The writer was an adviser to Tony Blair and more recently Keir Starmer. He was also a history teacher and headteacher
As the headteacher of a school in east London, I regularly asked employers what they were looking for from new staff recruits. The same answer kept coming up: people with “something about them”. Contained in that short phrase are a collection of important qualities such as initiative, resilience, curiosity and imagination.
Parents might add the ability to build healthy relationships, listen with respect to other points of view and the critical thinking skills to distinguish between truth and lies online.
But none of these feature much in the curriculum. The former Conservative education minister Michael Gove’s reforms should be praised for both continuing the previous Labour government’s push on literacy and numeracy and for pursuing a knowledge-rich curriculum so all children have access to “the best that has been thought and said”. But this is not sufficient.
The gap today between the diet of schools and what is needed to thrive in a rapidly changing, technology-driven world couldn’t be wider. England’s education system owes more to the past than the future. For that reason, an increasing number of employers are not looking at qualifications at all when hiring. Letters and numbers say so little about what someone is really like.
None of the government’s growth plans will succeed without a highly skilled workforce. And yet, education has fallen down the political agenda — possibly because it is not in permanent existential crisis like the NHS. But that is to ignore an emergency that is just as urgent. It is played out in the mental health of young people, the large numbers absent from school and skills shortages, not least in the life sciences, artificial intelligence and clean power sectors. In truth, our schools need changes just as big as the NHS does.
Curriculum reform in England has the potential to be a landmark legacy of this Labour government. An independent review is under way and will produce its initial findings in the coming weeks. Its recommendations need to be bold, yet the mood music is the opposite. It must begin with the purpose of school: to develop the whole child — head, heart and hand. To think deeply (head), to develop emotional intelligence (heart) and to become creative problem-solvers (hand).
We need a new “basics” that includes oracy (high-quality speaking skills) and digital skills (the ability to adapt to rapid developments in AI and other technologies). We need fruitful work placements, the creative arts and space in the curriculum where controversial issues can be wrestled with sensitively. All young people should do an Extended Project Qualification, a rigorous piece of original research or the creation of a new product — giving them the chance to show initiative.
There is broad cross-party consensus that the exam system is distorting the breadth and depth of the curriculum. Radical reform is needed here, too: A-levels broadened, GCSEs streamlined, better technical and vocational pathways, the use of technology so young people can take tests when ready, and a way of capturing “the full strengths of every child”, a phrase prominent in the remit for the curriculum review. To achieve this, each child should leave school with a digital profile of who they are and what they can do. It should contain their qualifications but also all their achievements, in and out of school, as well as a portfolio of their best work.
Labour’s success when last in power came in no small part from the priority it gave to education, and the electoral coalition it built around it — working class and middle class — united by a powerful sense of aspiration and the necessity of preparing our children for the future. This spirit needs to be captured again. A new curriculum for a new age will do exactly that.
