TIMES EDUCATION
COMMISSION11The
business
view
education. It’s like
having a personal tutor
for each child and the
parents like it for that
reason. For the children
it has really made a
difference. There’s no
wasted time; they can
learn at any time and in
any place.”
That flexibility was
invaluable during the
pandemic and the pupils
love this way of studying.
Holly Graham, 10,
sometimes spends three
hours doing maths
questions after school.
“It’s definitely helped me
with my learning,” she
said. As in a computer
game, there are
competitions and
incentives.
“The best thing about
it is it challenges you to
go further and faster,”
Max Ode, 10, said.
Sharon Bruton, chief
executive of the trust,
said that the impact on
outcomes had been
astonishing in all its five
schools. “We have seen
progress well above what
we would previously
have expected,” she said.around the classrooms,
as pupils take their
individualised lessons,
offering support and
encouragement. The
teachers can monitor in
real time what each
pupil is doing and how
they have developed over
the term. The AI,
developed by the British
educational technology
company Century Tech,
even shows how long the
pupils spent on each
question, analysing their
swipes and strokes.
There is a scatter
graph of pupil progress,
showing every child as a
dot, which allows their
teacher to work out who
is struggling and who
needs to be stretched.
One 10-year-old moved
so fast through the
maths curriculum that
he ended up doing
GCSE-level work.
The AI can also
predict with 96 per cent
accuracy whether a child
is autistic by assessing
how they tap the iPad
screen. “It’s not a
gimmick,” James said.
“It enhances the
“
It’s like
having a
personal
tutor for
each child
a week, compared to the OECD average
of 41 hours. Primary school teachers said
they worked 52.1 hours a week, more
than any other country except Japan.
The joy of teaching has been drummed
out by a blizzard of appraisals, marking
and regimented lesson plans. Every week
one in five teachers spends seven hours,
the equivalent of a whole working day,
marking students’ work. Many schools
also require teachers to fill out regular
“data drops” plotting pupils’ progress so
that heads can have information on
hand to present to Ofsted if the
inspectors suddenly turn up.
The profession has lost confidence in
the accountability system. Less than one
in ten teachers thinks that Ofsted is fit
for purpose, according to a survey for the
commission by Oxford University Press.
Dame Alison Peacock, the head of the
Royal College of Teaching, said teachers
felt pressure to “be like robots” to “stick
to the script” in classrooms. “Ofsted,
frankly it’s a reign of terror.”
Two former teachers gave moving
testimony to the commission explaining
why they had quit. Ryan Wilson, who
now works in radio, had wanted to be a
teacher since he was eight but left after
ten years in the job. “The bit in the
classroom I loved, and still love,” he said,
but the “hyper-accountability and
pressure” became unbearable. “You end
up with a whole school on a knife edge
about Ofsted coming in. We weren’t
doing things because it was the right
thing for children, we were doing it
because Ofsted wanted to see it.”
Mehreen Baig, now a television
presenter, trained as a teacher because
she wanted to “save the world”. She told
the commission: “I thought ‘I’m going to
make them love Shakespeare’ [but] the
magnitude of the intellectual and
physical and emotional, hourly and daily
demand was unsustainable in the end.”analogue system in a digital age
Technology could be the solution to
many of these problems, reducing
teacher workload, personalising learning
and helping pupils to catch up with
missed lessons. The extraordinary rise of
online learning during the pandemic
showed the capacity of schools and
teachers to adapt.
More than 1.8 million laptops and
computers were distributed by the
Department for Education. Oak
National Academy, the government-
funded online school set up last April,
now has 10,000 lessons on its database
covering virtually the whole national
curriculum. Even after schools have
reopened 170,000 pupils and 40,000
teachers are still logging in every week.
The next step could be exams.
Pearson, which owns the EdExcel board,
has introduced its first on-screen GCSE
in computer science and pupils at dozens
of schools will be set digital English and
maths exams this year in a trial by
another board, AQA. There could soon
be interactive tests, which allow the
questions to become harder or easier
according to a student’s performance,
and continuous assessment by AI.
The Department for Education,
however, has only recently started taking
the digital revolution seriously. There is
no policy to ensure that students have a
laptop or tablet, the pen and paper of the
future. Ofcom found that nearly a
million children can still access the
internet only through a mobile phone
and half a million have no access at all.
