Four nations
with four sets
of different
problems
Devolution has led to growing
differences between the education
systems in England, Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland but The Times
Education Commission heard many
similar concerns from headteachers,
academics and business leaders around
the United Kingdom. In all four nations
there were calls for reform of the
assessment system and demands for a
greater connection between education
and employment as well as worries
about mental health and inequality.
John Fyffe, non-executive director of
Education Scotland and a former head
teacher, told a round-table meeting at
Adam Smith’s former home Panmure
House in Edinburgh: “You’ve got the big
assessment tail wagging the dog.”
Children in Scotland take different
national exams from those in England,
Wales and Northern Ireland, but he said
that across the board the United
Kingdom was “probably the most over-
assessed group of countries in the
western world”.
Martin Darroch, chief executive of the
Scottish law firm Harper Macleod, said
that there needed to be a greater
emphasis on skills. “There is an
obsession that to be successful you have
to go to university and go down the
profession route.”
In Northern Ireland there are growing
concerns about the attainment gap
between wealthy and disadvantaged
students. Tony Gallagher, professor of
social sciences, education and social
work at Queen’s University, Belfast, told
a round-table meeting: “We have a huge
problem with inequality. We have a huge
problem of a fixation with a particular
type of exam system.”
Ann Watt, director, of the public
policy think thank Pivotal, said that
segregation in education was a huge
issue in Northern Ireland. “We segregate
children according to community
background, according to selection at 11
and also often by gender as well.”
There is a mental health crisis
throughout the UK. Carol McCann,
principal of St Dominic’s school in
Belfast, said her school had a counsellor
two days a week, but added: “It’s like
trying to put your finger in the dyke
since the pandemic.” Social media had
caused huge damage, she said. “It
dominates young people’s lives and I
think that is what causes so much of the
issues that children are feeling now.”
England is increasingly isolated in
maintaining a traditional curriculum
focused on knowledge rather than skills.
In Wales a new curriculum is being
introduced that aims to “prepare young
people to thrive in a future where digital
skills, adaptability and creativity,
alongside knowledge, are crucial”.
The Welsh government is also trying
out a longer day in 14 schools.
The Scottish “Curriculum for
Excellence” was introduced in 2010 with
the aim of providing children with a
more rounded education. The
Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development said it
offered “an inspiring and widely
supported philosophy of education” that
held “valuable lessons” for other
education systems.
There have, however, been problems
with the implementation. Scotland’s
performance in maths and science has
declined and head teachers warn that
there is a “lack of definition” about what
schools are expected to teach.
The Times commission aims to draw
up recommendations that are relevant to
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland.TIMES EDUCATION
COMMISSION530-minute collective
reading session.
There is an emphasis
on character as well as
qualifications.
Wednesday afternoons
are dedicated to non-
academic “electives”
such as gardening, chess,
debating, coding,
creative writing and
sport. Pupils choose a
different activity every
half term. One term
students built a medieval
trebuchet. All pupils
learn an instrument in
year 7 and 95 per cent of
pupils play for a school
sports team.
The longer day makes
it possible to include
these activities in the
timetable rather than as
after-school clubs, which
means that everybody
does them. “It doesn’t
cost us more,” Lock said.
“The teachers do more
hours of supervision, but
the pay off is we get rid
of some of the nonsense.
We don’t have masses of
folders of performancebecause they fail to get grade 4 or above
in English and maths GCSEs. There are
perverse incentives that encourage
schools to “off-roll” or exclude
vulnerable children who are unlikely to
do well in exams and special needs
provision is woefully inadequate.
The brightest children are also
suffering in a system that puts exam
technique above intellectual inquiry.
Sarah Fletcher, high mistress of the
independent St Paul’s Girls’ School, said
it was “morally unacceptable that a third
of students fail to get maths and English
every year” but she insisted that the
high-achieving pupils at her own
academically selective school were also
being let down by a system that
homogenised children. “They’re not
getting the skills they need for the real
world, they’re not being stretched.”
The classicist Dame Mary Beard
described how young people arriving at
Cambridge had changed since she
started teaching forty years ago. “The
assessment system is putting a brake on
kids’ explorations and achievements.
