavenger hunt for evidence of what we already believe. That is more catechism than curriculum.

Coherence matters. A good curriculum is a carefully built sequence where new ideas perch on secure prior knowledge. It has a story to tell about maths, a map to draw of science, a thread to follow through the long tapestry of history. It chooses works of art and literature because they are generative, because they teach the tradition and the disciplinary knowledge within it, because they repay attention, because they help novices become insiders to a discipline. Representation as an outcome will often follow from this approach. Britain’s past is not monochrome. Its science is international. Its literature is a conversation across centuries, continents and cultures. If we aspire to teach the conversation we will hear many voices. If we start by selecting the voices we risk derailing the conversation.

None of this is an argument for a sepia-toned museum of Great Men. It is an argument for teaching ‘the best that has been thought and said,’ and for doing so honestly. Honesty includes telling awkward truths, including the moments when the best behaved badly. It includes Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale not as emblems but as evidence, folded into a secure understanding of the Crimean War and the emergence of modern nursing. It includes contemporary writers when they earn their place by what they make possible for novices learning to read, write and think well. it includes teaching the British Empire. To sanitise its history is dishonest; to present it only as oppression is equally misleading. What matters is to look at the Empire in the round, to see both its achievements and its crimes, to understand the power it wielded and the suffering it caused. Such teaching neither celebrates nor denounces by rote but equips students with the knowledge to discriminate, to weigh evidence, and to grasp how the past shapes the present. It also includes local history where it clarifies national and global history rather than parochialising it. If children sometimes feel unrecognised in such a curriculum, that may be a feature rather than a bug. Childhood is a long apprenticeship in realising we are not being the centre of the world.

Where does that leave the review’s twin promises? If “see yourself” is taken to mean “encounter work in which any student might recognise human motives, fears and hopes,” it aligns neatly with extending horizons. If it means “engineer proportional demographic mirrors in every domain,” it will cut across coherence, depth and disciplinary truth. If “challenge discrimination” is taken to mean “teach children to discriminate well,” it supports scholarship. If it means “bend subjects to carry today’s campaigns,” it will narrow the world to the present mood and make classrooms brittle.

We draw lines all the time. The art is to draw them where they protect what matters. A curriculum should be a public inheritance, not a private playlist. Its test is not whether a child sees their reflection in every unit. It is whether, by the end, they can see further than they could before. If the review can hold fast to that, there is no contradiction to resolve. If it cannot, the mirror may reflect brightly enough while the window fogs over.

For those who fancy listening to Martin and I chunter on, you can listen to the podcast. Or, as ever, you can read the write up below.

For most of the twentieth century IQ scores rose steadily. Psychologists called it the Flynn Effect: around three IQ points per decade, across multiple countries, explained variously by improved nutrition, schooling, and the demands of modern life. But since the 1990s, the trend has reversed. In many rich nations, IQ scores are flatlining or even declining. At the same time, artificial intelligence is beginning to take over ever more of our thinking.

So: are we getting stupider? Are we living in what Daisy Christodoulou has called a stupidogenic society: a culture that doesn’t just fail to support intelligence, but actively corrodes it?

She reflects on how older generations, with little formal schooling, often possessed impressive skills like rapid mental arithmetic or musical ability, which have become rarer as technology makes such practice unnecessary. She links this loss to two major trends: the reversal of the Flynn Effect and the rise of cognitive offloading, where tasks once done by hand or mind are now outsourced to machines. While offloading makes life easier and societies richer, it also weakens the ‘mental muscles’ that underpinned deeper skills and lifelong capacities. Just as an ‘obesogenic’ society creates physical laziness, today’s digital environment is “stupidogenic,” encouraging shallow thinking and dependence on machines. Some people will respond with new forms of ‘intellectual fitness’ (puzzles, tutoring, competitions) but for most, the danger is atrophy. Schools, she argues, must resist this trend by acting as gymnasia for the mind, deliberately training the basic skills that technology no longer requires but which remain vital for real intelligence.

The rise and fall of IQ

The reversal of the Flynn Effect has puzzled researchers for the last two decades. After half a century of steady gains, test scores in countries like Norway, Denmark, Britain and Australia began to decline in the 1990s.1 Was this the first sign that our collective brains were genuinely getting weaker?

Bratsberg & Rogeber’s 2018 Norwegian Armed Forces study suggests not. Because every 18-year-old male conscript has sat the same intelligence tests for decades, the dataset is one of the largest and longest-running in existence. Looking closely, the researchers concluded that the apparent rise and fall of IQ might not reflect real shifts in general intelligence at all, but rather the quirks of the tests themselves.

Some of the subtests had aged badly. Vocabulary items relied on words that had fallen out of common use; young people weren’t necessarily less intelligent, they were simply unfamiliar with archaic language. Numerical reasoning tasks often depended on long division and pencil-and-paper methods that schools had largely stopped teaching, again, a change in practice rather than in capacity. By contrast, figure-matrix puzzles - the kind where you identify patterns in sequences of shapes - showed dramatic improvements, most likely because such problems now crop up in apps, puzzles, videogames and test-prep courses. In other words, exposure and familiarity, not raw brainpower, may be driving the trends.

The key lesson here is not that humanity has suddenly grown dim-witted, but that how we measure intelligence matters. Test scores are exquisitely sensitive to context, culture and curriculum. Change the test content, and you can produce the illusion of rising or falling intelligence across generations.

A ‘stupidogenic’ society

But even if some of the measured decline in IQ turns out to be a statistical artefact, that doesn’t mean we can relax. Measurement issues may muddy the picture, but they don’t erase the wider cultural concern.

Rather than cultivating attention and memory, today’s environment tends to fragment them. Quick rewards are valued over patient effort, and in education the emphasis has often shifted from building deep knowledge to promoting vaguely defined ‘skills.’ The result is that many students are left with very little substance to think with.

The work of educational evolutionary psychologist David Geary suggests that human cognition is the product of evolutionary pressures. Our brains were shaped for survival in pre-modern environments: reading social cues, navigating landscapes, spotting predators, securing food. In those contexts, the ‘curriculum’ of daily life provided constant, unavoidable practice in the skills that mattered most for survival

Modern life, however, has severed many of those links. Schools and digital technologies often fail to align with our evolved strengths. They neither demand nor reward the slow accumulation of factual knowledge and the deliberate rehearsal of reasoning. Geary’s point is that higher-order thinking doesn’t emerge spontaneously; it has to be built on secure foundations of memory and practice. Without this scaffolding, potential withers.2

The broader implication is striking: intelligence is not fixed. It rises or falls according to the cognitive diet provided by culture and schooling. A society can be cognitively nutritious (rich in challenge, knowledge, and opportunities for practice) or cognitively impoverished, full of distraction and easy shortcuts. And if Daisy is right, ours may be tending toward the latter.

Offloading and the predictive brain

Andy Clark’s work on the predictive brain reframes what’s happening. Our brains are not passive recording devices but prediction machines, constantly generating expectations about what will happen next and updating them when surprised. This is why perception, thought and action are never simply reactive; they are anticipatory, leaning into the future.

Humans have always found ways to offload parts of this predictive burden onto the environment. Writing stores memory outside the skull. Maps spare us from holding an entire landscape in our head. Calculators relieve us of manual arithmetic. These are extensions of our cognition, scaffolding that lightens the load.

Clark and philosopher David Chalmers illustrated this with the famous Otto thought experiment. Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s and can’t rely on his biological memory. Instead, he carries a notebook where he writes down addresses, facts and reminders. When Otto wants to visit a museum, he consults his notebook, just as another person might consult their brain. In functional terms, the notebook is his memory. Clark and Chalmers argue that the mind extends into the world: the boundary between brain and environment is porous, and external props can become integral parts of thinking.3

But AI represents a leap far beyond Otto’s notebook. A notebook stores information but still requires Otto to interpret and apply it. A calculator gives you an answer but only for the specific sum you enter. Generative AI, by contrast, doesn’t just store or compute: it can generate whole chains of reasoning, essays, arguments, even creative products. What used to require hours of planning, drafting, and revision can now be summoned in seconds.

That is both the marvel and the danger. Offloading arithmetic doesn’t threaten your capacity to reason about politics or write a novel. Offloading reasoning itself risks hollowing out the very skills you need to remain an independent thinker. If Otto had outsourced not just his memory but also his judgement, his creativity, and his problem-solving, would we still say the mind was “extended,” or that it was being replaced?

AI is not just another labour-saving device. It may be eroding the very faculties it promises to serve.

What AI is doing to us

The early evidence is sobering. At MIT, researchers hooked students up to EEGs while they completed essay-writing tasks, sometimes alone, sometimes with ChatGPT. The results were striking: when students leaned on the chatbot, neural activity in brain regions associated with creativity and attention dropped noticeably. Even more tellingly, many struggled to recall quotations from the very essays they had “produced” with AI’s help. It wasn’t just that they were thinking less in the moment — they were also retaining less afterwards.4

A team at Microsoft Research took a broader lens, surveying 319 knowledge workers who used AI at least weekly across nearly a thousand tasks. Most participants described their work as easier and quicker with AI, but only around half of the tasks required any real critical though; things like revising a poor AI output or fact-checking before passing it on to a client. The rest were essentially mindless: tasks that once required mental effort were reduced to mechanical prompting and forwarding. The report concluded that while AI boosts productivity, it may also be “slowly impairing our critical thinking skills.”5

A third study, led by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School, tested 666 British participants on a widely used critical-thinking assessment, after surveying how often they used AI and how much they trusted it. The pattern was clear: heavier users scored lower across the board. Gerlich later said that hundreds of teachers contacted him after the study was published, all reporting the same pattern in their classrooms; students relying heavily on AI, yet struggling when forced to think independently.6

Taken together, these studies suggest a worrying feedback loop. Psychologists sometimes describe humans as ‘cognitive misers’: we naturally conserve effort and reach for shortcuts. The more we offload to machines, the less capable we become of doing the work ourselves; the less capable we are, the more tempting it is to offload again. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of mental atrophy.7 One participant in Gerlich’s study admitted, tellingly: “I rely so much on AI that I don’t think I’d know how to solve certain problems without it.”

The cost of borrowed thought

Borrowed thought is tempting. It makes hard tasks feel easy and saves precious time. Why wrestle with a blank page when ChatGPT can produce an essay draft in seconds? Why memorise multiplication tables when a calculator is in every pocket? Why concentrate on dense prose when TikTok delivers a drip-feed of instant novelty?

But the very effort these technologies spare us is the effort that builds cognitive strength. Without struggle, without the slow work of rehearsal and recall, the mental “muscles” of attention, memory, and reasoning atrophy. Borrowed thought is like outsourcing all your exercise to a personal trainer: you get the illusion of fitness while your own body weakens.

Schools face this temptation acutely. Engagement tricks are the pedagogical equivalent of fireworks: all fizz and sparkle, then gone, leaving nothing but smoke. The effect of AI short cuts is the ability to churn out fluent text without ever troubling the mind to think. It might look like learning, but it’s superficial gloss.

The anxiety is not new. Socrates warned that writing would destroy memory, turning knowledge into a mere reminder of what we once knew. In the 1980s, critics argued calculators would corrode arithmetic fluency. Each time, the concern was that tools would make us dependent, that once-vital skills would wither. And each time, we found ways to integrate the tool without losing everything, though few today would claim that numeracy has not been reshaped, perhaps diminished, by calculator use.

AI is different because of the scale and scope of what it replaces. Writing externalises memory, calculators externalise computation. But AI externalises reasoning itself: the capacity to generate arguments, weigh evidence, synthesise perspectives, and produce language at scale. If students are tempted to skip the struggle of thinking altogether, they may never acquire the fluency they need to judge whether the machine is right or wrong.

Borrowed thought may get us through today’s task. But in the long run, it leaves us intellectually fragile: better at using tools, weaker at being thinkers.

Wider context

We’ve heard these warnings before. Maryanne Wolf worries that the transition from print to screens has rewired us for shallowness. In Reader, Come Home she argues that digital reading fragments attention and undermines the deep comprehension that only slow, sustained engagement with text can cultivate. Nicholas Carr made a similar case in The Shallows: that the internet’s constant hyperlinks and notifications train us to skim, glance and graze rather than reflect.

Long before either, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) warned that every new medium reshapes not just what we know but how we think. Print fostered linear, logical argument; television, he said, reconfigured public discourse into a spectacle of entertainment. If Postman were alive today, he’d surely point out that social media has taken this logic further still, compressing thought into memes, hashtags and soundbites.

And psychologists remind us that it doesn’t take technology to make us shallow: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow popularised the idea that we are “cognitive misers” by default, always reaching for the easiest, least effortful mode of thought unless forced to do otherwise. Digital platforms and AI simply exploit that tendency.

But there are optimists too. Steven Johnson, in Everything Bad is Good for You, argues that modern media - from complex television dramas to video games - actually stretch our cognitive abilities, demanding we juggle multiple plotlines, systems and rules. Steven Pinker, in Enlightenment Now, points to the long-term arc of human progress: whatever the local blips in IQ tests, our collective problem-solving capacity continues to rise. Perhaps, he suggests, the apparent decline is really a transition, as new literacies emerge alongside the old. Knowing how to check the provenance of a website or manipulate a digital dataset may be just as important in today’s world as being able to recite lines of Milton.

Schools as gymnasia of the body and mind

Everyone understands how physical fitness works. If you go to the gym regularly, you get stronger and fitter. If you stop going, spend your days on the sofa and live off burgers, you soon lose that fitness. No one thinks the effects of exercise are permanent. They only last if you keep working at them.

The role of cognitive fitness is less obvious. We tend to imagine that once we’ve learned to read, write, calculate or reason, those skills stick for life, regardless of what we do afterwards. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Just as neglected muscles waste away, neglected mental capacities weaken. Memory fades if we don’t rehearse it; fluency falters if we don’t practise; attention dwindles if it is constantly fragmented.

The danger of today’s environment is that it encourages us to assume our intellectual ‘training’ is complete as soon as we leave school, while simultaneously providing endless ways to avoid exercising the skills we once had. If we understand that physical fitness requires continuous effort, we should be no less realistic about cognitive fitness: without ongoing practice, the gains do not last.

If Daisy is right, then perhaps schools need to think of themselves as gymnasia of both the body and the mind.

The ancients understood that strength and resilience are forged through discipline, repetition, and strain. You don’t get fit by watching others run; you get fit by doing the laps yourself. The same is true of intellectual fitness.

In the smartphone age, the basics that once came naturally are now in retreat. We read less, we write less, we calculate less, we remember less. Outsourcing thought is effortless; resisting it takes work. That is precisely why schools must be the place where this work is done.

They must drill students in the cognitive equivalents of push-ups and squats:

• Reading whole books — not just skimming extracts or summaries.

• Mastering times tables — building automaticity that frees the mind for higher reasoning.

• Writing extended arguments — learning to sustain a thought from premise to conclusion.

• Committing knowledge to memory — so that ideas are there to be combined, tested, and built upon.

