What's the future of education?
Back to the drawing board
Summary
In a discussion mediated by Financial Times Global Education editor Andrew Jack, two key figures in the UK education system – Fiona Millar and Leora Cruddas – examine the challenges it faces. They unite on the need for equity, inclusion and urgent reinvestment, and diverge on the role of academies, Ofsted inspections and a teacher’s power to improve the system. For both, the goals is to build an inclusive system with excellence at its core.
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.
“We’re in one of the most difficult environments in living memory,” says Cruddas. “The headroom the government thought it had in the autumn budget has rapidly declined, and is still declining. We’ve seen rising costs across the board, as well as rising levels of child poverty. School leaders are more worried now than I think I’ve ever seen them about state funding.”
Millar adds: “The problem is that local authority services are no longer there: speech and language therapy, mental health services. Schools are being made responsible for absolutely everything: washing children’s clothes, feeding them, going into their homes to make sure they had enough [devices] to do the work they had during Covid. School leaders are being asked to solve all the problems of society without any extra resources.”
She points to the high proportion of children living in poverty, suffering from food insecurity and inadequate shelter. “They’re coming into our schools in the morning tired, cold, hungry. That’s not a brilliant way to learn. It’s not a brilliant way to experience childhood. And this is in the world’s sixth-largest economy. I don’t think that’s acceptable.”
A common concern for both is falling school attendance as young people disengage with education, often linked to the absence of any sense of belonging, and a similar crisis in the recruitment and retention of teachers.
“It’s a particularly strange feature of our system that we don’t celebrate state schools and state teachers”
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.”
Social engineering
On the underlying reasons for the current inequities in education, Millar points to structural factors: a system based on a division between fee-paying and state-funded education, and between maintained schools and academies. While she sees no political likelihood of the abolition of private schools, she believes much more could be done to make admissions policies for state schools fairer.
That means abolishing entrance exams like the 11-plus, which still operate for entry into grammar schools, and scrapping the power of schools more broadly to select who they admit. “There are so many ways within the state comprehensive system that schools can pick and choose the children they want to teach, which means you leave the children from more disadvantaged backgrounds corralled into particular schools where all the evidence shows they’re less likely to do well than in schools with a balanced intake,” she says. Millar suggests an overhaul to trigger “social engineering for the benefit of the children at the bottom of the pack” rather than those at the top.
Cruddas adds a nuance: “Governments of all colours have conflated social mobility and social justice. I think that those are different terms, and we should be more precise in our language. Social mobility is lifting up the few. Social justice is lifting up all. I think we want an education system by design that lifts up all children.”
She argues for the African concept of ‘ubuntu’: the idea of community which reflects the idea that ‘I do the best for my child, but I also want to do the best for all the children in my community’. In that context, she stresses the idea of ‘human flourishing’ and welcomes current discussions about reforms to inspection that would emphasise inclusion.
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”
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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.”
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Powering change
Cruddas welcomes the need for reflection on the curriculum and wider policy reforms, but argues there is already scope for positive change untapped within schools. “I think we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for. Why don’t we just embrace a sense of leadership agency and make the changes that we know will make the difference to our children, to our families, to our communities? I think we need to break the compliance mindset and work with other civic leaders for that wider common good while we wait for government to catch up.”
Millar, by contrast, questions the degree of empowerment of educators in the current environment: “I just don’t think it’s very realistic, given the pressures on school leaders at the moment to deliver. At a recent headteacher conference at which I spoke, all the heads wanted to talk about was complaints from parents and the difference in the way the parents relate to school. It goes back to the marketisation of education: that you’re a consumer, you’re entitled to something, and if you don’t get what you want, you can go in and complain about it.”
She says: “I’m not sure that at the moment a lot of heads do feel they have the time to lead that wider system change, especially if you’re a school that’s struggling to get out of a poor Ofsted grade. That is a bad place to be, and that pressure on you is going to be intense.”
On that, at least, Cruddas agrees, placing emphasis on the need to shift cultural norms and encourage greater belonging in schools. “This isn’t just about pupils or students. It’s also about parents and communities.”
Andrew Jack is the Financial Times Global Education Editor and oversees its free schools programme.
Lana Hughes is a mural artist and designer from East London and her works can be seen in situ around the city.
Benjamin Asante Amponsah is the artist behind Brebmassarts. His work blends bold colours, abstract forms and cubist influences to explore themes of identity, culture and connection. He also mentors young artists and shares his practice through exhibitions and community projects.
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