What's the future of education?

Fiona Millar’s adult engagement with schools began as a mother raising children in London, then as a governor, political adviser to government and journalist. Leora Cruddas grew up in South Africa, became a special needs teacher in London and worked in education policy in local government before joining the Association of School and College Leaders and now the Confederation of School Trusts. 

Certainly, Millar and Cruddas have arrived at their experience of the English education system from very different backgrounds. While both agree the system is under enormous stress, they diverge on the value of academy trusts and how the country’s schools are structured, the role of Ofsted inspections, and how much teachers have the power to improve the system without significant fresh government reforms. 

A mountain of worries 

Asked for her long-term vision, Millar calls for the creation of “an inclusive, comprehensive education system in which all children thrive”. Cruddas similarly highlights excellence, inclusion and equity as “the building blocks of a truly great schooling system”. 

Both suggest the greatest current challenge is chronic underinvestment in education, as well as the financial squeeze on social services with which they interact. The result has been to place ever greater burdens on schools as the fallback of last resort, notably since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.  

Changing habits 

Millar sees “incremental improvement” overall in schools in recent years, but cautions: “What I find interesting is how many of the same issues we are still tackling, we’ve tried to tackle for the last 30 years, and not completely successfully. Fundamentally, we have ended up with a very hierarchical school system, which was the aim when it was founded 150 years ago. You have to ask yourself whether that’s really appropriate for the modern world we’re living in.” 

She suggests that the best education systems around the world are characterised by teachers who are well paid and highly regarded. These countries “focus relentlessly on the quality of the teaching and invest in their teachers”, prioritising efforts to ensure teachers have enough time to prepare their work and to benefit from professional development.  

Cruddas is a little more positive on the current state of education. “From the point of view of somebody who wasn’t born in England, I think we have a really good school system that I feel proud to be a part of,” she says. “If you are looking from outside, you see something that’s quite desirable, although I would say we are not yet a great system because it doesn’t work for everyone. It will be a great system when it works more consistently for all our children.” 

She stresses there is a danger in being too obsessed with comparisons with other countries. “I think context matters enormously. I don’t think you can just import practice from other systems. It’s a particularly strange feature of our system that we don’t celebrate state schools and state teachers, and our wonderful support staff.” 

However, Cruddas agrees that “the untapped potential of professional development is the next frontier of school improvement. There is no real improvement that is sustainable without improving the quality of teaching, and the only way is evidence-informed professional development.” 

Tunnel vision 

For Millar, the Ofsted system had a greater value two decades ago when there were serious concerns, including around safeguarding and quality, but says that today it has become “way too powerful”. She argues: “You’ve got schools that spend their lives permanently preparing for Ofsted, which is a very narrow vision of education.” 

She seeks an overhaul in favour of “a more generous vision of what makes a good and successful school and takes the pressure off teachers”. The current pressure for positive assessments puts excessive pressure on both educators and students, helping explain their disengagement. She suggests schools should be penalised in inspection reports if their students are not representative of their local communities. 

By contrast, Cruddas argues that “both peer review and inspection are necessary. Peer review is an improvement tool. Inspection is a legal duty to report on the quality of our state schools to Parliament and to parents. But I agree we have extended the role of Ofsted in such a way that it [dominates the thinking] of leaders, and that that can’t be right. We need Ofsted back in its box.” 

Millar argues for greater convergence between academies and maintained schools, suggesting that there is no meaningful difference in performance between the two systems. She says the former Conservative Education Secretary, Michael (now Lord) Gove’s push for ‘academisation’ of all schools was a distraction from improving the quality of leadership, teaching and governance. “We’ve ended up with a mishmash of different systems all sitting alongside each other, and it’s incredibly inefficient and it doesn’t really work.” 

One related topic where she seeks reform is around accountability. While maintained schools report to local authorities, concerns linked to academies are, in theory, handled directly by the Secretary of State for Education – which she sees as impractical. She advocates instead for the same system for both, along the lines of former Labour Education Secretary David (now Lord) Blunkett’s proposal in 2014 for local school boards to oversee both maintained schools and academies. 

“We’ve ended up with a mishmash of different systems all sitting alongside each other, and it’s incredibly inefficient and it doesn’t really work”

Maintaining trust 

Another distinction between the two concerns academies’ freedom from the national curriculum, which schools must follow and which Millar sees as an unfair playing field. More broadly, she argues for scrapping exams at 16 years old and introducing a baccalaureate-style system in the final years of school to encompass practical and vocational qualifications as well as academic performance.  

Millar calls for a fresh focus on sports, music, art, project work and civic engagement, which could motivate more students by reflecting their interests and preparing them better for life beyond school. “I think you need a much more personalised experience,” she says. “There is not one single story, and you need to be able to meet the needs of all their children. That would make school a more enjoyable experience, and I think the teachers would be under less pressure too.” 

Cruddas defends the academy system. “I do think that there is something very powerful about a group of schools working together in deep and purposeful collaboration in a single legal entity,” she says. “If we are to build the resilience of the state school system in England, particularly in this fiscal environment, we have a better chance of creating resilience if we organise schools into groups with a single, strong, strategic governance structure.” 

But she also sees a case for reform to narrow the differences with the maintained sector in flexibility and autonomy, and welcomes reform proposals. Referring to the Confederation of School Trusts, she says: “Our formal position is that some of those freedoms should actually be applied to all schools in England.” 

“The concept of academies being somehow set in opposition to the maintained school system is really unhelpful,” she adds. “It’s one of those terrible binary oppositions in English education, where we end up shouting at each other across some very unhelpful divide rather than having a sensible conversation about what we think an end state would look like. I agree with Fiona that it’s probably not helpful to have lots of different systems sitting side by side, so we do need to understand what we are building towards.”