A new approach to education?

The recent Times Commission on Education report of 2022 is based on interviews and data collection involving many specialists in related fields. It produced a number of radical recommendations for UK schooling. These include a premium for all schools to be spent on activities including drama, music, dance and sport, and a National Citizen Service offering outdoor experiences for every pupil, not just middle-class children. It also recommends a significant boost to Early Years funding targeted at the most vulnerable and a unique pupil number from birth, to level the playing field before children get to school age. Currently Early Years funding falls some way below spending higher up the educational system (see Figure 1). Finally, the report recommends a laptop or tablet for every child in school, coupled with a much greater use of artificial intelligence in schools, colleges and universities.

The report claims that the way people shop, work, travel, bank and watch television has been utterly transformed, even over the past decade, but UK schools have failed to keep pace. Instead of adapting to the twenty-first century, the report argues that UK education remains stuck in the twentieth and, in some ways, the nineteenth century. In Estonia, rated by the OECD as one of the best education systems in Europe, children learn robotics from the age of seven and teachers use virtual reality to bring geography, chemistry, history and languages to life. The ability to speak a foreign language is essential for young people going out into a globalised world, and crucial for the country’s economy. But there has been a 47% decline in the number of UK pupils taking French, German or Spanish over the past 20 years. Only 9% of English 15-year-olds are competent in their first foreign language, compared with an average of 42% across 14 European countries. The number of pupils enrolled in so-called ‘creative’ subjects in UK schools has been steadily falling (Figure 2).