Kids expect now that you will tell them
what they have to do in order to get a
good mark. It’s ‘I want to know what I do
concluded that reforming education to
make it more commercially relevant
would boost the economy by £125 billion
a year. “The employers felt that there
was a lack of real-world understanding
coming through,” Darragh O’Sullivan, a
trustee for the charity, said. “People may
have some of the the subject-matter
expertise but they don’t necessarily
know how to apply that.”
Lord Bilimoria, the founder of Cobra
beer and president of the CBI, said it was
“the biggest false economy” not to invest
in education but he warned that just
pouring more money in was not enough.
“We need to unleash the creative
potential that lies within almost every
child in this country. If it is that ability to
be creative and innovative that makes us
more competitive as a country then
we’ve got to turbocharge that.”
The world is changing at an
astonishing rate. It is impossible to
predict the jobs that will be available
when today’s primary pupils go out to
work. The next generation needs to be
flexible, inquisitive and empathetic.
More than half the children who start
school in September will live to 100.
They will have to retrain many times
over the course of their long careers so it
is more important than ever to inculcate
a love of learning.
The rise of “fake news” makes it
crucial that young people are
encouraged to debate, question and
challenge. The neuroscientist Baroness
Greenfield said: “Education shouldn’t
just be about imparting facts but more
about how you handle facts.” Yet at a
time when artificial intelligence is going
to take over many routine tasks,
education has become more robotic.
“The machines are going to be able to do
the coding,” the businesswoman
Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho said. “We
need to encourage the human skills. The
ability to be critical about the world
around us, and particularly the
information in that world, is vital..”
The challenges of the modern age
from pandemics to climate change
require an interdisciplinary approach but
the education system is still boxed into
traditional curriculum subjects. Sir
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome
Trust, said Covid-19 had shown the
limitations of narrow subject-based
teaching. “The critical voices that you
need are those people that have an
ability to bring expertise across
dimensions, rather than just within
narrow dimensions,” he said.
The countries with the best education
systems have adapted to the global
trends. In Estonia schools focus on
teaching pupils “21st-century
competencies” including
communication, collaboration and
critical thinking. In Singapore the
curriculum has refocused on problem-
solving to foster a new generation of
entrepreneurs. In Shanghai two districts
are testing new forms of assessment for
creativity and in the Netherlands
wellbeing is integral to education.
According to Andreas Schleicher, the
director of education and skills at the
OECD and the commission’s
international adviser, England looks
increasingly like an outlier. “It’s quite a
traditional school system and perhaps
has become more traditional,” he said.
“Over the years most countries have
gone in the opposite direction when it
comes to curriculum design and
implementation. The world no longer
rewards people just for what they know
— Google knows everything — but for
what they can do with what they know.”
This is a once-in-a-generation chance
to change course. The world is in flux.
There is an appetite for reform across a
remarkable cross-section of society and
a new education secretary, Nadhim
Zahawi, who as an entrepreneur
understands business and technology
better than any of his predecessors. The
dedication of teachers is being
undermined by a system that is not fit
for purpose. This is the moment to
reinvent education for the digital age.to get a first’ instead of ‘I want to explore
this subject as widely as I possibly can
until my head hurts.’ ”
There is, according to Sir Charlie
Mayfield, the former chairman of John
Lewis who now runs the digital training
company QA, a damaging “disconnect”
between the education system and the
employment market. Almost 90 per cent
of business leaders say that they have, or
are expecting, serious skills shortages
and 44 per cent of employers feel that
young people leaving education are not
“work-ready”. “Standards in education
have always been measured by exams,
assessments and grades, so it’s not
surprising that this has been the focus,”
Mayfield said. “However, this is
increasingly at the expense of what
employers really value: resilience,
communication and problem-solving.”
The economic cost is enormous. A
recent survey by the Commercial
Education Trust found that almost three
quarters of companies believed that their
profitability and productivity would rise
by at least 25 per cent if new recruits
from school, college or university were
prepared better and had excellent
commercial ability. The analysismanagement paperwork... We don’t make
teachers mark books.”
The school, set up in
2012, is run on the basis
of the “Sophie test”,
named after the
daughter of the founding
principal Mark Lehain,
now a special adviser at
the Department for
Education. Lock, whose
daughter also goes to the
school, explained: “If it’s
not good enough for our
kids, it’s not good
enough.”