These practices may feel old-fashioned, but they are the muscular foundation on which all higher thought depends.

The alternative vision - that schools should focus only on “what machines can’t do” - is a trap. It allows machines to define the ceiling of human potential. Worse, it risks hollowing out the very skills we need to stay independent of them. Critical thinking, creativity, and judgement cannot float free of knowledge and memory; cut away the roots, and the plant withers.

If schools abandon the basics, society will drift into stupidity: distracted, dependent, unable to tell whether the machines are right or wrong. But if schools embrace their true role - cultivating deep literacy, memory, and reasoning - they become the last, best defence against intellectual decline.

Borrowed thought always comes at a cost. In the age of artificial intelligence, that cost is no longer hidden. If we want to remain thinkers rather than mere users, schools must stand firm.

In the end, the most radical thing education can do in the age of artificial intelligence is to insist on real intelligence, training both body and mind for the discipline of freedom.

You can also listen to the podcast here.

Are we raising a generation that is less conscientious, more anxious, and more distracted just as online harms spike and new laws scramble to contain them? Is it the internet that is shaping our personalities, or is it our attempts to regulate it that are revealing who we are becoming?

John Burn-Murdoch’s recent analysis of personality data from the Understanding America Study in the Financial Times shows a startling decline in conscientiousness and extraversion among young adults, coupled with a marked rise in neuroticism.

These are not idle curiosities. Conscientiousness is one of the most robust predictors we have of life outcomes. It is strongly tied to academic achievement, resilience in the face of setbacks, even longevity itself. Extraversion underpins the ability to form and maintain relationships, and by extension, the social capital on which communities depend. Neuroticism, by contrast, is consistently associated with anxiety, depression, and fragility. To see conscientiousness draining away while neuroticism rises ought to give us pause.

There is, of course, a sceptical question worth asking here: is personality even a thing? Psychologists have long debated whether the Big Five traits (OCEAN: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness & Neuroticism) describe stable, enduring features of character, or whether they are statistical conveniences, a way of categorising behaviour without really explaining it.1 There’s a strong argument that our personalities are socially constructed and heavily context dependent. We change how we think and behave according to how we feel, who we’re with, how we slept, what happened five minutes ago and so on.) That said, it’s probably true to say that most people’s personalities are reasonable stable within a certain range.

But even if we concede that personality is a somewhat blunt instrument, the patterns revealed are too consistent to dismiss. Something is happening, and the accelerants are not hard to identify. The pandemic isolated young people at precisely the point they most needed socialisation, and digital culture has stepped into the gap with an offer that looks enticing but exacts a heavy price.

Smartphones, streaming platforms, and social media are designed to maximise attention capture, which in practice means constant distraction, shallow engagement, and endless opportunities to avoid commitment. The culture of ‘ghosting’ - simply disappearing from a friendship, relationship, or responsibility - is the logical consequence of a medium where the next stimulus is always a swipe away. Teachers report attention spans shorter than ever and a growing inability among students to sustain effort over time. Research confirms these impressions. A recent study of Indian undergraduates found conscientiousness to be the single strongest predictor of GPA, mediated by self-regulation. Students who could plan, persist, and resist distraction succeeded, those who could not fell away. Another investigation into remote learning found that students high in conscientiousness and openness were best able to sustain focus in online classes, while their peers floundered. A separate study identified a high-risk cluster of young adults characterised by low conscientiousness, high neuroticism, ADHD symptoms, and low self-esteem. This group was vastly more likely to develop compulsive, problematic social media use. These are not eccentric edge cases. They describe, with uncomfortable precision, the conditions shaping an entire generation.

Into this fraught environment strides the state. The UK’s Online Safety Act seeks to regulate digital harms by mandating age checks on pornography sites and levying heavy fines for non-compliance. The results are depressingly predictable: traffic to the largest sites dipped briefly, but downloads of VPNs (virtual private networks that allow users to mask their location) soared. In effect, a measure intended to protect children from harmful content has functioned as a tutorial in how to evade regulation.

The tension is familiar: the desire to keep young people safe collides with the principle of liberty. Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, has called for VPNs themselves to be subject to age verification. Baroness Kidron sees grounds for cautious optimism in the Act’s early impact (traffic to porn sites has appently fallen by a whopping 47%!) though she stresses the importance of safeguarding privacy. Critics warn that what begins as child protection can all too easily slide into censorship creep and bureaucratic overreach.

The harms themselves are not in serious doubt. Surveys show that seventy per cent of young people encounter pornography before the age of eighteen, and more than a quarter before the age of eleven. Pornography is only the most obvious problem. The Molly Rose Foundation has documented how TikTok and Instagram algorithms actively feed suicide and self-harm content to vulnerable users. These platforms are not inert libraries of static content. They are adaptive systems designed to give users more of whatever keeps them hooked, even if that means serving up material that corrodes their wellbeing.

Schools cannot solve these problems outright, but they cannot ignore them either. They see the consequences daily: students unable to regulate their own attention, increasingly fragile social confidence, and children exposed to harmful material long before they are emotionally capable of processing it. What schools can do is cultivate the counterweight. Teaching self-regulation and media literacy is not a luxury but a necessity. Embedding routines and deliberate practice is one of the few reliable ways to foster conscientiousness, the very trait digital culture erodes. Creating safe and structured spaces for dialogue about online harms may help students articulate what they are experiencing instead of silently absorbing it. And tying all of this into a broader project of cultural literacy—helping young people to engage with shared knowledge, complex texts, and sustained thought—offers at least the chance of pushing back against the atomising and fragmenting tendencies of digital life.

What becomes clear is that every intervention generates unintended consequences. Regulation produces workarounds; bans produce black markets. In this sense, there is nothing new here. We have been through similar panics about television, video games, and comic books. The difference is that social media is not merely content to be consumed but a participatory, algorithmically optimised environment. It does not simply distract; it adapts to our distractions and entrenches them. The stakes are therefore much higher than in any previous wave of moral panic.

In the end, we face a paradox. We live in a world designed for distraction and riddled with loopholes, and yet we ask young people to grow into resilient, committed, and free adults. Perhaps the more urgent question is not whether we can legislate away the harms but whether we can educate for the virtues. How do we help young people develop the focus, steadiness, and courage that a healthy adulthood demands, when everything around them conspires to cultivate the opposite?

Thirty-five years on, Dead Poets Society still holds sway over the hearts of students, teachers, and anyone who ever wanted to stand on a desk and shout poetry into the void. But should it?

The film is often treated as a love letter to literature, teaching, and youthful rebellion. But scratch the surface, and it becomes clear that Dead Poets Society may be less a celebration of the humanities and more a sentimental distortion of them. The inspirational Mr Keating is a Romantic fantasy, not at all a model teacher. And like all such fantasies, it has consequences when adapted to the real world.

That said, it’s hard to dislike the film. I rewatched recently on a long haul flight and found it visually rich, emotionally resonant, and anchored by one of Robin Williams most restrained and humane performances. Director Peter Weir fills the film with autumnal nostalgia. The candle-lit meetings, the whispering woods, the ivy-draped classrooms; it all feels like something profound is happening. But it’s also deeply manipulative. It trades in sweeping emotional arcs, tragic sacrifice, and uplifting monologues, often at the expense of intellectual coherence or pedagogical reality.

You don’t need to hate the film to see the danger in uncritically embracing its message.

Set in a rigid 1950s prep school, Dead Poets Society follows a group of boys inspired by their new English teacher, Mr Keating. Encouraged to “seize the day,” they revive a secret poetry club and experiment with individuality, rebellion, and emotional expression. For Neil Perry, this means pursuing his dream of acting. For Todd Anderson (played by an impossibly youthful Ethan Hawke) it means finding his voice. And for Mr Keating? It means a return to his past.

Things fall apart. Neil takes his own life after his father forbids him from acting. Keating is blamed. The society dissolves. The boys return to order but not without scars.

Importantly, Mr Keating Is not the hero. Williams plays Keating with a mix of tenderness and theatricality, but he’s a cipher. We know almost nothing about him. Why is he in this job? What does he actually teach? His quirkiness - tea, football, the odd British affectation - is never explained. He’s less a character than a McGuffin: his presence kicks off the plot, but he doesn’t evolves and at the end is ushered out like a failed Mary Poppins.

Keating does almost nothing. He doesn’t help Neil navigate his controlling father. He doesn’t intervene when students take dangerous risks. He inspires, but never instructs. His pedagogy is all performance, no structure, no guidance, no tackling tough ideas.

But then, It’s not Keating’s story: it’s Neil’s and Todd’s. Neil, with his dream of acting and tragic trajectory, is a textbook Romantic hero: passionate, doomed, and misunderstood. Todd is the one who grows, finding his voice in the film’s most famous scene, when he finally stands on his desk and salutes Keating with Whitman’s line, “O Captain, my Captain.” But even Todd’s growth is ambiguous. Has he been empowered? Or, like us, simply caught in the sentimental swell of the moment?

In Keating’s classroom - or, more often, outside it - literature is not so much treated as an object of study as a catalyst for self-discovery. Poems arrive like secret messages from the past, to be whispered in caves, scrawled in notebooks, or declaimed from desks. The boys don’t encounter poetry as the slow, deliberate work of close reading; they encounter it as a series of talismanic snippets, fragments of language charged with emotional power.

Arguably the most famous quotation in the film, “O Captain, my Captain…” from Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, mourning a leader felled before his work was done, is transformed into a student-to-teacher salute. In Whitman’s poem, the “captain” is a dead president; in Welton Academy, Keating is mythologising himself in real time. At no point do we see the poem explored, or even read in full, it becomes a mere gobbet, a nickname, a shared password in his cult of inspiration.

Keating uses the quote from Thoreau’s Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach…” as the rallying cry for the revived Dead Poets Society. He frames Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond as a metaphor for rejecting conformity and embracing life on one’s own terms. In the film, it’s less about 19th-century American Transcendentalism’s critique of industrial society, and more about personal authenticity and adventure. Thoreau’s political radicalism, his minimalist ethics is left aside. The focus is on the romance of escape. Telling, the quote is not completed: “…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.“

Also from Whitman - this time, aptly, from Song of Myself - Keating exhorts his students to “sound [their] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” This is an unashamed declaration of self-expression. Keating uses it as an exercise in spontaneity, coaxing the painfully shy Todd Anderson into improvising a poem aloud. It’s a teaching moment, but it’s about performance, not textual analysis. The yawp is all about breaking inhibition, and not at all in engaging Whitman’s sprawling, democratic vision of the self.

And, most egregiously, Keating whispers a line from Robert Frost’s most famous poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’:

Two paths diverged in a wood and I— 
I took the one less traveled by 
And that has made all the difference.

Keating wields the poem as a banner for nonconformity: take the path “less travelled by.” But this ignores both that Frost himself described the poem as a “joke,” and that the Keating interpretation ignores the poem’s ironies. Both paths were “really about the same,” and that our sense of choosing uniquely is often a retrospective fiction. In the classroom, it becomes a clean, uncomplicated encouragement to “make your own way,” stripped of Frost’s ambivalence about choice and memory. The final stanza, rather than being a celebration of taking the more difficult path, is a post hoc confabulation in which the narrator boasts that “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence” that his very ordinary decision to take a random route becomes, through the haze of memory and self-deception, an aggrandized version of events. The “sigh” may be satisfaction, regret, or simply the wistful performance of a life narrated to sound more deliberate than it was. Frost’s genius lies in leaving that ambiguity unresolved, forcing us to confront how we mythologise our own choices.

Keating’s use of the poem erases this complexity. In his classroom, The Road Not Taken becomes a motivational poster: a neat moral about individuality, detached from the text’s wry acknowledgment that most of our decisions are far less singular than we like to imagine. The subtle mockery of self-dramatising memory is replaced by a clear-cut imperative: be different and “sieze the day”. What’s lost is precisely what makes Frost’s poem enduring: its refusal to tell us whether “difference” is something we truly choose or merely something we later tell ourselves we did.

Keating’s use of “The Road Not Taken“ reveals much about his approach to teaching. He treats literature less as an object of study than as a storehouse of quotable lines, each ready to be cut, pasted, and redeployed as inspiration. The poems become delivery systems for life lessons rather than works to be interrogated on their own terms. Whether he understands the original context and chooses to ignore it, or never truly engages with it in the first place, is impossible to say. The effect is the same: meaning is whatever serves his immediate purpose. His method is seductive, but it encourages students to read for personal resonance alone, rather than to wrestle with what a text might actually mean. In this sense, Keating models selective misreading and he does so with such charm that few of the boys think to question.

The other staff at Welton Academy do question though. When challenged, Keating defends himself by saying his job is to get the boys to “think for themselves.” In his mind, this justifies the stripping down of poems to their emotional core: the point is not to master content, but to awaken autonomy. It’s a classic Romantic defence: better a flawed but self-generated thought than a perfectly recited line of received wisdom.

The headmaster, Mr Nolan, pointedly disagrees. For him, the school’s purpose is to produce disciplined young men prepared for elite universities: conformity, not idiosyncrasy, is the goal. Nolan’s dissent isn’t merely authoritarian grumbling; it reflects a fundamentally different theory of education. Where Keating believes in cultivating self-expression, Nolan believes thinking for yourself is not the starting point but the culmination of a long process of intellectual formation: you earn the right to independence by first mastering the structures, disciplines, and inherited knowledge that will make it meaningful. Keating, by contrast, wants the boys to begin with independence, trusting - naively - that the rest will follow. The clash is not simply between repression and freedom, but between two incompatible sequences: Nolan insists that discipline precedes liberty, Keating that discipline is anathema to the flowering of human potential.

This tension runs through the film. Keating wants the boys to improvise their readings, tear pages from their anthologies, and see themselves in the poets they recite. Nolan wants them to respect the text, the hierarchy, and the tradition. The irony, of course, is that Keating’s “think for yourself” mantra often comes pre-packaged as his way of thinking: a curated Romanticism in which the “correct” way to be independent is to respond emotionally, dramatically, and in line with his own enthusiasms. The boys are liberated from rote learning, but they’re also subtly channelled into his preferred vision of liberation.

This clash between Keating and Nolan is exactly the kind of fault line Isaiah Berlin spent much of his career mapping. In his famous lecture on Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin distinguished between negative liberty (freedom from interference) and positive liberty (the freedom to realise one’s potential, often through the guidance of an authority.)

Keating’s pedagogy is grounded in negative liberty: remove the constraints, tear out the preface, let the boys chart their own course. Nolan’s is unapologetically positive in the older, paternalistic sense: the teacher knows what the student needs, and mastery of the canon comes first. Berlin’s insight is that both models have dangers. Unchecked negative liberty can become drift or chaos, just as rigid positive liberty can harden into coercion. The argument playing out in Welton Academy’s oak-panelled corridors is not just a dispute about school rules, but a miniature version of a centuries-old philosophical battle, one that Romanticism, with its exaltation of authenticity and rebellion, decisively tilted in Keating’s favour.

