Last week I was in New York speaking at Google’s AI for Learning conference.
I realise I am getting repetitive on this subject, but lots of people abroad are really interested in what’s made England’s schools so successful over the last 20 years - and are, like me, really baffled that the current government are moving away from the policies that made it happen.
So quite a few people there asked me to explain what has been and is going on in the English education system.
When you are explaining policy change, especially to a foreign audience, it is very easy to focus on the high-level decisions made by senior politicians and officials. And there is a lot of value to that: it is important that policymakers are aware of the levers that are and are not available to them, which decisions are likely to have the biggest impact, and how giving a speech is not the same as actually changing a system.
However, it is only part of the story. No top-down reform programme is going to work unless it can bring the profession with it. And one aspect of England’s education reforms that was incredibly important but doesn’t get written about as much is that it featured a very influential and lively grassroots teacher community organised around blogs and Twitter. Its peak period was probably about 2012 - 2019.
Since then it has scattered and fragmented, especially since the Elon Musk purchase of Twitter. And in one sense, England has become the victim of its own success, because organisations in America, Australia and the British international school sector are snapping up a lot of people who were prominent in that community.
But there are still quite a few of us left, and over the last few months I’ve noticed some new voices joining too. In terms of social media, nothing is going to have the dominance of Twitter in the old days, and the conversation is fragmented across X, Bluesky and LinkedIn. But Substack newsletters are in many ways even better than blogs, and are very well-suited to thoughtful, longer-form writing.
So here are 22 great Substacks writing about education policy and practice in England, with a selected article from each one. I have grouped the articles into four loose themes: policy, knowledge and the curriculum, school improvement, and assessment. I don’t know all of the authors, and they represent different perspectives, but all of these pieces are bangers! I strongly recommend subscribing to all of them.
(I am sure I have missed some good ones - feel free to add suggestions in the comments and I can do another post in the future).
Education policy
Andrew Old - Education Battleground
Andrew Old is a legendary education blogger, still teaching maths and still nailing the big issues. I would not like to be the senior manager who tells Andrew he has to use group work.
The problem with progressives is that they use power structures to create obstacles that get in the way of teachers imparting knowledge. However, so many of the old barriers have been cleared away that it’s not obvious how we can be stopped any time soon. I will be standing at the front showing kids how to do maths until they sack me or kill me. I don’t even have plans to retire.
Sam Freedman — Comment is Freed
Sam Freedman is now one of the world’s most popular Substackers, but those of us in education remember him as a former DfE adviser and senior leader at Teach First. He was one of the first to warn that the current Labour government might be making a mistake on education. (There is also a very funny anecdote in this piece about a meeting between Ken Baker and Michael Gove…)
But there are good reasons why vocational education at 14 has never taken off, despite being a popular idea that reappears every decade.
Why England’s schools are doing so well
In a follow-up, he, like me, looks at why England’s schools are attracting attention from overseas. Other countries are asking what we got right just as we consider changing direction.
Back in 2010, I hoped that one day delegations would be coming here instead. That might be starting to happen. In the past few weeks I have had calls from journalists in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and even Japan, asking how England has avoided the falls seen elsewhere.
Alex Crossman — Powerful Knowledge
What future vision guides Labour Education Policy?
Alex Crossman previously led the London Academy of Excellence in Stratford. In this post he includes a fascinating - and dispiriting - anecdote about trying to establish a similar new sixth form in the north-east of England.
For much of 2025 and 2026, I worked with the Laidlaw Foundation to try to drum up enthusiasm for a new sixth form school in the Northeast of England based on, and linked to, my former school, the London Academy of Excellence.
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The response from Labour officials at multiple levels was, to put it mildly, lukewarm. Local politicians sat on a spectrum from indifference to hostility. Mostly, they were complacent. One local councillor sermonised about the redundancy of our project given how well ‘academic’ students were doing in his area. This in a part of Newcastle where the progression rate from GCSE to A Level and from A Level to Russell Group was among the lowest in the country.
Iain Mansfield — The World of Edrith
Yes, but WHY are we making these mistakes again?
Iain Mansfield is a serious advocate of vocational education, who has written policy papers on vocational pathways and problems with our existing university-centric model. What should worry the government is that their proposed policies on vocational education have left him with his head in his hands wondering if he is just a useful idiot providing cover for a policy that will dumb down academic standards.
I put my head in my hands. Wanting high quality vocational pathways doesn’t mean I want watered-down GCSEs or snake-oil on oracy. Yet that, it seems, is what we are going to get.
And so I am forced to ask myself the question, to what extent am I simply a useful idiot?
Clive Hill
Knowledge Has More Than One Home
Clive Hill entered teaching after serving in the British Army and working in industry. He gives some great examples of how knowledge underpins vocational expertise.
Ask a master electrician why a protective device has tripped. Ask a precision machinist how tolerances accumulate across multiple components. Ask a welder to explain heat-affected zones, metallurgy and distortion control. Ask an aircraft engineer why one maintenance schedule differs from another. None of these professionals simply “do”. They understand. They apply principles. They solve unfamiliar problems. They integrate theory with experience. They possess enormous bodies of declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge that have taken years to acquire. Technical education is not knowledge-lite. It is knowledge-dense; the knowledge simply looks different.
Jonathan Simons - Ardour And Diligence
Making the Burnham 14-19 vocational education plan work
Jonathan Simons is a public policy adviser and this article brings plenty of policy detail to the question of what would actually have to happen for vocational reform to work. He also makes a point that can get lost in the academic-versus-vocational debate: literacy and numeracy are themselves enormously valuable in the labour market.
