Track back to Summer 2024, and we find the nation celebrating the first major shift of political power for 14 years. Here was a new dawn, the chance to save the UK from disastrous right wing policy directions such as a ‘hard’ Brexit and transporting asylum seekers halfway across the world for processing. Fast forward to Autumn 2025, Labour has added its own disasters to the catalogue, and many British people are feeling ‘buyers’ remorse.’ The recent curriculum review has added many teachers to their numbers.
Buyers’ remorse
Over the time Labour has been in power, there have been many attempts to ‘tinker’ with existing legislation, many of which have had the effect of replacing one set of problems with another, leaving the British public exasperated at the current government’s lack of courage and vision. Examples include:
A welfare rights bill with the potential to reduce support for vulnerable people, which caused a rebellion amongst Labour backbenchers.
Tweaks in taxation policy which removed winter fuel support for pensioners, a change in inheritance tax which led farmers to complain that it would be impossible for their family business to be handed down to their heirs, and a rise in National Insurance for employers which had the potential to flatten the jobs market and economy.
An Online Safety Act which was met by complaints that adults’ rights to privacy online had been impinged, without any significant improvement in child protection, bearing in mind most British children continue to enter independent online life during their 11th year, and the arena they access is still full of violence, extreme pornography and social media bullying.
Weak reforms in policy for children
In December 2024, I welcomed the weak reforms introduced in the children’s wellbeing and schools bill 2025, but additionally commented “…if we’re talking about rehabilitating the national soul, I’d need to see much greater reforming zeal than this.” It did recognise many of the issues I’d been writing about for fourteen years, but its attempts to deal with them did not go far enough to make any significant impact upon curtailing the cluster of issues that contribute to the epidemic of poor mental health amongst 18-24 year olds.
A new curriculum?
This month, the Department for Education (DfE) introduced a new curriculum document entitled Building a world-class curriculum for all. I read it with trepidation, given over thirty years of experience of being buffeted by empty political whims introduced in many such previous documents.
I was cheered to find many good suggestions made within it, but disappointed that not enough thought had been given to the necessary action required to meet the aims outlined: yet another Starmer government document of wishes, not horses, upon which anyone could ride.
Positive points included a focus on teaching children everyday maths skills, and featuring climate change and ecology far more extensively in geography and science. Those currently in school are the generation who will have to meet this challenge; a point I have recently made in Yorkshire Bylines and other publications.
IT, AI and citizenship
There was also an emphasis on keeping up with the changes in IT, AI and other areas of fast-moving technology, which of course is a crucial part of preparing children to enter the adult environment of their era.
The emphasis on citizenship and participation in civil matters such as voting and societal administration was also very welcome, particularly the focus on teaching children techniques to detect fake news and conspiracy theory.
A proposal to amend the curriculum so children learn more about the histories and cultures of other nations necessarily addressed a curriculum deficit introduced by the previous government, whose view of education was tainted by political indoctrination issues.
Assessment issues
The most problematic issue emergent from the Conservatives’ 14 years in power was the handing over of state education to privately run businesses, creating an ethos that focused more upon statistical data than human welfare. This greatly contributed to children’s (and in many cases, teachers’) unhappiness.
Within such a culture, the focus of state schooling too frequently became rooted only in assessment scores, with those children and teachers not meeting targets constructed as failures to be discarded. This has contributed to a huge number of children with additional needs being dropped in one way or another from schooling, and questionable practices being undertaken by the most unscrupulous non-teaching CEOs and business managers, whose pay rises rest on meeting and exceeding statistical criteria.
Children as individuals
There is clearly a need for diagnostic assessment in education. However, the policy of targeting schools on outcomes that have been neatly graphed on a smooth and linear basis, and premised upon a belief that all children should be reaching a particular level of competence in all subjects at a particular stage (regardless of calendar age, given that there is a year’s age gap between the oldest and youngest children in any school year) is a nonsense.
As such, I was rather concerned about Building a world-class curriculum for all’s suggestion to add even more assessment points. I would rather that, from the child’s point of view, until the final four years of schooling, all assessments were treated as diagnostic. School performance could be evaluated by grade sampling, which should take account of issues such as individuals’ calendar age, number of children with additional needs in cohort, and family/area position on the deprivation index.
The culture of education
At the moment, England educates children in a corporate culture where the only meaningful assessment of schools’ worth is constructed as the score that pupils achieve in regular tests of ‘knowledge’ regurgitation.
To be fair, Building a world-class curriculum for all does, in places, consider the limitations of this, including the undesirable practice of rote teaching to test. But it does not engage with the extent of making sufficient cultural changes in state education to move away from such practices; for example, the replacement of the government inspectorate OFSTED, whose current mode of operation would not be commensurate with supporting schools that do not work in this way.