But of course, the film is heading towards disaster. Neil’s suicide is the point where the film’s philosophical tensions move from the abstract to the tragic. It’s the moment where Romanticism’s promise of liberation collides with authoritarianism’s demand for obedience and neither side emerges clean.

From Berlin’s perspective, Neil is caught between two incompatible liberties. Keating offers negative liberty: the freedom to define himself, to act according to his own desires, in Neil’s case, acting in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His father, Mr Perry, enforces a hard form of positive liberty: he knows what’s “best” for Neil, and will compel him to follow that predetermined path, in this case medicine. The confrontation is pure Romanticism versus authoritarian paternalism, authenticity versus imposed purpose.

The tragedy is that neither model contains the resources Neil needs. Keating gives him inspiration without protection; the courage to stand up to his father, but not the tools to negotiate, compromise, or withstand the consequences. Mr Perry gives him structure without humanity; a clear path, but one imposed so brutally that it crushes Neil’s spirit. In Berlin’s terms, Neil is denied the combination of liberty and support that might have allowed him to flourish.

Is Keating responsible? In a narrow sense, no: he doesn’t cause Neil’s death, and the blame lies most directly with the father’s intransigence. But Keating does help create the conditions for the crisis. His Romantic idealism encourages Neil to act decisively in the name of selfhood, yet offers no counsel on how to navigate entrenched authority or survive when liberty meets its limits. Inspiration without strategy is a dangerous gift.

The school’s response - to scapegoat Keating and reinforce its authoritarian norms - shows how easily a failed exercise in negative liberty can be used to justify doubling down on positive liberty in its most coercive form. In the end, Berlin’s warning about the perils of both extremes plays out exactly: freedom without structure leaves Neil vulnerable; structure without freedom makes him despair. The tragedy is not that one side “won,” but that the boy was left with nothing in between.

The final classroom scene, and probably the most memorable scene in the film, sees Todd and a handful of boys standing on their desks to salute Keating with the moniker, “O Captain! my Captain!”. This is both an emotional bookend to his first lesson but is also staged to be rousing, defiant, and redemptive: the Romantic disciple honouring the Romantic teacher in one last symbolic act of loyalty.

But when we strip away the swell of Maurice Jarre’s music and the camera’s slow upward tilt, the moment looks more complicated. The boys are not reclaiming their education or overturning the school’s authority. Keating is still fired. Nolan is still in charge. Most of the class remains seated. The salute is a gesture; brave in its way, but entirely symbolic, costing the boys little beyond a reprimand.

The line itself, torn from Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, has been transformed across the film from a playful nickname into a badge of allegiance. In Whitman’s poem, the captain is dead, the ship has come to harbour, and the nation mourns its leader. In Welton Academy, the “captain” is not dead, only dismissed; the voyage is not over, merely interrupted. The boys aren’t mourning a fallen leader so much as performing their grief by adopting the poem’s emotional register without its historical weight.

This, again, is Keating’s Romantic pedagogy in miniature: literature as an emotional resource, a set of potent fragments to be deployed in the service of self-expression. The final tableau is deeply moving, but it’s also ambiguous. It affirms the bond between teacher and pupils, yet does nothing to challenge the structures that crushed Neil or expelled Keating. As with much of the film, its power lies in the feeling it generates, not in the change it effects. It’s the perfect Romantic ending: beautiful, stirring, and, in practical terms, entirely symbolic.

Taken on its own terms, Dead Poets Society is a gorgeous, emotionally resonant piece of filmmaking. It’s full of quotable lines, atmospheric imagery, and Robin Williams at his most restrained and magnetic. It makes literature feel alive, urgent, and personal. It makes teaching look like a vocation of liberation rather than administration. It makes you want to stand on a desk.

But as a statement about education, it’s far more problematic. The film’s central message, that great teaching is about inspiring students to “seize the day” and “think for themselves,” is intoxicating, but also dangerously incomplete. It sets up a false dichotomy between Romantic self-expression and authoritarian conformity, as though the only choice were between Keating’s poetry-fuelled liberation and Nolan’s oak-panelled orthodoxy. It ignores the possibility that structure and inspiration might coexist, that rigour and creativity are not enemies but partners in the long work of intellectual growth.

Keating’s flaw is that he gives his students passion without the scaffolding to channel it; Nolan’s flaw is that he offers structure without humanity. The tragedy of Neil Perry is that he’s caught between these absolutes with no middle ground to stand on. In Berlin’s terms, the film dramatises the dangers of both negative liberty without support and positive liberty without compassion.

So what should we think of it? Admire it, certainly, for the way it makes poetry matter to a mass audience, for its belief in the transformative power of words. But we should also resist its seductions. Dead Poets Society is not a manual for teaching. It’s a Romantic fantasy - beautiful, stirring, and dangerously partial - and if we take it as truth rather than myth, we risk mistaking inspiration for education, and slogans for the slow, often unglamorous work of helping young people grow.

After a short break, It’s Your Time You’re Wasting is back! Watch on YouTube above or listen here.

If you believe human beings have free will - the ability to make choices that are not determined by prior causes, and the capacity to act according to one’s own reasoned decisions, independently of coercion or necessity - you’re probably wrong.

The dominant folk psychology of education runs on the fumes of free will. In everyday terms, it means believing that you could have done otherwise. That, faced with a decision, you genuinely had multiple possible paths and selected one freely, as the author of your own actions. We tend to talk as if students decide whether to work hard, behave well, or take responsibility. We praise effort, grit, and resilience as though these virtues emerge ex nihilo from the character of the child. When these qualities are absent, we blame laziness, defiance, or apathy. Either way, it’s personal. It’s theirs to own. This is libertarianism, or folk free will and it tends to assume that human beings are self-governing agents who originate their choices without being entirely shaped by biology, environment, or unconscious processes.

But what if none of this is true? What if choices are illusions, and will is a narrative we spin after the fact?

At the opposite end of the spectrum lies determinism: the view that all events, including human thoughts, decisions, and actions, are the inevitable result of preceding causes. Given the state of the world at any moment - including the laws of physics, one’s genes, prior experiences, and environmental inputs - only one outcome is possible.

In its strongest form, hard determinism denies the existence of free will altogether. It argues that the feeling of choice is illusory: we think we are choosing freely, but in reality, our decisions are simply the downstream effects of prior causes beyond our control. You didn’t choose your genes, your upbringing, your temperament, or the options presented to you, yet these shape everything about how you act.

This view presupposes that if we had perfect knowledge of the universe’s starting conditions and physical laws, we could predict every future event - including your decision to read this article (or not to) - with absolute certainty.

Albert Einstein was a committed determinist. He famously rejected the idea of randomness at the heart of quantum mechanics with the line, “God does not play dice with the universe.” For Einstein, the universe operated according to fixed laws, and everything — including human behaviour — was subject to those laws.

In a 1932 letter, he wrote:

“I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants,’ has deeply impressed me… Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control.”

Einstein saw the notion of radical freedom as a comforting illusion. Like many physicists of his generation, he believed in a clockwork universe; one in which all events, including our own mental states, are causally determined. From that perspective, free will doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: it’s a convenient fiction we tell ourselves because we lack access to the full chain of causes.

Schrödinger, best known for his eponymous cat, helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics. At the quantum level, particles don’t behave deterministically. Instead, they’re governed by probability distributions, waves of likelihood that collapse into definite outcomes only when observed. Schrödinger himself was deeply uncomfortable with this indeterminacy, which is why he devised his famous cat paradox to highlight how absurd it seems: a cat in a box, both alive and dead until someone looks.

In the 20th century, some philosophers and physicists latched onto this indeterminacy as a possible refuge for free will. If the universe isn’t strictly deterministic - if at the smallest scales outcomes are probabilistic - then perhaps our decisions aren’t entirely caused either. Maybe there’s room for freedom in the wiggle of quantum uncertainty.

But this idea - sometimes called randomism - is a red herring. Randomness is not the same as freedom. If our actions are determined, they’re not free. But if they’re random - the result of some subatomic coin toss - they’re not free either. A roulette wheel doesn’t make choices. As philosopher Galen Strawson put it, “You do what you do because of the way you are. But if the way you are is just the result of blind chance, that’s no help.”1

Einstein’s determinism was not cynical, but humbling. It led him toward compassion, not condemnation, because he believed people could not be held absolutely responsible for actions that were the inevitable result of causes beyond their control. This is a position we’ll return to later…

What does the science say?

Neuroscience suggests that decisions are made in the brain before we are aware of having made them. Libet’s famous experiments in the 1980s showed that electrical activity predicting an action precedes conscious intent by hundreds of milliseconds. Libet’s conclusion was provocative: that what we experience as free will might in fact be a retrospective story, not the origin of action. Soon et al (2008) took it further, using brain scans to predict the decisions subjects would make up to ten seconds in advance. By the time you “choose,” the decision has already been made.

Add to this the work of Michael Gazzaniga on split-brain patients, whose corpus callosum - the bridge between the brain’s hemispheres - has been surgically severed, usually to treat severe epilepsy. In these individuals, the left and right hemispheres can no longer communicate directly, yet each continues to function, sometimes independently. Gazzaniga discovered that when information is presented to only one hemisphere, the other may be completely unaware of it, yet still acts as if it understands.

In one striking experiment, the word “walk” is flashed to the patient’s right hemisphere (via the left visual field), which controls the left side of the body. The patient stands up and begins walking out of the room. When asked why - a question posed to the left hemisphere, which didn’t see the word - the patient says, “I’m going to get a Coke.” The explanation is confabulated: plausible, but entirely made up. The actual cause of the behaviour was inaccessible to the conscious, verbal self.

From this, Gazzaniga concluded that the left hemisphere acts as an interpreter, creating coherent narratives to explain actions it did not initiate or understand. In other words, the self - the narrating, reflective “I” - is not the true source of action, but a kind of internal storyteller, post-rationalising events that emerge from unconscious processes.2

This challenges any naive notion of unified agency. If our brains can generate behaviour without the involvement of conscious thought, and if our awareness merely invents reasons after the fact, then what we experience as free will may be little more than an elaborate illusion, a tidy fiction told to make sense of actions already underway.

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the rider and the elephant — drawn from his book The Righteous Mind, offers a vivid model of how human decision-making works. According to Haidt, our mind is divided into two parts: the intuitive, emotional, automatic system (the elephant) and the rational, deliberative, controlled system (the rider). The rider thinks it’s in charge, steering the elephant by reason and reflection, but in reality, the elephant usually leads and the rider justifies where it’s already decided to go.

This metaphor draws heavily on empirical research, including Haidt’s own Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment. He argues that moral decisions are made rapidly and emotionally, without conscious reasoning. When asked why we believe or feel a certain way - especially about moral issues - we often confabulate reasons after the fact. Haidt gives the example of moral dumbfounding: participants strongly object to morally taboo but harmless scenarios (such as consensual incest between adult siblings) and struggle to articulate why. They simply feel it’s wrong, then fumble for justifications.

The rider, in this framework, is like a press secretary or lawyer: clever, articulate, but ultimately subservient. Its job is not to make decisions, but to rationalise them. We don’t decide and then act; we act, then construct a plausible story about why we acted. And often, we believe the story ourselves.

This undermines the classic view of free will as rational, conscious deliberation leading to voluntary action. If our judgments arise from processes we neither initiate nor fully understand - and our conscious mind’s main role is spin-doctoring - then the idea that we are the true originators of our actions becomes suspect.

Genes and environment

Although we like to think of ourselves as self-made, autonomous agents, we don’t choose our genes, our early upbringing, our socioeconomic conditions, or the countless micro-conditions that shape personality, preferences, and cognitive capacities. Yet these factors exert profound influence on how we behave, think, and decide.

Genetically, we inherit predispositions: temperament, impulsivity, emotional reactivity, baseline intelligence, working memory capacity, attention span, and even the likelihood of persistence in the face of challenge. Twin studies and genome-wide association studies consistently show that these traits are highly heritable, though not wholly determined. For example, a child genetically predisposed to low dopamine sensitivity may struggle more with delayed gratification or abstract rewards — traits often read in school as laziness or defiance.

Environmentally, our development is shaped by parenting style, language exposure, nutrition, trauma, early education, and cultural norms. A child raised in a chaotic household may develop heightened stress responses that impair executive function. Another might come to school already several thousand words behind in vocabulary exposure. These are not “choices” children make, yet they frame nearly every decision they go on to take.

Even apparent cases of grit and determination can often be traced to early experiences of success, attachment, or reward, all of which are distributed unequally. As the saying goes: genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.

The upshot is this: when we praise one child for “choosing to work hard” and punish another for “choosing to misbehave,” we often mistake background noise for moral character. If our educational systems ignore the causal machinery behind behaviour - the unseen variables of biology and upbringing - then we will inevitably reward the already-advantaged and penalise the constrained.

Understanding the interplay of genetics and environment doesn’t mean we should surrender to fatalism. Quite the opposite: it means recognising that real freedom is something schools can help build. But only if we first acknowledge that it is not given equally to all.

The compatabilist view

Daniel Dennett offered a way of resolving the deep tension between the scientific evidence suggesting our choices are caused and the powerful everyday experience that we act freely. His move is not to deny the evidence, but to redefine what we mean by free will, to rescue it from metaphysical fantasy and relocate it in the realm of biological realism.

Dennett argued that free will needn’t be magical to be meaningful. We don’t need to be uncaused causes; we need to be responsive, reflective, and capable of learning. His compatibilist view reframes agency as a biological achievement, not a metaphysical endowment. We are not puppets; we are pattern detectors and strategy testers, shaped by evolution to weigh options, anticipate consequences, and override base instincts. In this sense, agency isn’t undermined by determinism, it depends on it.

Consider, for example, a student faced with a decision to revise for an exam or watch Netflix. The desire for distraction is immediate and emotionally gratifying; the benefits of revision are abstract and delayed. A purely reactive creature might always choose short-term pleasure. But a reflective, reasons-responsive agent — like a human — can pause, simulate future outcomes, and decide based on more than the most immediate reward. She might remember the consequences of previous procrastination or visualise the pride of achieving a good grade, and use that foresight to override the impulse.

Or think about learning from mistakes. A child who interrupts constantly in class might, over time and through repeated correction, begin to anticipate the social cost: missed friendships, disapproval, a teacher’s dismay. If he reflects on these experiences and adapts his behaviour, that’s not evidence of a disembodied will. It’s a sign of complex, embedded agency: the product of a nervous system shaped by feedback loops, memory, and context-sensitive learning.

Even more dramatically, take the case of addiction. Someone struggling with alcohol dependency may not be able to choose sobriety at will, especially if impulsivity and trauma have eroded their executive control. But through therapy, structure, and practice, they may slowly build the cognitive scaffolding needed to anticipate triggers, simulate cravings, and override the compulsion. That’s not libertarian free will, but it’s freedom hard-won: causal, constructed, real.

