Some 80 years ago, the crisis of the Second World War led to a visionary change in the form of the 1944 Education Act.

It gave new educational opportunities to the children of its time: it raised the school leaving age and for the first time gave secondary education for all in modern, technical and grammar schools.

Now, in 2021, the pandemic has brought many interesting and thought-provoking ideas about education to the surface: online and blended learning can work; teaching is a skilled job; there’s a learning gap and a digital divide; children’s mental health is important; and our exam system is fragile.

The experience has challenged our understanding and provoked new thinking. Things will not simply now “go back to normal”. We need a visionary spirit again for the post-pandemic world - to recognise what we have learned and what should become.

The challenges

However, as well as the insights into what education is and can be, we have also been shown serious fault lines that will hold it back, such as digital access, which is now not a privileged option but an essential part of life.

What’s more, the exams fiasco of last year and debates about how to make awards this year have shown our dependence upon final exams.

Yet children do not grow by being measured. Assessment needs to serve learning - to be “formative”. Instead, we still prioritise memory, paper and factual content over learner skills, and summative snapshots over student development.

Recent years have brought about a retreat from teacher-assessed student work at key stages 4-5, tinkering with grades and numbers and shoring up a GCSE that was updated 35 years ago as a school-leaving exam. It’s unsurprising that some top schools ignore it.

This exam tail wags the curricular dog. We teach to the exam, and a crowded national curriculum that values and is defined by its highly prescriptive content - not the skills needed by young learners now and for their next seven decades, nor the pedagogy that supports them.

As a system, it is massively out of date. And, in turn, this architecture of testing, grades and curriculum content is upheld by inspection.

Yet most heads and teachers believe that Ofsted is about accountability and does little for school support and improvement - often inspiring fear rather than professional engagement. This is not good.

It means morale is generally low among teachers, the result of oppressive ‘workload’ expectations, punitive inspection and frequent and highly prescriptive change.

Too many teachers leave within five years of qualifying, and there are serious shortages and lack of diversity in some regions and subjects, not least applicants for headship. Teaching is a wonderful job - so we must change this situation. 

Change from the top

To start to turn all this around, we must look to the top.

The Department for Education has a truly challenging job, but it is active largely in administration, regulation, standards and accountability, not educational support, development and innovation. We’ve lost the visionary spirit of 1944.

With 17 secretaries of state in the past 35 years and five in the past decade, policy seems driven by short-termism - electoral appeals to “rigour” and “results”, or re-engineering term times, rather than considered reform. It’s a poor way to lead a system that needs to invest in informed research and in the long-term development of people.

We need to be thinking about how we prepare children for the impact of AI on society and employment, of climate emergency, of nano- and biotechnology, of social medicine, of the internet of things, of international shifts in political systems, of challenges to fact and truth, of cybersecurity and privacy, and of demographic changes. 

Yet search the Department for Education or government website for this vision and it is in vain. 

Where can we look for inspiration?

But inspiration is out there - and you don’t need to look far: Charles Fadel at the Center for Curriculum Redesign on 21st-century skills or AI in education; Priya Lakhani’s Century; Professor Dylan Wiliam on modern assessment; Professor Deborah Eyre on High Performance Learning; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s report Trends Shaping Education (the Programme for International Student Assessment has now advanced way beyond subject league tables) are a good start.

The leading schools internationally are shaped by these analyses. Their curricula are not knowledge content-driven but driven by a bedrock of Steam subjects (science, technology, engineering, the arts and maths) while being equally focused on growth mindset, learning skills, collaboration, character development and meta-learning.

Within a strong framework, there is room for personalised, self-directed, experiential and project-based learning, developing skills and dispositions for a complex and fast-changing world, global mindedness, service and citizenship and learning both within and beyond school.

Assessment is formative, and teachers have room for initiative. These schools have maker spaces as well as classrooms. This is not a tale of the privileged, but of modern focus and intention. It is what children, society and employers need.

These approaches are not theoretical. School 21 in London is built around personalised learning and 21st-century skills. The amazing success of Doha College (the British school in Qatar) is driven by High Performance Learning.

Other British schools overseas have maker spaces, leadership and community engagement programmes, and highly successful blended learning.

But we are not always world leaders: for interdisciplinary and enquiry-based learning, creativity and critical thinking, education for entrepreneurship, problem-based approaches to develop leaders of industry, we must look to Avenues World Schools in New York, Sao Paolo and Shenzhen, Thomas Jefferson High School’s Stem curriculum, Illinois Math and Science Academy, the BASIS Charter Schools, Raffles Singapore, the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, the Chinese International Academy Hong Kong - and more.

What next?

We need a reset - a national dialogue initiated by government but drawing upon wide, informed and independent expertise.

Its remit should be time limited, to review the school experience based upon future need. It will pose some interesting and difficult choices, and need courageous leadership, but it is an economic as well as social imperative.

It is essential that the teaching profession is listened to and the commercial examination companies included.

And it needs to be translated into practical, achievable and staged reform. This must include a radical new approach to curriculum focus, to assessment and to the role of support and inspection. And the DfE needs to re-imagine its role as administrator to include informed development and support.

If it looks challenging, it is. It is also necessary. It requires is political imagination, ambition and, perhaps most of all, vision.

Trevor Rowell is chair of the Council of British International Schools. He has led schools and school groups in England and internationally, both state-funded and independent, taught all ages from 3-18, been a governor of 14 schools worldwide and advised many school boards on several continents