The tech entrepreneur Kathryn
Parsons, who successfully campaigned to
get coding on the national curriculum,
said: “The world of business has
transformed incredibly in the past five to
ten years. The technologies to transform
the world have been created and those
businesses are at the coal face so they
are adapting or they won’t exist in
twenty years. But education hasn’t really
had that same pressure point so it hasn’t
had to transform to meet the needs of
how the world is changing. There is a
chasm between where education is and
where the world of business is.”Employers have lost faith
in the exams system and
most now use their own
assessment of recruits, a
survey for The Times
Education Commission
found. Almost three
quarters of businesses ask
applicants to sit cognitive
ability tests or online
aptitude tests and one
in seven give no
consideration at all to
GCSE or A-level grades
or university degrees, the
poll by the professional
services firm PwC found.
It discovered that three
quarters of companies
had to give new recruits
additional training in
basic skills, including
literacy and numeracy.
Almost a third of
employers regularly had
to give young people
joining their workforce
extra lessons and nearly
half sometimes did. Only
a fifth never had to
provide additional literacy
and numeracy training.
There is also a
mismatch between the
education that young
people receive and the
skills that employers say
are required. According to
the survey, 70 per cent of
companies agree that the
system focuses too much
on grades and only half
think the curriculum
provides young people
with the skills they need.
Almost three quarters of
employers agreed that
recent record grade
inflation for GCSEs and
A-levels had devalued the
qualifications.
The PwC survey of
150 human resources
directors of large
companies found strong
support for a shift of
emphasis in school. More
than half would like to see
a greater emphasis on
personal skills, such as
time management; 48 per
cent wanted more focus
on problem-solving;
45 per cent on teamwork;
and 44 per cent on
presentational skills.
Asked what were the
biggest challenges they
faced with recruits joining
straight from school,
college or university,
three fifths of the
employers cited “lack of
preparation for the world
of work” and half said
“inadequate personal
skills, eg time
management”. Almost
half suggested that the
main problem was “lack
of communication skills”.
Laura Hinton, from
PwC, said: “The education
system undoubtedly gives
students an important
foundation for the world
of work but it’s not just
about the grades but the
broader experience of
learning, participating
and meeting deadlines.”neuroscience at Cambridge University
and a member of the commission, said
GCSEs had been introduced when little
was known about the teenage brain. “In
the last 20 years we’ve learnt a huge
amount about how the brain undergoes
very substantial and protracted
development during adolescence. Brain
regions that are particularly relevant to
skills such as decision making and
planning and inhibition and
multitasking, as well as social processing
and self awareness, and analytical
thought and creativity... undergo huge
amounts of development. We also know
that most mental health problems start
in adolescence.”british pupils among unhappiest
There are multiple causes of the mental
health crisis in schools but many
students cite the pressure of exams as a
driving force behind their own anxiety.
When one in six young people suffers
from a probable mental health disorder,
and more than half of adult mental
health problems emerge before the age
of 15, this cannot be ignored.
British children are among the
unhappiest in the world. The OECD
found that pupils in the UK suffered the
steepest decline in life satisfaction
between 2015 and 2018 and ranked 34th
out of 35 countries for fear of failure.
Schools urgently need more support
and counsellors but just as importantly
students must be given the emotional
tools to cope with life. The adventurer
Bear Grylls emphasised the importance
of resilience. “Teachers are such heroes
but I think generally the education
system is wildly outdated and that’s one
of the many reasons why we’re seeing
such a surge in young people’s mental
health struggles,” he said. “One of the
most disempowering things for young
people is feeling ill-equipped for life.”
Sir Anthony Seldon, who has
championed wellbeing in schools and
universities since introducing it at
Wellington College, said: “Education
should be drawing out all the different
intelligences — including creative, social
and physical — of the young and that is
transparently insufficiently happening,
especially for the most disadvantaged. At
the top end we see too many young
people coming out from high schools
with strings of A*s but unable to cope in
life because they have been told that
academic results are all that matter.”a demoralised workforce
Teachers feel demoralised by the
drudgery of teaching to the test and the
plethora of paperwork. Underlying the
immediate Covid-driven staffing
shortage is a growing recruitment and
retention crisis. A YouGov poll of
teachers for the commission found that a
third planned to leave within five years
and 16 per cent were ready to go within
twelve months. More than half of head
teachers are also thinking of quitting.
Research from around the world
shows that good teaching is the key to
success in education. Teachers should be
celebrated as much as the health
workers the country clapped during the
pandemic. From Dead Poets Society to
Harry Potter, the bond between an
inspirational teacher and their pupils is
woven through popular culture. The
singer Adele broke down in tears last
year as she brought her teacher up on
stage as a tribute at her concert. Yet the
education system is doing too little to
nurture the talent of its workforce.
The OECD found that full-time
secondary school teachers in England
reported working on average 49.3 hours