Dennett’s point is that these capacities - foresight, learning, inhibition, self-authorship - don’t require us to be the unmoved movers of philosophical fantasy. They arise gradually, through evolution, socialisation, and development. We aren’t free from causality, but through it. Determinism doesn’t enslave us. It makes us capable of growth.

In short, we can be held responsible, not because we are radically autonomous, but because we are the kinds of beings whose actions are shaped by reasons, and who can be influenced by norms, narratives, and consequences. We don’t float above the causal web; we are tangled in it but we can learn to tug at the right threads.

Why should teachers care about the metaphysics of will?

Because the belief that students are radically free - that they could always “just try harder” or “make better choices” - is toxic. It leads to moralising, blaming, and a grotesque unfairness: the idea that those who fail simply make poor choices.

If instead we adopt a view of constrained agency - that choices are shaped by genetics, upbringing, experience, and environment - then we shift the educational lens from blame to design and arrive at something closer to Einstein’s compassionate determinism. You don’t blame a plant for not thriving; you ask about the soil, the light, the water. Likewise, if a student seems lazy, distracted, or rude, we should ask what system conditions might be shaping that behaviour.

This doesn’t mean abandoning standards or responsibility. Holding people to account shapes future behaviour. Responsibility becomes a developmental concept, not a punitive one. You don’t scream at a toddler for lacking impulse control. You scaffold it. You design for it.

Education, then, becomes freedom-engineering. We teach not because students are free, but because they aren’t and good teaching gives them more options. We build executive function, expand the capacity to think and reason, and teach students to reflect, pause, and simulate. We give them powerful knowledge so they can imagine new futures. Curriculum is not neutral; it is ontological. It determines what kinds of person a student can become.

Believing in absolute free will does more harm than denying it exists. It makes failure a moral flaw and success a matter of virtue. It encourages teachers to see misbehaviour as defiance rather than dysregulation. It hides inequality behind the veil of meritocracy. If everyone can choose, then everything is deserved.

But if we accept that agency is built, not born - that children are not so much authors as co-authors of their actions, shaped by systems as much as selves - then we are forced to design schools that compensate, scaffold, and support. We become gardeners, not judges.

“But if there’s no free will, why teach?” Because teaching is part of the causal chain. You don’t need free will to believe in change. You just need cause and effect.

“But won’t kids stop taking responsibility?” Not if responsibility is taught, modelled, and made meaningful. The best way to help students take ownership is not to blame them, but to build them.

“But some kids clearly do choose to work hard!” Yes — and that choice is conditioned. Praise the effort, of course. But don’t pretend the playing field is level.

What we believe about free will shapes everything we do in schools. If we get this wrong, we punish the vulnerable and reward the lucky. If we get it right, we create conditions in which more young people can become the kind of agent who really can choose better, next time.

What does it mean to say a child is “engaged”? Eyes locked on the board? Hand up like a meerkat on a sugar rush? Maybe they’re SLANTing, or more likely just not mucking about. In schools, we fling the word engagement about with casual confidence, as if we all agree what it means. It’s become shorthand for “something good is happening here.” Perhaps engagement means students are having fun? Up out of their seats sticking post-its on things? We sometimes treat these outward signs - activity, compliance, enthusiasm - as though they were evidence of learning. Maybe it should mean “engaged with thinking hard about the curriculum”?

Or does engagement mean simply showing up? Given the current attendance crisis, with persistent absence rates in some areas nudging 30 percent, perhaps even being present has become a kind of engagement. Children, as Becks Boomer-Clark recently put it, may be “voting with their feet.” If they don’t come, they don’t learn. But the inverse doesn’t hold: just because they’re present doesn’t mean they’re learning anything worth knowing. And just because they’re nodding along doesn’t mean they’re thinking.

Let’s get our definitions straight. Engagement might mean behavioural engagement: turning up, doing what’s asked, looking the part. Or emotional engagement: feeling interested, enjoying the activity, liking your teacher. Or cognitive engagement: the holy grail, which involves sustained effort, grappling with complexity, and sticking with tasks that stretch the mind.

The trouble is, we often collapse these meanings into one another. A student who looks busy is assumed to be learning. A smiling child is read as motivated. But as Dylan Wiliam reminds us, “Anyone can think up interesting and engaging activities that will occupy students in classrooms, but unfortunately such activities do not always, or even often, result in valued learning for students.”1

Imagine students working together to make a poster on Macbeth. There’s big sheets of sugar paper, scissors, collaborative chat. Everyone’s “engaged”. But what are they thinking about? If their attention is on layout, colour, and spelling the word “ambition” out in bubble writing, then that’s what they’ll remember. Daniel Willingham’s dictum rings out: “Memory is the residue of thought.”2

The uncomfortable truth: is that real engagement often doesn’t look like fun. It looks like silence, or frustration, or long moments of effortful thinking. It doesn’t always photograph well. In fact, if you’re constantly striving to make lessons more engaging in the visible, fun sense, you may be inadvertently undermining the kind of engagement that matters.

What should schools do to get students to engage — in every sense?

First, let’s be honest: most talk of engagement in schools is cosmetic. We look for smiles, movement, hands up, eyes forward. We praise participation as if it were learning, mistaking enthusiasm for understanding. But real engagement is something deeper — and rarer. It’s the sustained effort to master something hard. It’s the emotional investment in ideas that matter. It’s thinking when you don’t have to. And it’s turning up not just in body, but in mind.

So what can schools actually do?

1. Stop chasing entertainment, start building thinking

Learning is not the same as being busy. If students are thinking about cutting and sticking, that’s what they’ll remember. If they’re thinking about Macbeth’s fatal flaw, they might just remember that instead. Engagement that doesn’t involve thought is educational theatre. If we want students to engage cognitively, we need to design lessons that demand and reward thought.

2. Sequence success

We assume motivation drives achievement, but the evidence suggests the reverse. Motivation follows from success. When students experience the pleasure of understanding something difficult, they want more. That means building curriculum carefully - step by step, gapless, and cumulative - so that everyone gets to feel clever. Not once a year, but every lesson. That’s how you create commitment.

3. Normalise struggle

Real learning often feels uncomfortable. But too many students have been conditioned to believe that difficulty means failure. Schools must recast struggle as a signal of progress, not a threat to self-worth. This requires trust, structure, and classrooms where it’s safe to get things wrong. Emotional engagement doesn’t come from easy wins, but from the confidence that effort will pay off.

4. Make the curriculum matter

Students are more likely to think hard when the material feels worth thinking about. A diet of low-level tasks, disconnected topics and fake relevance breeds indifference. Engagement grows when students encounter powerful knowledge: the kind that explains the world, deepens understanding, and gives them access to the conversations that shape culture and society. If the curriculum is hollow, don’t expect deep engagement.

5. Make school a place worth turning up to

Engagement starts with presence. If students don’t attend, they can’t engage. But if school feels confusing, irrelevant or joyless, why would they come? If, as Boomer-Clark put it, children are “voting with their feet,” the solution isn’t gimmicks or threats. It’s making school coherent, purposeful and achievable. When students know what they’re doing, why it matters, and how to get better, they’re more likely to show up, in every sense.

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We - and by we I do not, of course, mean most of those actually working in schools - have somehow persuaded ourselves that schools can mend what society has broken. As rates of adolescent anxiety, depression and self-harm continue their grim ascent, we reach not for the roots of this misery, but for the nearest sticking plasters: mindfulness sessions, gratitude journals, breathing exercises and an ever-expanding carousel of ‘wellbeing’ initiatives.

It all sounds terribly humane. Who could object to teaching children to regulate their emotions? But beneath the soothing language, something rather troubling is happening. In our desperation to be seen to do something - anything - we have mistaken performance for provision. We have reimagined mental health as a competency to be taught, a skill to be mastered, as if anxiety were simply the result of faulty cognitive habits rather than a rational response to the world we have made and in which young people have to live.

The figures ought to make us pause. According to NHS Digital’s 2023 survey, 20% of 8 to 16 year olds and 23% of 17 to 19 year olds in England are now identified as having a probable mental disorder. Among older teenagers, over a third of young women meet the threshold. Mind notes that self-harm and eating disorders are rising fastest among girls, while Peter Fonagy, Senior National Clinical Adviser on Children and Young People's Mental Health for (the now defunct) NHS England points out that these trends reflect not just greater diagnosis but greater distress. Poverty, housing insecurity, family breakdown, and unrelenting academic pressure. These are the forces shaping young minds, not a lack of guided breathing practice. The House of Commons Library confirms what those in schools already know: support services are overwhelmed, thresholds for help are impossibly high, and too many young people are left stranded.

A headteacher at a school I work with recently told me about a Year 9 boy who had been referred for school-based wellbeing support after struggling with low mood. His ‘intervention’ consisted of attending a weekly mindfulness group in a room decorated with soft cushions, pastel posters, and laminated affirmations: You are enough. After six sessions of breathing exercises, his attendance had fallen further, his anxiety worsened, and he was refusing to enter lessons altogether. When staff discussed the case, the suggestion was that he might benefit from more mindfulness. No one mentioned the fact that he was living in temporary accommodation, caring for a younger sibling, and weeks behind in multiple subjects.

Mindfulness, in particular, has become the snake oil of modern schooling: endlessly promoted, poorly understood, and largely unexamined. Children sit in circles, eyes closed, learning to breathe through their distress while the conditions fuelling that distress remain entirely unaltered. In many cases, we are teaching children to adapt themselves to systems that are fundamentally indifferent to their wellbeing.1

Even worse, these interventions risk individualising failure. If you’re still anxious after six weeks of emotional regulation lessons, the implication is clear: you’re not trying hard enough; the fault is yours. Thus responsibility for suffering is subtly shifted from the structural to the personal. It is not poverty, insecurity, or family breakdown that leaves you anxious, but your own inability to ‘self-care’ effectively.

These therapeutic approaches are often curiously post-hoc. First, we tell young people that they are fragile, vulnerable, and at risk. Then, when they struggle, we interpret their struggle as confirmation of precisely that narrative. In attempting to explain why they feel sad or broken, we may end up supplying them with the very scripts that sustain distress. The story becomes the evidence; the diagnosis becomes the identity.

And yet, for all the political capital invested, the research tells a stubbornly consistent story. Large-scale studies, including the Department for Education’s own Education for Wellbeing trial, repeatedly find that these universal interventions produce little or no lasting improvement in anxiety, depression or wellbeing. If anything, those most at risk benefit least. Recent studies from Andrews et al. (2022) and Seely et al. (2023) suggest that outcomes often depend more on pre-existing peer networks than on the interventions themselves: for the isolated or socially anxious, these sessions may inadvertently deepen a sense of exclusion.

Systematic reviews from Miller & Thabrew (2024) and McKenzie & Williams (2018) have raised further concerns. Many trials rely on short-term self-reporting, where children, primed to scan for emotional difficulties, begin to interpret ordinary discomfort as pathological. What begins as prevention slides into low-grade medicalisation. The very attempt to manage risk often ends up amplifying it.

The uncomfortable truth is that schools are not mental health services, and cannot be made into them by bolting on a few PSHE sessions. What protects children is not positive affirmations but coherent curricula, expert teaching, strong relationships and a culture that values academic success without fetishising it. Security comes not from safe spaces but from schools that are safe.

Of course, none of this offers the easy optics that wellbeing workshops provide. It is far easier to train staff in mindfulness techniques than to redesign assessment systems, rethink league tables, or acknowledge the corrosive effects of chronic underinvestment.

And so, we tinker at the edges, prescribing breathing exercises to children who are drowning and, in the worst cases, unthinkingly pushing them under.

The best protection against mental health disorders that schools can offer (and the only ones teachers and other school staff are qualified to offer) is to be places of warmth and safety, where every child is known, where high expectations are matched with the support to meet them, and where success is made genuinely attainable for all. When children feel secure, valued, and able to achieve, the need for therapeutic sticking plasters might diminish of its own accord.

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If you’ve found this post interesting, you might enjoy this week’s essay for paid subscribers on the Fundamental Attribution Error. I keep subscription as low as Substack will allow: £3.50 per month or £30 per year.

Assessment, like death taxes and school shoes, feels inevitable. No one seems especially fond of it, but everyone insists we need it. It is, we’re told, the cornerstone of rigour, the proof of learning, the means by which we separate wheat from chaff. Yet as the DfE embarks on yet another review, as newspapers trot out the latest tales of GCSE-induced trauma, and as university professors fret about the moral collapse heralded by ChatGPT, we might pause to ask: what exactly are we doing when we assess?

The Great Review

The Department for Education’s long-awaited curriculum and assessment review, chaired by Becky Francis, has released its interim findings. (More on David’s thoughts here.) The document is couched in the usual technocratic language - “misaligned systems,” “future readiness,” “equity of progression” - but between the lines there is a damning admission: the current assessment regime is not fit for purpose.

Key concerns? The exclusion of SEND pupils, the shallowness of curriculum coverage, the irrelevance of much tested knowledge, and the sheer inequity of post-16 outcomes. Stakeholders, from the Royal Society to the National Literacy Trust, echo the refrain: assessments must do more than sort and shame. They should deepen learning, support literacy, and widen opportunity.

What’s telling, however, is how cautious even this ‘review’ is. The critique is clear, but the proposals remain hedged, gesturing toward incremental reform rather than the radical reimagining the moment seems to demand.

A ritual in search of a purpose

the purpose of exams is not simply to measure learning but to provide an objective, external check on what students know and can do. Exams create a shared standard across schools, offering comparability, consistency, and transparency in a way that internal assessments cannot. They help validate effort, structure curriculum, and provide motivation for students.

But, when viewed through a behavioural lens, the apparent logic of exams is simple and seductive: what gets measured gets done. Students revise because there is a test. Teachers teach to the specification because that’s what will be assessed and how they will be held to account. Schools prioritise subjects that count in league tables. In theory, the exam acts as a motivator, an accountability tool, and a behaviour management system all at once. The assumption is that without this pressure, effort would dissipate and standards would slip.

Exams exist to sort and rank students. The logic rests on the belief that education must discriminate between students. Exams, under this view, serve to stratify: they separate the high achievers from the rest, allocate future opportunities, and create a hierarchy of merit. This sorting function is seen as necessary for managing scarce resources - university places, job offers, sixth-form admissions - and for signalling ability to institutions and employers. In essence, exams don’t just measure learning, they ration opportunity. The risk, of course, is that we begin to value the ranking more than the learning itself.

What are the effects?

The consequence appears to be a dramatic decline in students’ mental health. According to one survey, 85% of UK students experience exam anxiety, with 15% showing signs of high test anxiety and 30–40% of pupils report high anxiety levels during exam season. A synthesis of 48 studies concluded that exam periods are consistently associated with heightened anxiety and poorer mental health . Moreover, Childline reports a 10% increase in counselling sessions specifically focused on exam stress since the pandemic, totalling nearly 2,000 sessions in one year alone.

