Schools cannot solve all our problems
The limits of ‘put it in the curriculum’ politics
There are two policy proposals so lazy and so generic that they usually tell you the team advocating for them didn’t have any good ideas:
We need a minister for [my thing]
We need to put [my thing] in the national curriculum
At some point, I’ll write about the role that ‘Minister for’ should (and mostly doesn’t) play in enabling joined-up government. Today I want to talk about schools: why we’re so obsessed with using them as policy-lever-of-first-choice, and the mistakes we’re making when we do.
The usual complaint you get is from teachers and educationalists: if we put everything into the national curriculum that campaigners had asked for, children would need to be at school for about 93 hours a week. For every new thing we add to the list, we need to take something away, and no campaigners ever ask for that except when it comes to the polarised issue of sex education.
But let’s wish that problem away for a moment: if we could make time in the school day - perhaps by abolishing holidays completely - would schools be the way to change the country, in the way campaigners seem to believe? I think not.
‘Put it into the curriculum’ falls into a number of intellectual traps.
First: timing.
I remember arguing with the late Labour MP Frank Field over the question of parenting education, which he wanted to be part of the secondary curriculum. Is parenting a critical life skill? Yes. Should the state support people to learn that skill, as part of our approach to improving early childhood? Yes. Is teaching 15 year olds about parenting the right mechanism? Surely not. Unless you’re trying to scare teenagers into abstinence or birth control, it’s not the right moment.
The time to learn about babycare is during pregnancy. The time to learn about toddlerhood is when you have a baby. Real-time interventions have a salience and immediacy that can lead to far better learning outcomes than herding recalcitrant giggling teenagers into thinking about things they won’t need to know for years or even decades to come.
Second: pace.
When you talk to campaigners about ‘put it into the curriculum’, it’s usually clear that what they really want is everyone in the country to know about [my thing]. Well, friends, let me tell you: this is social policy on slo-mo.
The new things that Becky Francis’ review is putting into the national curriculum will affect children from 2028. From 2035, it will have been a feature of the secondary curriculum of all new adults - children whose *whole* schooling has been shaped by it will start turning 18 in 2042. It won’t be until 2060-ish that half the population will have benefited and we won’t have reached the whole adult population until well into the next century, by which time it’s just possible we’ll have had a couple more curriculum reviews. And of course this discounts all the people who move to the UK as adults and never once set foot in our schools.
Third: blinkers.
Financial education, how to spot fake news, CPR, citizenship and democracy skills, British history, sexual consent: there is a case for building up the shared knowledge and capacities of the people who live on these islands on all of these issues. But we say that schools should be responsible for getting everyone to know things because we’re incapable of imagining another mechanism.
Our model for what childhood is legitimises two things that are contested for adults:
Compulsion
The imparting of knowledge from an expert source
What if we stopped treat capacity as a switch that flicks at 18 - and started to think more imaginatively about how we build capacity for the whole population, and the civic obligations we might owe to one another throughout our lives. If we want people to ‘join in’ they have to know how.
Not just for kids
When I set up the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, we did extensive research with consumers with lived experience of mental health problems. We also reached many neuro-divergent people, people with brain injuries, learning disabilities or dementia. It became immediately apparent that many of them were using financial products, or internet controls designed for children. These products were the only ones that offered them restrictive features that helped them stay on budget, manage impulsive spending, or stay away from parts of the internet they knew caused them harm.
Financial services and utility providers struggled to get their heads around this (they’re getting a little better now). We made the case for consumers who knew they sometimes got into impulsive debt during times of crisis to ‘self-exclude’ from the credit market. The legislative framework says no: an adult must always be able to change their mind, even if it is addictive or compulsive behaviour associated with an illness that is making them change their mind.
These issues are different in many ways, but they reinforce for me the poverty of our model of what adulthood is. We have a laudable desire to empower and enable free citizens to take responsibility for themselves. But it blinkers us to the idea that we are all, also shaped by our environments, by the information we can access, and by worst as well as the best impulses of our minds. It is legitimate for us - collectively, through our democratic system - to try to shape that for the collective good.
Civic civics
If we want a society that is literate in money, media, and citizenship, we need an infrastructure for lifelong learning that reflects how adults actually live. Schools are only one node in a much bigger information system, and we’ve been neglecting the rest.
First, we need to be far more confident about shaping the information environment itself. The Online Safety Act and its regulators are still trapped in a moral panic about speech - forever balancing “free expression” against the risk of offence - rather than focusing on the kinds of content that do the most tangible harm. It is not political satire that’s bankrupting pensioners or destabilising trust in medicine; it’s scams, frauds, medical disinformation and synthetic videos designed to deceive to make money through exploitation.
We need an online ecosystem that treats this kind of systemic deception the way we treat unsafe food or faulty wiring: as a public-safety hazard, not a philosophical conundrum. Enshittification of our information environment cannot continue unchecked.
Second, we should build education into the moments when people’s lives actually change. The touchpoints already exist - GPs, benefits offices, employers, banks, registrars, housing providers - but we rarely see them as places of learning. Imagine being automatically offered a short, evidence-based financial education module when you first claim Universal Credit, or clear, simple guidance on power of attorney when you retire. Imagine a GP referral to a nutrition or sleep course that’s actually interesting and accessible, rather than a dusty leaflet.
Life throws up these transitions - getting a job, having a child, falling ill, retiring - and each one could be an opportunity for small, targeted injections of public learning and even connection to others in a group going through the same thing. “Just-in-time” civics, delivered through the infrastructure we already have.
Third, we need to normalise the idea that citizenship education doesn’t end at the school gate. In the twentieth century, the BBC performed part of this function: providing shared, public-interest information at scale, from cooking to voting. Some of that still survives - in MoneyHelper, Citizens Advice, NHS websites - but the connective tissue between them has frayed. We should see these institutions as part of a national civic learning network, funded and governed for public good, not just as service providers.
The goal isn’t to create a nanny state, or a curriculum for grown-ups. It’s to recognise that adulthood is not a static condition. People’s knowledge, resilience and social responsibilities change over time. We don’t just create gateways for new professionals to prove their skills - we require them to develop throughout their careers with CPD. We need the same for citizens - not just gateway processes for kids or migrants, but a way of learning together how to live together.
A civic information system
Practical entitlements for public learning
Spaces that deliberately mix people across generations and backgrounds, not just to teach, but to rehearse the act of living together.
It’s easy to say ‘put it in the curriculum’ and it’s much harder to imagine this kind of learning infrastructure. But easy isn’t working - so let’s try something different.
Morsels of optimism
A couple of book recommendations this week -
Citizens, by Jon Alexander and Ariane Conway
Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
Fractured, by Jon Yates
How we Learn to Live Together
Citizenship is a good case study on this. It became part of the curriculum in England in 2002. But a lack of suitably trained/enthused teachers means it is patchy at least (in that there are some teachers doing brilliant things, but not enough of them).
But also funding for the more exciting/innovative things dried up in part because it was now part of the curriculum, and therefore assumption was resources would be state funded. The plan to have a Young Citizens Passport to be issued to every school leaver was never realised (apart from in Northern Ireland).
Now we have no British Youth Council, no UK Youth Parliament etc, all the things that brought energy/excitement to the subject.
We have sheep-dipped a generation in citizenship and have we got better citizens? I'm not sure we have.
👏 Thank you for all this. Could not agree more. Schools can do a lot, but not everything, as evidenced by the fact we teach kids maths for years and still loads of people forget it by the time they need it. Just In Time learning is vital. As are public information campaigns, which seem to have died.