There are two big problems that hang over any discussion about education.

The first is our collective inability to separate the desirable from the possible; there are many things that we might want to be able to do, but that doesn’t mean we can, but we can waste an inordinate amount of time trying to make the impossible happen.

For example, it might be desirable to be able to accurately predict the grade that a pupil is on track for, but that doesn’t mean we can do it.

What is the purpose of schools?

The second big problem haunting debates about education is that of purpose. We seem to forget that there is no agreed purpose to the education our schools provide. Some people see schools as being there to make children into employable adults, with the skills they will need for whatever future employment might hold. 

Others argue vehemently that schools should nurture the whole child, developing their moral character and creating happy, well-balanced adults. 

Still others suggest that schools might improve the life chances of children by giving them qualifications, and other crazy radicals put forth the notion that schools might be there to give children access to the kinds of powerful knowledge that would otherwise pass them by. 

The lack of agreement over the purpose of education, and more particularly the purpose of schools, means that schools end up trying to do a bit of everything with endless calls for them to do even more. Schools can be asked to solve almost any problem because the parameters of what they are responsible for are so ill-defined.

Questions over Covid catch-up

These dual problems have been thrown into sharp relief in the past few weeks as discussions have turned to how schools can catch up on lost learning, coming to something of a head at the beginning of last week with comments from the new “catch-up tsar”, Sir Kevan Collins, that teachers will be asked to increase learning time. Here we can see a perfect storm of the impossible but desirable and confusion of purpose. 

The statement that some pupils will have learned less over the past year than they would otherwise have learned seems fairly uncontroversial. And closing that gap sounds desirable. However, identifying which pupils won’t have learned as much of what gets us into the impossible. 

Most of my pupils have worked incredibly hard and, as far as I can tell, have continued to learn what was on our curriculum. They don’t need increased learning time to study it all again. A handful of pupils might, but they will have gaps in slightly different areas of their knowledge. Simply extending the school day, or the school year, will do nothing to close these gaps. 

Indeed, the Education Endowment Foundation, the organisation that was, until recently, led by our new catch-up tsar, has shown that extending the school day or the school year has a low impact on pupil achievement. It warns that it is not enough to make a difference without a very clear purpose as to what this time is going to be used for.

And purpose is not clear here. In the same interview in which Sir Kevan Collins talked about teachers increasing learning time, he also said: “I think we need to think about the extra hours not only for learning, but for children to be together, to play, to engage in competitive sport, for music, for drama because these are critical areas which have been missed in their development.” 

What is odd here is the juxtaposing of learning and then a list of things that are also learning. Learning to play, learning to engage in competitive sports, learning to appreciate and create music is all learning. It is just not learning that necessarily has to happen in a school setting.

What is learning time?

This brings us to the crux of the problem facing the catch-up tsar, and, by extension, all of us; you can’t increase learning time. All time is learning time. We are always learning. Extending the school day, shortening holidays, setting more homework, none of this increases learning time. It increases time spent on some things and decreases time spent doing other valuable things that we tend to believe also have a purpose. 

If, as a nation, we are genuinely concerned about lost academic learning, the solution isn’t to try and do the impossible and cram more into the same amount of time. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

We can eventually catch up on lost learning by investing in high-quality adult education so that people can return to anything they feel they might have missed out on. We can put money back into all those things slashed by years of austerity that made our lives richer and made constant learning more possible. 

In the meantime, governments, and their tsars, can get out of teachers’ way and allow them to concentrate on providing an excellent education in the time already allotted to them. Stop asking schools to fill every gap in society, and we can work wonders. 

Talking about increasing learning time may be a quick way to win a headline or two, but, without a deeper discussion about the purpose of this time, it will come to nothing.

Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex. His new book, Powerful Geography, is out now. He tweets @EnserMark