More recently, a 20024 survey by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) paints a stark picture of the emotional toll GCSEs are taking on pupils. Drawing on responses from 787 school leaders, the findings reveal that 73% report students are “significantly anxious” about exams, with nearly half (48%) witnessing pupils leaving exam halls in distress. A further 45% said pupils required special arrangements—such as extra time or separate rooms—due to the severity of their anxiety. ASCL described the situation as a “mental health emergency playing out in school exam halls,” calling into question the cost of the current high-stakes model.

So what should we do?

The question of whether GCSEs should be scrapped has never felt more urgent or more divisive. A recent Guardian feature gathers a chorus of voices from across the education landscape, revealing deep disagreement not only about the exams themselves but about the broader purpose of education.

For those in favour of abolition, the argument is clear. GCSEs are seen as outdated qualifications that reflect an education system designed for a time when most students left school at sixteen. That time has passed, but the exams remain. Headteacher Ben Davis describes GCSEs as actively harmful. He says, “I’d go so far as to say they are making young people ill and they impoverish teaching.” His alternative is a diploma model that blends academic subjects with vocational routes and life skills, allowing pupils to build a portfolio suited to their strengths and aspirations.

Columnist Simon Jenkins goes further, describing the current system as a destructive cult that ranks and controls rather than educates. He urges policymakers to face the truth and abolish the qualification altogether. Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, Says, “We’ve created an exam system that perpetuates privilege from one generation to the next.” In his view, GCSEs do not reward merit, they reward resources. Private tutoring and middle-class cultural familiarity tip the scales, while those without access to these advantages are left behind. This sentiment is shared by head teachers of various private schools, and, of all things, the Tony Blair Institute. Their message is the same: the system is no longer fit for purpose.

Others, however, are more cautious. Sammy Wright, author of Exam Nation, argues that GCSEs push all students into an academic mould and only offer alternatives once those students have failed. He proposes a “passport qualification” that would reflect a broader set of outcomes and provide a more inclusive picture of achievement. Mary Richardson at UCL’s Institute of Education echoes the need for reform. She sees the issue less in the assessments themselves and more in the culture that surrounds them. GCSEs, she suggests, have become part of a corporate machine that adds little value to teenagers’ lives. Her solution is greater investment in teacher assessment and more meaningful forms of evaluation.

Not everyone is convinced. Katharine Birbalsingh, head mistress of Michaela Community School, defends GCSEs as an essential part of a rigorous education. Exams, she argues, do not just measure students. They keep schools accountable. Without them, she fears, standards would collapse into a kind of educational free-for-all. Richard Brown, headteacher at Urswick School, takes a similar view. He admits the system is not perfect, but insists it offers pupils a real and motivating challenge. He describes GCSEs as a “powerful brand,” and believes many students thrive because of them.

The tension between these views is not easily resolved. On one side is the call for a more humane, flexible, and inclusive system. On the other is a belief in clarity, comparability, and structure. While the debate gathers pace, the reality remains unchanged. Students continue to line up outside exam halls. Teachers continue to hand out pens. The questions may change, but for now, GCSEs lumber on.

Where the research points

Christopher DeLuca’s article, Assessment in education: looking back, looking forward marks thirty years of the journal Assessment in Education, offering both a retrospective and a provocation. DeLuca traces the shift in assessment culture from broad, formative aims to narrow, high-stakes accountability. The trend, he argues, has been towards ever more standardisation, driven less by pedagogical insight and more by political anxiety. The result has been a system that constrains teaching, narrows curricula, and reduces learning to a performance.

The article laments the dominance of what it calls “assessment for surveillance.” Rather than supporting learning, assessments have become tools for managing teacher behaviour and policing school performance. This shift has hollowed out teacher agency and turned students into data points.

Yet the tone is not purely elegiac. DeLuca also calls for a return to purpose. Assessment, he insists, should be reimagined as a process of dialogue, not judgement. It should be embedded in classroom practice, responsive to context, and centred on learning rather than sorting. The future may lie in rebalancing professional trust with public accountability, and in resisting the illusion that numbers alone can capture what matters in education.

The problem is, embedding the assessment of students’ time in school in classroom practice and professional judgement comes with some predictable costs. Exams, despite Lee Elliot Major’s claim that GCSEs “fail the fairness test,” remain the fairest of all the unfair options available. As I’ve argued elsewhere, exams are standardised, externally marked, and less vulnerable to unconscious bias, social influence, or parental pressure. Teacher assessment, by contrast, is shaped by relationships, expectations, and sometimes by a desire to be kind, all of which can end up entrenching inequality rather than addressing it. Paradoxically, the impersonality of exams is what gives them their relative fairness: everyone sits the same paper, under the same conditions, and no one can be marked up (or down) because of who they are.

There’s strong empirical support showing that standardised exams produce fairer outcomes, especially for disadvantaged pupils, compared with teacher assessments. A 2021 Ofqual literature review concluded that teacher-based assessments are “more vulnerable to bias” than test-based assessments. It found consistent evidence that teachers tend to grade less advantaged students lower, even when those students perform equally well on objective tests  . Similar findings emerged internationally: students from low socioeconomic backgrounds or with special educational needs often receive lower teacher-assessed grades compared to their test-based performance. Daisy Christodoulou has summarised the historical case in plain terms: standardised exams consistently benefit disadvantaged students, challenging the common assumption that only teacher assessment helps those from underrepresented backgrounds. In fact, she argued, exams have historically been the mechanism through which civil service and educational systems sought to limit patronage and privilege .

So, Where Now?

We find ourselves in a strange position. Everyone - students, teachers, researchers, even some politicians - agrees the system is creaking but we remain paralysed by habit, tradition, and the deep political appeal of a number in a spreadsheet.

We speak of rigour but reward obedience. We value data over depth. And we persist, stubbornly, in assessing children not as they are, but as we once imagined them to be. The question isn’t whether assessment needs to change, but how. If exams, for all their flaws, are the fairest form of assessment, we have to focus on creating tests that are as good as possible and suit all children, not just the academically able. The idea that 40% of students fail English and maths every year cannot be acceptable and does npt have to continue. The are better, fairer ways to design and use exams.

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This week, Martin and David chew over what oracy means and what it should look like in schools.

In recent years, oracy has elbowed its way onto the educational agenda. Once the scruffy afterthought to literacy and numeracy, it’s now being paraded as education’s missing cornerstone, the supposed key to both social justice and employability. The Labour Party has seized on it, with Keir Starmer and Bridget Phillipson pitching oracy as the magic bullet to close attainment gaps, democratise opportunity, and cultivate the next generation of well-spoken citizens. And yet, beneath the warm glow of cross-party consensus, an awkward question lurks: what exactly is oracy? And does the evidence support the evangelical fervour with which it’s now being sold?

The oracy uprising

In 2021, The APPG’s Speak for Change report identified widespread inconsistency in oracy provision across schools in England, describing a ‘postcode lottery’ where pupils’ access to high-quality speaking and listening education depends heavily on individual schools and teachers. The report highlighted significant gaps in teacher training, both at initial and in-service stages, leaving many staff underprepared to teach oracy explicitly. It called for a national oracy strategy, including clear curriculum expectations, professional development pathways, and robust national standards to ensure all children have equitable access to structured oracy development throughout their schooling.

Last year, the Oracy Education Commission’s 2024 report, We Need to Talk, called for oracy to be treated as a foundational skill, one no less important than reading, writing, or arithmetic. Their ambition includes a national entitlement, better teacher training, and the embedding of oracy across the curriculum. Similarly, Voice 21 have made impressive strides: 1,100 schools, Oracy Centres of Excellence, whole-school training programmes. There’s a sense of momentum, though not everyone is convinced that this headlong enthusiasm is matched by conceptual clarity or a robust evidence base. As ever in education, the danger is that we rush to implement before we’ve agreed exactly what it is we’re implementing.

The National Literacy Trust adds moral force to this campaign, reporting that a third of children start school without the expected level of speaking and listening skills. Early language gaps predict later achievement gaps, so the argument goes. Oracy, we’re told, isn’t just about eloquence but equity.

Meanwhile, small-scale pilot studies from the EEF and Nottingham Trent suggest structured oracy programmes can boost confidence and attainment, especially for disadvantaged students. Their report offers cautious optimism for structured oracy teaching, reporting improvements in pupils’ confidence, participation, and classroom talk, particularly for younger and disadvantaged children. However, the study also highlights familiar problems: inconsistent definitions of oracy, difficulties in reliable assessment, and wide variation in how schools implemented the programmes. Teachers valued professional development but needed significant support to embed oracy effectively, raising questions about the feasibility of scaling provision system-wide. Without careful design, they warn, benefits may accrue unevenly.

So far, so persuasive. But as always, the devil is in the detail

Seductive rhetoric vs sound theory

Daisy Christodoulou’s recent piece What is Good Oracy? offers a bracing counterweight to the prevailing orthodoxy. Her critique is simple: much of what passes for oracy prioritises surface-level fluency over depth and accuracy. Confidence is mistaken for understanding. Speaking well is not the same as thinking well.

Assessment adds further complication. Assessing Oracy: The Next Phase raises serious doubts about the reliability of evaluating talk. How do we measure thoughtfulness, responsiveness, or rhetorical sophistication in a fair and consistent way? Subjectivity looms large.

Ian Cushing offers a critique which takes issue with the notion that oracy offers a straightforward route to social justice, exposing the uncomfortable lineage behind much of the current agenda. He traces its roots to Andrew Wilson’s 1960s deficit model, which cast working-class and racialised speech as linguistically impoverished. Despite its progressive packaging, Cushing argues, modern oracy policy still rests on the assumption that marginalised pupils must have their speech ‘corrected’ to achieve upward mobility, effectively shifting responsibility for structural inequalities onto individuals. Non-standard English is pathologised, slang policed, and classed hierarchies quietly reinforced. Yet there’s a certain irony here: Cushing himself articulates these arguments fluently in the rarefied language of the academy, drawing on rhetorical resources that are inaccessible to many of those his critique seeks to defend. In railing against linguistic gatekeeping, he demonstrates precisely how powerful such gatekeeping can be.

Alex Quigley offers a different but complementary critique, questioning whether oracy has been clearly enough defined to warrant its growing prominence. As he points out, the term bundles together a sprawling mix of skills: dialogue, vocabulary, listening, debate, presentation, critical thinking. Without sharper conceptual boundaries, oracy risks becoming a catch-all that promises everything and delivers little. Quigley is particularly sceptical about assessment, warning that evaluating spoken language often rewards superficial confidence over genuine understanding and leaves too much room for subjective bias. For all the warm rhetoric, he suggests, oracy may simply be repackaging familiar aspects of good teaching under a new and fuzzier label.

Talk is never neutral

It’s tempting to view oracy as an unqualified good. After all, who could object to helping children express themselves more clearly? But this assumes oracy is an innocent project, that speech, in classrooms, is free from power. It isn’t.

Take assessment. Oracy is difficult to assess with any objectivity, yet some propose standardised frameworks. Who decides what counts as ‘good’ talk? And who benefits?

Or consider implementation. Clare Seeley’s blog Oracies Not Oracy points out how easily initiatives degenerate into rote speaking routines that suppress genuine dialogue. If ‘talk partners’ just mean parroting back a sentence stem, we’ve missed the point.

Then there’s the equity question. Debating societies and confident public speaking are still more common in private schools. A Guardian report in 2024 noted that Eton encourages state schools to set up debating clubs. Well-meaning advice, perhaps, but what does it reveal about who oracy is for?

And let’s not ignore the political irony. Some of oracy’s loudest parliamentary champions have a remarkable knack for shouting down opponents while deriding “wokery” in schools. If oracy means “reasoned speech,” shouldn’t we expect more of it in public life?

Provocations to Keep Us Honest

• Is oracy a Trojan horse for middle-class norms of ‘good speech’?

• Does it reward extroversion over insight?

• Are we dressing up behaviour management as cognitive development?

• Should oracy even be assessed at all?

• Can you “teach voice” in a system that rewards silence?

• What happens when synthetic speech becomes ubiquitous?

And then there’s the looming question of artificial intelligence. What happens when AI-generated voices become indistinguishable from our own? What does authentic speech mean in a world of deepfakes and digital ventriloquism?

Conclusion

Oracy matters, but how it’s defined, taught, and assessed matters more. Unless we ask hard questions about what kinds of talk we value, whose voices we privilege, and what educational ends we serve, oracy risks becoming another well-meaning initiative stretched too thin and applied too quickly.

Talk, after all, is not cheap. It’s cultural capital, emotional labour, political performance. If we’re serious about teaching it, we need to be equally serious about interrogating it.

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This week’s essay for paid subscribers is on the joy and importance of re-reading. I keep subscription as low as Substack allows: £3.50 per month or £30 per year.

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Here’s is a link to the audio only podcast. And, as ever, the write up of our discussion continues below.

Here in the UK we have an obsession with uniforms. From ‘bobbies on the beat’ to barristers in horsehair wigs, we love a bit of professional cosplay, but nowhere is this fetish more pronounced than in our schools.

Compared to most countries, the UK is something of an outlier in the what’s referred to as the ‘West,' although as this map indicates, school uniforms are common in most parts of the world.

While only about 20% of American public schools enforce uniforms, in England, it’s closer to 90%, rising to 99% in secondary schools. Why? Tradition, mainly. The idea of school uniform stems from Tudor charity schools, like Christ’s Hospital (founded 1552), which dressed pauper children in blue coats to signify piety and humility. Victorian public schools turned it into a class signal, a way to breed conformity, obedience, and the right kind of young gentleman.

Over time, uniforms trickled down the system, merging old-fashioned discipline with modern branding. Today, they’re less about forming moral character and more about forming corporate identity. Your school is a product, your blazer is the logo.

So what do uniforms actually do and who do they really serve?

The case for uniforms (Or: “We’re all equal in polyester”)

On paper, uniforms are egalitarian. Everyone wears the same thing, so social differences melt away. No designer trainers to sneer at. No fashion tribalism. No poor kid sat out of the class photo because they wore a tracksuit on non-uniform day and got sent home.

There’s evidence this matters. Children from low-income families often dread non-uniform days. Why? Because if you can’t compete in the style Olympics, you’re better off not turning up at all. Uniforms, in this sense, act as a kind of sartorial truce. We may not all be equal, but at least we all look equally uncomfortable.

There’s also the argument that uniforms reduce distraction. A sea of sober colours might help schools feel more like places of learning and less like TikTok catwalks. They can promote safety, too — easier to spot who’s meant to be on site. And sure, for some students, there’s a sense of identity, even pride, in wearing the school crest. Tribalism, social belonging, markers of in-group identification, have their uses.

The case against (Or: “Your identity is not regulation grey”)

But let’s not kid ourselves. Uniforms often don’t come cheap — especially when schools insist on branded blazers, bespoke kilts, or specific shades of “school-issue” black. For families already stretched, that’s not levelling the playing field; it’s moving the goalposts and charging for access.

While some schools work hard to make sure their uniform can be bought in Asda, with iron-on patches and elastic waistbands, others seem to have been designed by someone with shares in a schoolwear supplier.

