Is It All Going Right in Schools in England?

Spoiler Alert: It Depends What You’re Measuring

Last week, there were two very different headlines that seemed to give two very different messages about the state of education in England.

The first was the latest PISA results, which saw England climb into the international top ten for maths, reading and science, ranking tenth, joint ninth and eighth respectively. 

Just two days later, analysis from the Stop School Cuts coalition reported that schools have lost £4.5 billion in real-terms funding over the past 16 years, with nearly three quarters of schools reportedly receiving less real-terms funding than they did in 2010.

Taken together, those findings present a picture that is perhaps more complicated than we might expect. Real-terms investment has fallen across much of the school system, while England’s academic performance, at least according to one of the most widely used international measures, appears remarkably resilient.

That doesn’t mean funding doesn’t matter, obviously… and let’s not look at these results and conclude that schools can simply keep doing more with less. But how have schools managed to achieve this despite the pressures they have been under? 

What Are Schools For?

For a long time, we have (for good reason) placed huge emphasis on academic standards, literacy and numeracy, a knowledge-rich curriculum and qualifications. The PISA results suggest that, at least in some respects, it has worked. England is performing significantly above the OECD average in maths, reading and science, and we are now in the top ten internationally across all three.

Happening in parallel to this, though, is the familiar conversation about how the ask of schools and educators is becoming increasingly broader. As Owen Jenkins and Samuel Thompson, CEO and CFO respectively of Broad Horizons Education Trust, told us in August: “Education policy is always additive.”

It’s not an exhaustive list, but we do want schools to:

• improve attendance and behaviour
• support increasingly complex SEND needs
• address mental health and wellbeing
• provide meaningful enrichment
• prepare pupils for employment
• develop digital and AI literacy
• make sure young people leave education ready for adult life.

The difficulty comes, however, when we start talking about how schools are supposed to do all of it, particularly when time, money and people are already stretched. Where’s the capacity?

If we want schools to deliver more, we need to be prepared to have a proper conversation about what we are asking them to prioritise and what resources they need to do it.

What’s Next?

The government has proposed changes to the curriculum and assessment system, and we are now talking about new technical pathways at Key Stage 4 and increasing the number of credible pathways through education for young people beyond the traditional academic one.

Our current definition of academic success works extremely well for some young people, but there are others who struggle to see how what they are doing at school connects with the ‘real world’.

If stronger technical and vocational pathways achieve their mission of giving those pupils a greater sense of purpose, improve engagement and help them to leave education with qualifications that support the needs of employers… that feels like progress.

A broader curriculum could also create more space for some of the experiences and subjects that schools have found increasingly difficult to protect.

Imagine then, in ten years’ time, more young people are engaged in school, attendance has improved, more pupils leave with meaningful technical qualifications, employers tell us young people are better prepared for work, and pupils report better wellbeing. Now imagine that, at the same time, England has fallen a few places in the PISA rankings.

How would we feel about that? Do our answers give us any clues into what we think our education system should prioritise?

Choices To Be Made

I also think we need to be careful about treating academic achievement, wellbeing, enrichment and engagement as though improving one inevitably comes at the expense of another. A child who feels they belong at school, attends regularly and understands where their education might take them may well be in a better position to achieve academically too.

Even so, there are practical choices involved because a school timetable only contains so many hours, teachers only have so much capacity and a school budget can only be spent once. When nearly 75% of schools are reportedly operating with less real-terms funding than they had in 2010, those choices obviously become harder.

We can’t keep broadening what we expect schools to be responsible for without thinking seriously about the capacity we give them to deliver it.

Information That Schools Need

If we decide that our definition of a successful education should become broader, then the information we use to understand success needs to become broader too. It's something we talk about a lot at Juniper through JoinUp, and the principle behind it is fairly straightforward: getting the right information, to the right person, at the right time.

School leaders are trying to understand attainment and progress alongside attendance, behaviour, wellbeing, SEND, enrichment and the individual context of their pupils, and then they have to decide where to focus their attention and increasingly limited resources.

That is where I think technology can genuinely help. It can't tell a headteacher what matters most in their school because every school and trust operates within its own specific context, and professional judgement will always be essential. What it can do is make it easier to bring information together, understand what it's telling you, and get it to the people who are best placed to act on it.

England has an education system that is producing strong academic outcomes by international standards, despite everything schools have had thrown at them over the past decade and a half.

The challenge is surely to preserve those strengths while getting better at some of the things PISA can't easily measure… In the words of February’s schools’ white paper, we really do want all pupils achieving AND thriving.

That means thinking about:

• whether children feel they belong at school
• whether they have access to art, music, sport and enrichment
• whether young people who are unlikely to follow a traditional academic route can see a credible future for themselves
• and whether teachers and leaders have the capacity to give pupils what they need

Perhaps the most interesting question raised by these PISA results, then, is whether we are clear about what we want an excellent education system to produce in the first place.

A system that fosters academically successful young people who are also healthy, engaged, curious (and prepared for whatever comes next) feels like a goal everyone can agree on…

…but we need to make sure schools have the funding, capacity and information to get us there.