Our statistically driven education system has also become highly ‘top down,’ with children pointed towards the assessment hoops they will have to jump through from the very beginning. This has negatively impacted upon their chances of receiving an early years education in which there is time to freely explore the physical and social world until the seventh year of life, which biology and psychology indicates is the natural developmental path for human beings.
In order to recognise and deal with all these issues fully, we must rebuild our education system from the bottom up. Policy for children is therefore yet another area where a few ‘tweaks’ will not make everything OK. The publication of Building a world-class education system for all indicates that despite earlier such failures, the government has not yet learned this lesson.
A teacher evaluating the new curriculum on Facebook summed up this issue very well:
“You can tweak the curriculum, modernise the subjects, add frameworks for oracy or citizenship, but if the system still judges success by the same narrow tests, then nothing truly changes… We really are just rearranging the furniture while the house is on fire… Until we’re brave enough to rethink how we define success and dig deeper into what the purpose of our education system really is, no review can possibly fix what’s broken.”
I spoke to some retired teachers about Building a world-class curriculum for all. They have the advantage of viewing the situation over six decades, from their own education during the 1960s and 70s, and a career in teaching between the 1970s/80s and 20-teens. The majority of this sample also have grandchildren currently in primary and secondary school and some are active school governors.
“I don’t think [Building a world-class curriculum for all has changed] the real issue of assessment (and mainly GCSE) tail wagging the curriculum dog.”
“I think there are some very good elements but it’s positive tinkering rather than the sort of fundamental change that’s really needed…. It’s too secondary focused. If they got early years right so much good could then follow.”
“I think we’ve got ourselves into a terrible pickle with assessment. We’re now about a generation into a culture where it’s demanded that an ‘A’ is achievable by everyone in everything, but that defeats the point of assessment… What Gove did to the curriculum (without ever teaching a child) was utterly insane, and there has been no explicit recognition of this.”
“Why sentence everyone to be driven to the edge of sanity by fronted adverbials before they’ve even left primary school? People are uneven in their skills, which is to be expected, so the aim should be to get a good general education, then follow the route that seems most appealing to you.”
“With behaviour… children should be told where they need to make a bit more effort, and that there is time in hand to improve. And that all that adults are asking of you is that you do your best (and ensure you can have time to have fun, because that’s an essential part of growing up, too.) And expect kids to be kids, with adult responses to be kind but firm, not zero-tolerance hysteria.”
“I think the idea that everyone can get an A comes from the ‘being fed knowledge’. I call it the robot idea… the reality is that some are way ahead, some haven’t a clue what it was about and the rest are at various places in between… There is no expectation that some will be good in some subjects and not in others.”
“We cling to our Victorian education system in this country… Society has changed but the system hasn’t changed much with it. Gove made it a whole lot worse. The skills we need to tackle the 21st century challenges just aren’t being developed for most people. A rich education should include the arts, practical subjects, getting outside, sport.”
“I hate the punitive mentality in our country. The desire to punish and divide people. Much more would be achieved by cooperation and kindness.”
“If you look at organisations like OECD they want students who are adaptable, flexible thinkers creatively and critically. They need the ability to collaborate, communicate etc. We have become fixated on subjects rather than learning.”
“I think children and young people need to feel that they matter. This one size fits all is a crazy way to run an education system.”
“The whole “there are no such things as transferable skills” idea is extremely damaging. Of course there are. I’ve taught them… Why wouldn’t there be?”
“The fundamental human (and mammal… and probably avian) learning process is rooted in transferable skills. What else is literacy, other than a transferable skill?”
“I think society is going wrong because we don’t value our children enough. I don’t mean that some people don’t love their children and care for them, but as a society their needs are secondary… if we nurture and care for all our children well, we could have a much better society. It wouldn’t solve every problem, but it would help a lot.”
Rearranging the furniture while the house is on fire
Over the next few months , our government will make yet another stab at a new taxation policy, and a bold new attempt at a cohesive immigration policy. The best the public can probably do is hope not to be bitterly disappointed yet again if they finally emerge as a rag-tag of slogans and ‘furniture re-arranging.’
All of these things –welfare rights, taxation, online regulation, state education, immigration – are crucially important for the wellbeing of the British people. We need strong leadership with an honest, humane vision; the willingness to take responsibility for bold, clear choices in an increasingly chaotic international environment.
I will admit to a growing concern that Starmer’s government is not up to the job. And the British public’s patience is wearing thin. Let us hope the government can firm up its grasp on the rudder and steer HMS UK out of its current storm. Because the alternative is unthinkable.