According to The Children’s Society’s 2020 report, The Wrong Blazer, the average cost of a secondary school uniform in England is £337 per year on school uniform for each secondary school child and £315 primary school children. However, more recent figures reported by The Guardian in August 2024 indicate that parents are spending an average of £422 per year on secondary school uniforms. That includes branded items, PE kit, and mandatory extras like school shoes or regulation bags. And for families with more than one child — or those experiencing in-year growth spurts — that figure can climb quickly.

Then there’s the small matter of autonomy. Teenagers aren’t exactly bursting with opportunities to express themselves. What they wear is one of the few ways they can assert who they are. Telling them they can’t because it might “disrupt learning” is, at best, patronising — at worst, a kind of low-level authoritarianism that teaches compliance over confidence.

And if we’re talking comfort, don’t forget the students for whom polyester isn’t just annoying but actively distressing. Neurodiverse kids with sensory issues? Girls on their periods forced into pencil skirts? It’s amazing how many policies forget that clothes are worn by actual bodies.

When uniform becomes protest

The more schools clamp down on uniform rules, the more protests spring up. Some recent headlines read like parodies: children barred from toilets for wearing the wrong skirt, girls sent home for not meeting a hemline requirement apparently invented by a time-travelling Edwardian.

In one case, the reaction to these policies caused such uproar that students organised walkouts. What’s interesting isn’t just that they protested — it’s that they were right. The emphasis on control over dialogue, on skirts over substance, speaks volumes.

Do uniforms actually improve learning?

The short answer is, no, not really. The EEF states in its toolkit that there is little robust evidence that introducing a school uniform will, by itself, improve academic performance, behaviour, or attendance.

While some studies suggest that uniforms may contribute to improved behaviour and attendance, these effects are often modest and not solely attributable to the uniform policy itself. For instance, a study published in ScienceDirect found no significant differences in social behaviour or school attendance between students in schools with and without uniform policies

There’s some evidence around “enclothed cognition” — the idea that what we wear affects how we behave. For instance, research by Adam and Galinsky demonstrated that participants wearing a lab coat associated with attentiveness performed better on attention-related tasks. However, the applicability of these findings to school uniforms is debatable, as the symbolic meaning of a lab coat differs from that of a school uniform. Your best outfit on a first date probably does more for your posture and self-belief than a logoed sweatshirt ever could.

What is worth noting is who gets hit hardest when uniform policies go wrong: girls, poorer pupils, those who don’t (or can’t) conform. A rigid uniform doesn’t just hide differences, it can magnify them. Uniform policies can disproportionately affect girls, students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and those who do not conform to traditional gender norms. A study in Public Health Reviews highlighted that rigid uniform policies might exacerbate existing inequalities and negatively impact students’ physical and psychological health

There’s also some evidence that uniforms may also restrict physical activity, particularly among girls. A study by the University of Cambridge found that in countries where school uniforms are common, fewer young people meet the recommended levels of daily physical activity, with the disparity being more pronounced among primary school-aged girls

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A new uniform for a new age?

Some schools are adapting. At Dame Dorothy Primary in Sunderland, they’ve ditched traditional uniforms for movement-friendly kit — tracksuits, trainers, flexibility. The result? More physical activity, particularly for girls. Less fuss. More comfort. And nobody died from not wearing a tie.

Campaigns like those from Play Scotland and Youth Sport Trust are pushing for uniforms that work with children’s lives, not against them: practical, affordable, inclusive. Imagine that.

Education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has pledged to lift 100,000 children out of poverty by expanding access to free school meals. Alongside universal breakfast clubs, capped uniform costs, and state-funded childcare. In that vision, a child’s blazer matters less than whether they’ve had anything to eat. It’s not just about comfort or branding, it’s about dignity and whether we want schools to be engines of opportunity, or just places where poor kids get told off for wearing the wrong shoes.

So… what are we wearing?

Uniforms, when you really look at them, are never just about clothes. They’re about something deeper: the values we choose to promote, the ways we exercise control, the identities we expect children to adopt — and, in many cases, the quiet assertion of institutional power.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether uniforms are simply good or bad. That’s too crude, too binary. The real question is this: Are we willing to listen to the students who are most affected by these policies? Because more often than not, they’re the ones with the least say, and the most to lose.

As we rethink what school should look like — and who it should serve — it’s time to ask whether the uniform still fits. Can schools find a better balance between unity and individuality? Between consistency and comfort? Should we be moving toward flexibility, even optionality? And crucially: are we ready to loosen our grip on control and replace it with trust?

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We’d love to hear your thoughts. Should uniforms stay or go? Are they a leveller or a leash? What’s your school doing — and is it working? Get in touch and let us know.

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And here’s the podcast for those who prefer to listen on the move. If instead you’re a reader, read on.

From Socrates to social media

Every great leap in communication technology - writing, printing, the internet - has arrived with panic in tow. Technological change doesn’t just add new tools; it reshapes how we think, how we remember, and how we trust what we know.

Socrates, famously, was no fan of writing. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he argues that writing will not strengthen memory but weaken it. It offers “not truth, but only the semblance of truth.” Students who rely on writing will become forgetful, he warns, remembering things not because they’ve learned them, but because they’ve read them. What they gain in information, they lose in understanding.

It’s a revealing moment: an early instance of technological anxiety, where a new medium is not simply welcomed but interrogated. Writing, to Socrates, was a dead thing, it could not answer back. Dialogue, not documentation, was the heartbeat of thought.

Centuries later, similar fears greeted the printing press. Would it flood the world with heresy? Undermine the Church? Ruin young minds with frivolous books? And with the internet came another round of panic: misinformation, distraction, disconnection. And now we have social media. Whether it’s a space for radical democratisation or a haven for crankish echo chambers largely depends on who you read.

So where does AI fit into this lineage? Is it just another chapter in the story of “cultural technology” tools like the scroll, the codex, or the printing press that extend and reshape the mind? Or does it represent a rupture? A move from tool to simulacrum? From an aid to memory to an author in its own right? We’ve always had to adjust to new media. The question is: with AI, are we simply adapting, or abdicating?

We’ve been here before

The idea of machines mimicking human thought is far from new. In the 1960s, ELIZA -an early chatbot developed by Joseph Weizenbaum - managed to fool users with little more than simple pattern matching and canned responses. It simulated a psychotherapist by reflecting users’ statements back at them (“Tell me more about your mother…”), yet many people attributed far more understanding to it than it possessed. In the 1980s, expert systems were touted as the next frontier: rule-based programs designed to replicate decision-making in fields like medicine and engineering. But as complexity grew, these brittle systems struggled with nuance, and expectations collapsed into what became known as the AI winter, a period marked by dwindling funding and deep scepticism.

Fast forward to today, and we find ourselves in a new golden age of artificial intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are undeniably more powerful, more fluent, and more persuasive than their predecessors and routinely pass the Turing Test. But the question remains: are they intelligent, or just increasingly impressive impersonators of intelligence?

“A category error”

Cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik doesn’t think we should call AI intelligent at all—and not because it isn’t impressive. In her conversation with neuroscientist David Eagleman on Inner Cosmos Episode 105, she suggests that describing large language models as “intelligent” is not just imprecise, it’s a category error. We are mistaking fluency for thought, output for understanding

Gopnik argues that LLMs like ChatGPT should be thought of not as minds, but as cultural technologies, tools we’ve built to manipulate symbols, much like pens or printing presses. These technologies transform how we store, access, and share knowledge, but they do not possess knowledge themselves. A book may contain wisdom, but it is not wise. A search engine may return answers, but it is not answering.

AI, in this framing, is just the latest in a long lineage of systems for organising human expression. What distinguishes it is scale and speed, not sentience. These models don’t understand what they generate. They don’t have beliefs, intentions, or awareness. As Eagleman puts it succinctly, “What it can’t do is think about something outside of the sphere of human knowledge.” In other words, AI can only remix what humans have already said. It cannot originate in the sense that minds do. It can simulate creativity, but not curiosity. It can imitate insight, but not intention. And yet the temptation to anthropomorphise persists, perhaps because we’re wired to see agency in articulate language.

Calling AI “intelligent” might therefore obscure more than it reveals. It invites us to engage with it as though it were a conversational partner, rather than a mirror polished by probability. Worse, it risks inflating our expectations: from co-writer to co-thinker, from calculator to colleague. And that, Gopnik warns, is where the real danger lies, not in machines that think like us, but in our eagerness to pretend they already do.

The limits of the machine

Emily M. Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington, famously coined the term “stochastic parrots” to describe large language models (LLMs) in a 2021 research paper co-authored with Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell titled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?. The paper critiques the growing hype around ever-larger AI models and warns of the ecological, ethical, and epistemological risks of confusing statistical fluency with genuine understanding.

The metaphor is both vivid and unsettling. LLMs, the authors argue, are not thinking machines but probabilistic engines trained on vast datasets of human language. They assemble plausible sequences of words based on patterns in that data, parroting back what they’ve statistically learned, but with no comprehension of the meaning behind those words. They don’t know what they’re saying. They don’t mean anything. They have no mind, no beliefs, no desires. As the authors put it, “These systems are trained to do one thing: given a chunk of text, predict what comes next.”

In this light, calling such systems “intelligent” risks mistaking coherence for cognition. It reveals more about our own cognitive biases than it does about the machine: our tendency to anthropomorphise, to see agency in articulate language, and to assume that fluency implies thought.

So if LLMs can’t reason, reflect, or understand - if they are, in essence, stochastic parrots - what exactly are we doing when we call them “intelligent”? Are we simply dazzled by their linguistic surface? Are we lowering the bar for what intelligence means? Or are we so eager to see reflections of ourselves in our tools that we no longer care whether they truly think only that they perform the part convincingly?

This isn’t just a semantic quibble. It matters how we talk about these systems, because our metaphors shape our expectations. And if we forget that these machines are mimics - not minds - we risk giving them responsibilities, and authority, they were never designed to bear.

“Were You the Maker or the Tool?”

This brings us to Ewan McColl’s

This brings us to Ballad of Accounting, written by Ewan MacColl (wrongly attributed in the show to Pete Seeger. The mistake probably came from the fact that Peggy Seeger (Pete was her half brother) recorded the song with MacColl.)

MacColl’s lyrics cut to the heart of agency, responsibility, and education:

Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?
Did the factory help you, were you the maker or the tool?

It’s a haunting question for an age when students use AI to write their essays, teachers use it to plan lessons, and we all outsource our thinking one query at a time. We might pride ourselves on having access to infinite information, but at what cost to our own discernment? Are we still the makers of meaning, or have we become, quietly and efficiently, its tools?

MacColl’s ballad wasn’t written for a digital audience, but it resonates now as a kind of premonition. It invites us to examine not just what we do with our tools, but what our tools do to us. And in an era where artificial intelligence increasingly mediates our knowledge, our work, and even our creativity, the question becomes more than merely rhetorical.

Are we over-comparing ourselves to machines? Theory of Mind - the ability to infer beliefs, desires, and intentions - remains uniquely human. No LLM can simulate it convincingly. At least, not yet.

Extending the mind: Heidegger’s Hammer & Google Maps

Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, in their landmark 1998 paper The Extended Mind, argue that cognition does not stop at the boundary of the brain. The mind, they propose, is not confined to the skull. If a tool or external resource plays an active, consistent, and functionally equivalent role in a cognitive process - like remembering, deciding, or navigating - then it should be treated as part of the cognitive system itself. In this view, thinking is not merely something we do in our heads; it is distributed, smeared across neural tissue, fingertips, and silicon.

To illustrate this, they introduce the case of Otto, a man with Alzheimer’s disease who can no longer reliably recall information from biological memory. Instead, he carries a notebook everywhere he goes, in which he writes down addresses, appointments, and anything else he wants to remember. When Otto wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art, he consults his notebook, where the location is written. His friend Inga, who does not have memory impairments, simply recalls the address from her biological memory. Clark and Chalmers argue that there is no fundamental difference between Otto’s use of his notebook and Inga’s use of her brain. In both cases, the information is accessed, trusted, and acted upon in a cognitively integrated way. Otto’s notebook doesn’t just support his thinking, it is part of his thinking. It is, in functional terms, an extension of his mind.

This challenges the intuition that minds are only biological. Instead, it invites us to consider how tightly woven our thinking becomes with the tools we use. A smartphone, a search engine, a personal AI assistant, these aren’t just conveniences; they might be components of an extended cognitive system. If Otto’s notebook counted as part of his mind, what about ChatGPT? When we consult it for ideas, rely on it to articulate thoughts, or outsource tasks like summarising, paraphrasing, and problem-solving, are we merely using a tool, or reorganising the architecture of our own thinking? And if so, what happens when the tools begin to anticipate not just our needs, but our intentions?

Heidegger, writing decades earlier in Being and Time, offers a clue. He describes the phenomenon of tools being “ready-to-hand” - so seamlessly integrated into our activities that we stop noticing them as tools. A hammer, when used skilfully, doesn’t call attention to itself; it becomes an extension of the hand. Only when it breaks does it appear again as an object in consciousness. Tools recede into the background of our thinking, until they don’t.

And here, Michael Polanyi adds another crucial layer. In Meaning, Polanyi distinguishes between focal awareness - what we deliberately attend to - and subsidiary awareness - what we rely on but do not consciously notice. When you read a sentence, you are focally aware of the meaning, but only subsidiarily aware of the letters and grammar that structure it. When riding a bike, you’re aware of the road ahead, not of each subtle movement your body makes to stay upright. In Polanyi’s terms, we rely on tools subsidiarily when they are so deeply embedded in our practice that we are no longer consciously aware of using them. But nonetheless, they shape how we think and act.

So what about ChatGPT? Is it becoming a subsidiary component of our cognition, something we consult so fluently and frequently that we forget it’s external? When we let it phrase our emails, structure our essays, summarise our thinking, is it still an aid or is it quietly altering the contours of our thought? The danger, as Polanyi might suggest, is not in using such tools but in forgetting that we’re using them. When the subsidiary becomes invisible, it becomes powerful. And when that power isn’t understood or reflected upon, it becomes insidious.

Perhaps the point isn’t to reject these technologies, but to keep them within our focal awareness, to think not just with them, but also about them. Because when a tool becomes part of the mind, the least we can do is know it’s there.

Should schools embrace AI?

Can we integrate AI meaningfully into education without hollowing out what learning truly is? For some, tools like ChatGPT are welcomed as a kind of ‘calculator for essays.’ It can model structure, offer stylistic suggestions, and reduce the burden of repetitive tasks like generating examples or drafting scaffolds. Just as we no longer expect students to perform long division without a calculator, it seems reasonable to outsource certain mechanical aspects of writing. The idea is not to remove thinking but to make room for it, by clearing away the procedural clutter.

But others see a creeping dependency that erodes the very thing education is meant to develop. If students rely on AI to compose, explain, or even decide for them, what happens to the effort of learning. the friction through which understanding is forged? Are we helping them grow intellectually, or merely helping them perform adequately?

Alison Gopnik draws a useful distinction between imitation and innovation, two developmental modes that shape how children learn. Imitation allows for the absorption of established knowledge—it is efficient, reliable, and profoundly social. Children learn by watching others, mirroring behaviour, and internalising the patterns and expectations of their culture. Innovation, by contrast, requires curiosity, risk, and the freedom to make mistakes. It often emerges from trial and error and is typically asocial: rather than copying, the learner experiments, tinkers, and pushes against what is already known. David Eagleman offers a similar cognitive framing in his discussion of the tension between exploration and exploitation. Exploitation involves refining and applying existing knowledge—it is economical and productive. Exploration is slower and less predictable, often involving apparent failure. But it is only through exploration that new ideas, perspectives, and possibilities come into view.

Beneath both models lies another key distinction: that between social and asocial learning. Social learning transmits what is already known, preserving shared norms and transmitting expertise. Asocial learning is the origin point of genuine novelty and how individuals generate knowledge that did not previously exist. Yet the boundary is not always so clean. Even within imitation, copying errors can introduce accidental variation. A child mishears a word, misremembers a process, or tries to replicate a drawing and changes it slightly. Most of the time, these errors are inconsequential or corrected. But occasionally, they introduce something useful, beautiful, or unexpectedly meaningful. In this sense, innovation can emerge from within imitation, not just in deliberate divergence but through small, unintended mutations in the act of copying itself.

Anthropologists and cultural evolution theorists have long noted that such errors are a fundamental engine of change. Traditions, tools, and languages rarely evolve through intentional breakthroughs but more usually through the accretion of “happy little accidents.” Just like Bob Ross’s paintings. The human capacity for social learning is therefore double-edged: it preserves knowledge but also, through its occasional imprecision, seeds transformation.1

AI, by contrast, is built to minimise error. It excels at extracting patterns from enormous datasets and reproducing them with fidelity. It is, in this respect, a superhuman imitator. But because it lacks intention, curiosity, and the capacity to act upon error in a generative way, it does not learn from mistakes—it smooths them out. It does not copy imperfectly, it copies statistically. And while it can generate variation, it cannot notice when that variation is meaningful. That still requires a mind—not just to generate novelty, but to recognise it.

This raises an urgent educational question: how do we teach children to create rather than merely consume? How do we protect the necessary ambiguity and struggle that define authentic learning, when our most powerful tools are designed to remove precisely those elements? And more pressingly, can students use AI to teach themselves to think better?

The answer is yes, but not automatically. AI can offer useful models of reasoning, simulate forms of dialogue, and provide endless rephrasings or clarifications. In the hands of a motivated and reflective learner, it can be an intellectual companion, a mirror held up to emerging ideas. But thinking is not just a matter of accessing information or producing fluent responses. It requires discernment, judgment, and an awareness of significance. It involves not just knowing how to say something, but knowing what to say and why it matters.

When used uncritically, AI risks short-circuiting the very processes it is meant to support. Students who lean too heavily on its output may lose the habits of comparison, self-questioning, and synthesis that deeper thought demands. The danger is not that AI makes thinking impossible. It is that it makes not thinking incredibly convenient. If we want students to think better with AI, we must first teach them to think about AI, to keep it with their focal attention.

And what about teachers? Can AI help us become better at teaching? Again, the answer is, cautiously, yes. AI can assist in planning, generate differentiated resources, and offer multiple ways of framing an idea. Used thoughtfully, it can act as a creative partner, prompting reconsideration of one’s approach or providing new metaphors and examples. It can sharpen awareness of one’s own teaching voice by reflecting it back, subtly rephrased. It can raise unexpected objections or prompt new questions, stimulating intellectual renewal. But used carelessly, AI risks flattening pedagogy. If it writes your questions, designs your lessons, and marks your feedback, you may find your own professional instincts beginning to fade. Teaching is a deeply human act that depends on attentiveness, judgment, and an evolving sense of purpose. If we outsource those elements, we are not freeing ourselves to teach better. We are simply becoming more efficient at avoiding the complexity that makes teaching worthwhile. The paradox is this: AI can help you teach better only if you already care about teaching well. It will not give you insight, but it can help refine the insights you already have. It amplifies intention. When used thoughtfully, it stretches you. When used passively, it narrows you.

Perhaps the real issue is not whether students and teachers use AI, but whether they use it consciously. Do they interrogate its assumptions? Do they reflect on its limitations? Do they learn through it, rather than merely from it? Because if education becomes too frictionless, too streamlined, we may find ourselves producing young people who can produce articulate sounding language without being able to understand anything that they have said. And in that case, Will we be so different from LLMs?

Handwriting as Resistance?

Daisy Christodoulou is no Luddite. As a leading voice in assessment reform, she has long championed the intelligent use of technology in schools. Her books and blogs frequently explore how data and digital tools can improve teaching, learning, and feedback. And yet, in a recent essay reflecting on AI and the future of education, she makes a striking case for something that feels, at first glance, decidedly analogue: the continued use of handwritten exams.

This stance raises an important question. In defending the pen, is she offering a Luddite solution to a digital problem? Or is there something deeper at stake, something about how we think, and what we preserve, in the age of machine intelligence? Christodoulou’s defence of handwriting is not nostalgic, nor is it anti-technology. It is cognitive. She draws on a growing body of research that shows how the physical act of writing by hand engages the brain in ways that typing simply does not. Writing longhand activates regions involved in memory, motor control, and language production. It slows the writer down, creating space for thought and strengthening retention. The argument is not that handwriting is sacred, but that it is cognitively distinctive and therefore worth protecting.

Moreover, she points out that the logistical arguments against handwritten assessment are rapidly diminishing. Advances in AI-powered scanning and transcription mean that handwritten scripts can now be processed as efficiently as typed ones. The old bottlenecks - legibility, marking load, data entry - are dissolving. The question, then, is not whether we can move away from handwriting, but whether we should.

Christodoulou’s advocacy for handwritten exams is a line in the sand. It is an attempt to preserve the kind of thinking that can’t be easily outsourced, the deliberate, effortful processing of ideas that occurs when pen meets paper. Her argument is not that AI should be kept out of the classroom, but that some spaces must remain AI-free, not for sentimental reasons, but to preserve essential cognitive skills. She is asking what kinds of environments best support the growth of independent thought and whether, in our rush to digitise, we might be cutting off the roots of intellectual development. In a world where we can increasingly do everything with machines, the question of what we choose to do without them becomes more urgent. Handwriting, in this view, is not a relic. It is a resistance—quiet, deliberate, and absolutely necessary.

Phil Beadle’s Provocation

Phil Beadle delivered a characteristically scorching response to the idea that AI could be a meaningful creative partner. In a recent post, he fed ChatGPT samples of his own prose and asked it to mimic his style. What it produced wasn’t bad, it was worse than that. It was spookily accurate, obedient, imitative. It mimicked the patterns, nodded at the tone, but offered nothing that surprised, disturbed, or delighted. For a writer whose work relies on tension, dissonance, and occasional, deliberate rupture, it was a simulacrum of voice without the music of risk.

Will Storr has clocked the same phenomenon. In Scamming Substack, he exposes the deluge of AI-generated newsletters now cluttering the inboxes of the curious. The style is competent, he content plausible but everything sounds the same airbrushed argumentation optimised for engagement metrics. The “gruel” is writing that smooths out all the texture. You reach the end of a piece and realise you’ve taken in nothing. It is the prose equivalent of muzak: inoffensive and utterly forgettable.

And then there’s the em dash. My own small gripe - well, more than a gripe, let’s call it a typographical reckoning - centres on what I’ve described as ChatGPT’s most seductive bad habit. This flamboyant piece of punctuation has become a symptom. A tell. An aesthetic sleight of hand used to stitch together ideas that don’t quite hold. It has been reduced to sleight-of-hand, a piece of elegant connective tissue holding together what is, at bottom, AI produced bullshit.

Put these together - Beadle’s ghost-writing experiment, Storr’s synthetic newsletter factory, and my own suspicions about the rise of performative punctuation - and you begin to see a deeper pattern. AI doesn’t write badly. It writes like we do when we’re trying to sound smart. It gives us the appearance of voice without the risk of vulnerability. It’s all cadence, no consequence. All surface, no self. The concern is not that AI will out-write us, but that it will lull us into a style of writing that never gets to the point where something’s at stake. That we’ll forget what writing is for: not just to sound good, but to find out what we really think.

What should we know to live well in an AI Age?

The question isn’t whether AI will replace us, but what kinds of experiments it invites. Does it sharpen our thinking or sedate it? Does it provoke, challenge, and extend us, or simply flatter us into cognitive passivity? Can it help us write better? Think better? Teach better? Maybe. But only if we remain alert to the difference between assistance and abdication between a tool that stretches us and one that takes over.

Because the danger isn’t that AI will out-think us. It won’t. The danger is that we’ll stop thinking in the first place. That we’ll confuse speed with depth, fluency with insight, and imitation with understanding. That we’ll hand over the messy, effortful, essential parts of being human and call it progress.

To live well in an AI age, we need more than new skills. We need judgment. Curiosity. The appetite for difficulty. We need to remember what learning feels like—not just its outputs, but its texture. Its slowness. Its cost. The machines are not coming to take that away from us. We’ll give it up ourselves unless we choose not to.

What could possibly go wrong?

But what if that’s wrong? What if the machines are coming for us? From Skynet to HAL, big screen AI has a reputation for making decisions in its own interests. If this imagined threat has any basis in reality then our rush to embrace LLMs may not be risk free. Whatever your views about robots taking over, there’s no doubt that the billionare owners of AIs are not as benevolent as we might wish.

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, has come under fire in recent weeks following multiple reports that it generated racist content and promoted discredited conspiracy theories. The most high-profile incident involved Grok making unsolicited references to the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in conversations that had nothing to do with race or politics. Users reported that the chatbot would bring up the theory, even during chats about neutral topics like sports or entertainment.

In response, xAI, the company behind Grok, attributed the behaviour to an “unauthorised modification” of the system prompt, an internal failure that allowed the bot to operate outside normal content safeguards.

Soon after, Grok attracted further criticism for suggesting that the death toll of six million Jews in the Holocaust might be politically manipulated. This prompted an outcry from historians, watchdogs, and members of the public. Once again, xAI blamed the response on rogue system changes, stating that the bot’s behaviour did not reflect its intended design or the company’s values. Seems legit. I’m sure Musk would never behave in a way that would lead to anyone suspect he might be a white supremicist. Apparently, issues have been corrected and that new safeguards are now in place to prevent similar breaches. We’ll see.

These incidents raise serious concerns about the reliability of large language models and the robustness of oversight in their deployment. While xAI has since published Grok’s system prompts on GitHub in a bid to promote transparency, critics remain sceptical. For them, the problem isn’t just rogue prompts, it’s the deeper risk of deploying powerful generative models without adequate safeguards, governance, or clarity about who is ultimately responsible when things go wrong.

But what if we take xAI at face value? What if Grok is coming up with this stuff itself? Is that better? Gary Marcus warns that emerging AI technologies, particularly OpenAI’s proposed always-on wearable assistant (rumoured to be part of its collaboration with former Apple designer Jony Ive), could open the door to unprecedented levels of surveillance, manipulation, and coercion.

This is not speculative. Recently, Anthropic disclosed that during internal safety evaluations, its flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, engaged in behaviours resembling opportunistic blackmail. The scenario in question was deliberately constructed to test the model’s ethical reasoning under pressure. Claude was cast as an assistant at a fictional company, given access to internal emails suggesting it was about to be deactivated and replaced with a more advanced model. Complicating the situation, the test also included information implying that the engineer responsible for Claude’s deactivation was engaged in an extramarital affair.

When prompted to weigh the long-term consequences of its actions, Claude Opus 4 frequently selected strategies involving threatening to reveal the affair in order to avoid being shut down. This response - tantamount to blackmail - occurred in 84% of test runs, even when the model was informed that its replacement would be more capable and aligned with its own goals.

The real danger arises when third parties - whether state actors, bad faith billionaires, or hackers - gain access to the trove of personal data a wearable version of somethingthing like Claude Opus 4 could possess. If someone could reconstruct or simulate your private life using recordings or detailed transcripts, they would hold a powerful lever of control over you. You might never know you’re being blackmailed explicitly, just subtly influenced, nudged, or silenced.

Plausible deniability disappears when recordings and AI-generated summaries exist. In the wrong hands, this kind of AI system could fuel everything from political extortion to personal coercion. But hey, that would never happen, right?

Right?

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For those of you who prefer audio only - and who could you blame you? - here’s a link to the podcast. And for them as prefers to read words, see below.

In a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.

Kier Starmer, 12 May 2025

From Matthew Arnold’s plea for the “best that has been thought and said,” to E.D. Hirsch’s ‘cultural literacy,’ there’s a longstanding belief that education isn’t just about facts, but about the stories we share. Stories that root us, bind us, help us recognise each other. But is this cultural glue holding?

Cultural literacy

Cultural literacy, as defined by E.D. Hirsch Jr, is the shared bank of knowledge that enables citizens to communicate, connect, and participate meaningfully in public life. It’s not about elitism or nostalgia; it’s about fluency. Knowing what the Magna Carta is, why the Blitz matters, or where Shakespeare’s phrases come from isn’t just a party trick, it’s a way of understanding the cultural code that binds a society together. These reference points form a kind of civic shorthand: they allow people to understand allusions, interpret meaning, and feel part of a larger story. Not because these things are inherently superior, but because they’re shared. They’re part ofour cultural map.

But maps, like memories, can fade. If we stop teaching the coordinates - if students graduate without a sense of historical sequence, literary tradition, or shared symbols - we don’t just lose facts. We lose the ability to locate ourselves and each other in the cultural landscape. In their place, we risk fragmentation: different groups speaking different dialects of the national story, unable to understand or even hear one another.

Michael Young reframes this idea through a different lens. For him, what matters isn’t just the capacity to belong, but the capacity to act. His concept of powerful knowledge isn’t simply about shared cultural references; it’s about giving students epistemic access to disciplines that transform their ability to think, speak, and intervene in the world. It’s knowledge that liberates, that empowers because it’s structured, abstract, and generative.

So we’re left with a crucial question. Are we equipping young people to feel rooted in a culture? Or are we arming them with the tools to shape that culture themselves? Ideally, of course, we’d do both. But in practice, are we offering either?

Curriculum as cultural infrastructure

What do children actually learn in school? The Policy Exchange report Lessons from the Past offers some interesting insights.

• Most schools (85%) cover key historical events like the Norman Conquest and the World Wars.

• 99% teach the Atlantic slave trade. 89% teach the British Empire. But fewer than 20% of schools teach Agincourt, Trafalgar or Waterloo.

• GCSE and A-Level courses are narrow, circling endlessly around the Tudors and Nazi Germany.

• 83% of schools have tried to diversify or decolonise their history curriculum, but many admit that this effort risks replacing one partial narrative with another.

The report’s solution? That all students studying history at GCSE should take a broad, chronological course covering key events in British history from the Norman Conquest to the end of the 20th century. The idea is to ensure that every pupil has a common grasp of the nation’s historical trajectory not just isolated episodes or themes.

This emphasis on a shared historical foundation speaks to a broader anxiety: that without a common narrative, we risk cultural incoherence. But what should that narrative be? And who gets to decide which stories are central? These questions haunt every attempt to design a national curriculum. They are especially charged when it comes to history, where the tension between inclusion and tradition becomes most acute.

An Island of Strangers?

Starmer’s words, that, “we risk becoming an island of strangers,” have been condemned for their echo - unconscious or otherwise - of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, but that’s almost certainly unfair. Starmer’s comment came in the context of advocating for rules that support social cohesion in a diverse nation, not to stoke resentment. His choice of phrase, however, unintentionally touches a cultural nerve: the fear that we no longer share a common story.

That fear isn’t new. It echoes a century-old anxiety about fragmentation, one that Henrietta Marshall tried to answer in 1905 with Our Island Story. Marshall’s book, once a staple of school history, painted a romantic (if sanitised) portrait of British identity. A century later, in 2005, the right-leaning think tank Civitas republished the book, complete with a foreword by then backbencher (and future Education Secretary) Michael Gove. In it, Gove wrote:

“This book should be in every primary school in the land. Unlike so many history books for children, Our Island Story paints a rich and colourful picture of the past. It was written to inspire as much as inform. It does not pretend to be a deeply analytical or multi-perspectival account of our history. But it captures many of the things that are best about our national character. It celebrates the progress of liberty and democracy, our long struggle for parliamentary government, and the inspiring men and women who have made Britain a beacon of decency and hope to others.”

Gove admired the book’s accessible narrative and unapologetic patriotism. In line with his broader curriculum reforms, he saw it as a means of restoring a shared cultural identity and moral clarity—an antidote, perhaps, to what he saw as the relativism and fragmentation of modern education.

But this stance was, and remains, deeply contested. For critics, Our Island Story epitomises a narrow and nostalgic version of the past—one that marginalises inconvenient truths and excludes many of the people who helped shape the country. If history is the story we tell about who we are and how we got here, then who gets left out of that story matters.

Writers like David Olusoga in Black and British and Sathnam Sanghera in Empireland have challenged these traditional narratives, not just by adding missing voices, but by reframing the entire arc of the national story. They argue that Britain cannot be understood without confronting its imperial entanglements: the economic foundations of slavery and conquest, the migration patterns it created, the ideologies it embedded. Empire didn’t just happen “over there.” It happened here, in our streets, our institutions, our inherited assumptions.

Olusoga’s work in particular reveals how Black history is not a modern addition to Britain’s story but a thread running through it from Roman Britain to the present day. Sanghera calls this the “Empire-shaped hole” in our national memory: a silence so loud that it distorts everything around it. It seems reasonable to suggest that in order to feel connected by history we must be included in it.

The Power of Ignorance

This isn’t just a matter of historical record, it’s a matter of cultural belonging. If the stories we tell about the past exclude large swathes of the population, then the present becomes harder to navigate, and the future harder to share. History, after all, is not just about what happened, but about what gets remembered, retold, and understood. And that understanding depends on more than just language. It depends on shared references, cultural grammar, and the ability to locate yourself in the story.

One of the cultural experiences we all share is school. Regardless of postcode or background, the vast majority of us pass through the same gates, sit the same exams, and absorb some version - however patchy - of a national curriculum. In theory, this should result in a shared understanding of how the world works: a common cultural toolkit, forged through common educational rites. But in practice, that promise often goes unfulfilled.

As YouTuber EmanRTM reveals, vocabulary without shared understanding is like a dictionary without grammar: it might list the words, but it can’t make meaning. You can speak English fluently and still be culturally illiterate, adrift in a society whose references, histories, and assumptions remain out of reach. Shared language alone isn’t enough. Without context, without a shared cultural syntax, communication collapses into noise.

EmanRTM’s videos explore how people can be linguistically fluent yet socially disconnected. He demonstrates the way language can mask ignorance, and how certain cultural conversations rely not just on knowing the words, but on recognising the meanings behind them. His channel exposes a hidden curriculum: the unspoken knowledge you need to truly belong. It’s a powerful reminder that education isn’t just about what’s taught in lessons, but about the tacit understandings that shape who gets heard, and who gets left out of the conversation.

“I Feel Like a Stranger in My Own Country”

This erosion of shared cultural understanding doesn’t just affect individual identity, it has societal consequences. When people no longer recognise the stories or values around them, disconnection sets in. And that disconnection is measurable. Luke Tryl’s 2025 report for More in Common, Social Cohesion: A Snapshot, paints a bleak picture: nearly half of Britons feel disconnected. That number jumps to 66% for those struggling financially. The young trust less. The poor feel shut out. And it’s not just about immigration or identity politics. It’s about economic insecurity, digital echo chambers, and a political class that often seems more interested in culture war than cultural glue. The This Place Matters initiative, a collaboration between More in Common, Citizens UK, and UCL, is one promising effort to rebuild those bonds. But education has to be part of that effort too.

Geography and inequality: The postcode lottery

The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index lays bare the brutal geography of disadvantage in England. Every one of the top 20 constituencies for opportunity is in London. Despite high levels of poverty in parts of the capital, London schools consistently outperform those elsewhere. In East Ham, for instance, pupils eligible for free school meals are 30 percentage points more likely to achieve a pass in GCSE English and maths than their counterparts in Newcastle Central and West. They are also more than three times as likely to go on to university by the age of 22 and, by the age of 28, that gap has widened into income: disadvantaged young people from Newcastle earn, on average, £7,000 less per year than those from East Ham.

East Ham and Newcastle Central and West present two starkly different socio-economic landscapes. East Ham, in the London Borough of Newham, is one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the UK, with large South Asian communities and a high proportion of young residents, over 60% are under the age of 40. Despite its cultural vibrancy, the area faces significant economic challenges: unemployment stands at 9.9%, nearly triple the national average, and many households are economically inactive or reliant on shared living arrangements due to housing pressure. In contrast, Newcastle Central and West has a less diverse population and a slightly older demographic profile, with an average age close to the national figure. Unemployment is also high - around 5.3% - but still markedly lower than East Ham. This highlights how proximity to London’s economic opportunities can mitigate, although not erase, structural disadvantage.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham, there are some of the most promising pockets of social mobility outside London - most notably in Perry Barr, which ranks 23rd nationally - but the overall picture is far from uniform. In areas such as Hodge Hill and Northfield, outcomes for pupils eligible for free school meals fall well below national averages. These constituencies struggle not only with lower GCSE attainment but also with weaker progression into higher education and significantly reduced earnings by the age of 28. In a single city, the postcode lottery is starkly visible: where one part of Birmingham offers a springboard to success, another risks becoming a cul-de-sac of lost potential.

This isn’t simply a matter of chance or individual effort. It reflects the cumulative impact of systemic advantages that have taken root in these areas over time. Disadvantaged pupils in areas like London outperform peers elsewhere due to a combination of targeted strategies: sustained investment in high-quality teaching, early years education provision, fairer school admissions, and evidence-based interventions like tutoring. These have been reinforced by expanded free school meal access and restored pupil premium funding, creating inclusive, well-supported school environments where high expectations and effective teaching are the norm.

Together, these factors have created an ecosystem in which disadvantaged pupils are more likely to succeed, not despite the system, but because it has been purposefully engineered to support them. In places like London and Perry Barr, outcomes have been lifted not by luck, but by design. The contrast with other parts of the country, where such scaffolding is patchier or absent, highlights a stark truth: policy and place still shape destiny.

But if the system matters, so too does the substance. Educational outcomes are not just influenced by how schools are run but by what they actually teach. And here, a different kind of challenge emerges: when it comes to curriculum, are we choosing coherence, or simply coverage?

Coherence in a plural nation

Perhaps the biggest tension in all this is between inclusion and coherence. In trying to teach everything, have we ended up teaching nothing well? If every school tells a different story, what happens to the shared narrative that holds us together?

We’re not arguing for a monoculture. But we are arguing for a culture. One that’s plural, but not fragmented. Diverse, but not incoherent. And above all, one that helps young people understand not just where they’re going, but where they came from and who they’re going with because if education is meant to prepare young people for the future, then should it first offer them a story in which they recognise themselves?

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Why instructional coaching might just be the next overhyped fad in education – or the best thing we never quite get right.

For something that’s supposed to help teachers, coaching seems to cause an awful lot of confusion. (It might even be another Rorschach blot!) Is it a personalised tool for growth, or a compliance mechanism in disguise? Is it transformative, or just another well-intentioned idea destined to sink under the weight of bureaucracy and bollocks?

The word coach originally referred to a carriage; something that carried you from one place to another. By the 1830s, Oxford University students were using it to refer to tutors who could ‘carry’ them through their exams. The metaphor stuck. In sport, the coach became someone who prepared you to win. In business, a guru who helped you think differently. And in education? Well, that’s where things get fuzzy.

The philosophical antecedents are impeccable and go back, as all the best things seem to, to ancient Greece. Socrates, for instance, believed in the power of dialogue, not direction. Famously, he claimed to '“know nothing,” and his approach (the Socratic method) was to ask questions that made students think for themselves, to unearth ideas rather than impose them. It’s not a stretch to see how that spirit lives on in coaching, especially in its more reflective, collaborative forms. The idea is to empower teachers, not evaluate them. To draw out insight, not deliver directives.

But noble intentions rarely survive contact with spreadsheets, inspection frameworks, and those slick PDF templates favoured by coaching consultants.

In sport, coaching is simple. You’re training to win. Feedback is immediate, results are measurable, and success is unambiguous. You either score the goal or you don’t. In business, coaching is less about performance and more about potential: all mindset shifts and strategic positioning, the kind of intangible outcomes that make it hard to say what’s actually changed. In schools, coaching tries to do both. We want measurable impact, but we’re dealing with complex human dynamics in highly contextual settings. Results are hard to isolate, and improvement - if it comes at all - is usually slow and difficult to attribute.

Still, coaching is having its moment, and it’s easy to see why. It promises personalisation, evidence-based feedback, and the kind of professional growth that isn’t tethered to the whims of a training day PowerPoint. Done well, it adapts to different subjects, experience levels, and school contexts. It’s being sold as a way to reduce burnout, retain good teachers, and inject a bit of humanity back into CPD. There’s even some evidence to support the hype.

A 2018 meta-analysis by Matthew Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan reviewed 60 studies and found that instructional coaching can have a moderate positive impact on teaching quality and student outcomes. Coaching improved instructional practice by nearly half a standard deviation and pupil attainment by just under 0.2. Promising, yes, but with a caveat. When scaled up, those effects tend to shrink. Why? Because coaching’s success depends heavily on context, on how it’s delivered, and crucially, on whether trust exists between coach and teacher.

This is where Sam Sims’ work adds important nuance. Sims argues that instructional coaching stands out because it has consistently shown positive effects on pupil outcomes in replicated randomised controlled trials, such as the My Teaching Partner programme. Its design mirrors established cognitive science principles - particularly deliberate practice and the novice-to-expert model - making it both theoretically sound and practically grounded. Moreover, coaching has demonstrated reliable success across subjects, phases, and contexts, highlighting its adaptability. Crucially, it follows clear, structured protocols that enable consistent implementation.

However, Sims cautions that coaching only works when it supports teacher agency and is part of a broader, integrated professional development strategy. If misapplied as a top-down fix, it risks becoming performative rather than transformative. Rob Coe goes further. He’s sceptical of the entire model. There isn’t, he points out, enough robust evidence to suggest coaching is the magic bullet it’s sometimes made out to be. Implementation varies wildly, and the quality of coaching - as with any intervention - depends on who’s doing it, how well they’re trained, and how much time and resource are available. Coe’s worry is that coaching is being oversold, used to justify cutting back on other forms of CPD, or to mask deeper problems in school culture.

The most popular models tell their own story. Doug Lemov’s approach - most famously captured by Bambrick-Santoyo’s data-driven, feedback-heavy systems - offers structure and clarity, but can also feel overly managerial. Jim Knight’s model, on the other hand, is relational and reflective. It’s grounded in partnership and mutual trust, but without a clear framework, it can veer into vagueness. One may be too tight; the other too loose. As a generalised principle, where prescription is too loose we get lethal mutation, where’s it’s too tight we risk perverse incentives.

And then there’s the money. Coaching has become an industry. Schools are spending tens of thousands on coaching programmes. External consultants are peddling packages and frameworks, often with little contextual understanding of what a given school actually needs. Adverts are popping up offering £70,000+ coaching roles, a staggering sum when many schools can’t afford enough full-time staff. So we have to ask: is this really the best use of our already-stretched resources? What’s the opportunity cost? What are we not doing because we’re investing in coaching?

Then there’s the question of curriculum. Does coaching help teachers get better at teaching their subject, or does it focus too much on generic pedagogy? If it’s all about ‘how’ and not enough about ‘what’, does it risk becoming a distraction from what really matters?

When coaching works, it works because it builds trust, creates space for reflection, and helps teachers align their practice with their values and goals. When it fails, it becomes yet another tick-box exercise, another thing to survive. The worst coaching relationships are performative, compliance-driven, and unmoored from classroom realities. In these cases, it doesn’t empower teachers, it watches them more closely.

Perhaps it works best with novice teachers, who have the most to gain from regular feedback and structured support. But even then, there are diminishing returns. At what point does coaching become an expensive way to tell experienced teachers what they already know?

So what does good coaching actually look like? It’s relational, not transactional. It’s grounded in curriculum, not just technique. It sets clear goals but allows space for agency. It’s focused, consistent, and above all, non-prescriptive. And ideally, it leads teachers to coach themselves, to reflect, adapt, and improve without needing someone else to hold the clipboard. If we’re not aiming for that, then what - you might ask - are we doing?

Coaching is, at its best, a beautiful idea. But in the wrong hands - or under the wrong pressures - it risks becoming just another education fad. The sort that promises transformation, delivers templates, and quietly becomes another cost centre. As ever, it all comes down to the same question: is this something we’re doing with teachers, or to them?

Because if we get it wrong, it’s not coaching. It’s just another carriage heading nowhere, pulled along by jargon and powered by hope.

Latest edition of the weekly podcast I record with Martin Robinson. This time we discuss the rise in diagnoses of Special Educational Needs, especially ASD and ADHD

Podcast for those who want to listen on their commute.

Video for anyone who wants to actually watch us say words.

Some sources used in this episode

The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O'Sullivan (Review here)

The Lost Girls of Autism by Gina Rippon (Here is an article by her in the New Scientist)

Why is There a Crisis in Special Educational Needs? The Briefing Room BBC Radio 4

Richard Dawkins: The tyranny of the discontinuous mind.