Regardless of what pathway students choose, or wherever they want to work in the country, the single best protective factor they have against being NEET and the key that opens the most doors, is a GCSE in English and a GCSE in maths – and wherever possible a GCSE, not an equivalent qualification. Getting a C above a D (in old money) has been shown to boost future participation in education, and the CAR shows how possession of GCSEs correlates positively with earnings, employment, health, life satisfaction, and civic engagement.
George Sullivan
Knowledge first, pathways second
George Sullivan is a geography teacher and offers a realistic account of how vocational pathways at 14–16 can go wrong and incentivise all the wrong kinds of behaviour.
When schools struggle, is it really because the curriculum is too academic? I would argue it is probably because the behaviour culture is fragile. Or teaching does not maximise thinking and participation. Or reading gaps from primary and early years haven’t been closed.
Allowing struggling schools to offload 14-year-old pupils into vocational streams creates a really dangerous escape hatch. It almost gives tacit permission to say “This child isn’t academic, so let’s send them off to do a practical course” rather than doing the hard work of fixing reading, culture and instruction. This is not a dig at school leaders; it is not an easy job, and 99.9% of leaders do absolutely everything with the best interests of the child at heart. But there are outliers; there will be gaming of the system, and there is a real danger that these reforms create unintended consequences.
David Thomas — Things David Thinks
David Thomas is the CEO of Axiom Maths and has written a historical account of vocational education in England, going back to a time when an apprenticeship really was more prestigious and financially rewarding than a university education.
It is not hard to imagine an alternative history in which there is parity of esteem between academic and vocational education. The guilds could not have survived the industrial revolution unchanged, but they could have modernised by becoming open and meritocratic - fair judges of competence rather than hoarders of a monopolistic right.
Knowledge, language and oracy
Greg Ashman — Filling The Pail
Oracy for the masses, Latin for the elite?
Greg Ashman is a deputy principal at a school in Australia, but he has worked in England and frequently contributes to our education debates. Here he writes about the problem with judging curriculum topics only by their immediate everyday uses. This is an especially important challenge in a world where AI may reduce some of education’s instrumental uses still further.
This depressing instrumentalism—the assumption that education should be judged only by its immediate uses in everyday life—can be used to argue away anything from the school curriculum. We can survive pretty well in a modern society with a welfare safety net without knowing very much at all.
David Didau - The Learning Spy
The “weird and complicated” world of oracy
David Didau examines what happens when we try to separate apparently general skills such as oracy and literacy from knowledge and vocabulary.
Recently I argued that oracy floats on a sea of knowledge. Giving it “equal status” with reading and writing risks grading children’s confidence and calling it competence. Treating speaking as a skill you can practise separately from knowing things is the mistake we made for years with reading comprehension.
Jon Hutchinson — Jon’s Substack
The three best arguments against a knowledge rich curriculum, (and why I think they’re wrong).
Jon Hutchinson is a senior leader at an academy trust and has just reposted an article he wrote in 2018 about the value of a knowledge-based curriculum. That in itself tells you something about where we are! Here he takes the strongest objections seriously and explains why he still thinks a knowledge-rich approach is right.
Biologically secondary knowledge, on the other hand, includes all of the stuff that doesn’t relate directly to our survival. This is much of our cultural knowledge (such as calculus, or , but also skills and knowledge that allow cultural transmission, such as writing. Of course, for hundreds of thousands of years nobody wrote anything at all, and mass literacy is only a few hundred years old; leave it to chance and vast swathes of the population will be left without this knowledge.
Clare Sealy
Talking floats on a sea of write
Clare Sealy is a former London headteacher now working in the Guernsey school system. She starts with the familiar claim that writing floats on a sea of talk and then asks if that is the wrong way round.
‘Writing floats on a sea of talk’ said James Britton in the 1970s.’ If you can’t say it, you can’t write it. This being the case, teaching children to write articulately will necessarily involve teaching children to speak articulately.
This is true but it is not the whole truth. Because the converse is also true; talking floats on a sea of ‘write.’ If you can’t write it, you can’t say it.
Amanda Spielman
Amanda Spielman is a former chair of Ofqual and chief inspector of Ofsted, and this article contains some much-needed institutional memory about the 2009 national curriculum and GCSE speaking and listening coursework.
The cardinal error of the 2009 National Curriculum was to lead with generic skills and to treat substantive knowledge as incidental stuff that might be helpful in skill-building. Powell’s oracy announcement looks worryingly like a first step in the direction of a move back to a skills-oriented curriculum, in the teeth of all the evidence from international studies such as PISA and from the natural experiment of the last fifteen years as between England, Scotland and Wales.
Alexander Thompson — The Examined Life
This is a new Substack featuring questions and analysis from historic exams,. This article is also about the power of knowledge itself: how committing things to memory changes what you notice, and therefore changes the world you experience.
I can now distinguish the clouds and their weather patterns more finely. I understand how they form, where they are going, what they might portend for sailing in the afternoon. The sky is no longer a mysterious watercolour but a system of activity.
Making schools and classrooms better
Adam Boxer — Carousel: Teaching, Learning, Leading
Adam Boxer makes a point that echoes Claire Stoneman’s: much of the work of transforming schools is neither exciting nor glamorous. Before reaching for another grand reform, we should pay attention to what makes lessons calm, quiet and peaceful.
None of the above is headline catching. It isn’t exciting or glamorous. But if we’re serious about education and its potential to change our students’ lives, I can’t see anything more important than calm, quiet, peaceful lessons.
Matthew Evans
Matthew Evans is a Trust Chief Executive writing about one of my favourite themes - trade-offs. We might like to believe we can have all the good things, but every new policy uses time and attention that could have gone elsewhere. We should ask ourselves not just if a new policy is good, but if it is better than the alternatives.
We don’t have to take sides but we do have to make choices…I want to see suspensions falling, relationships improving, and children’s needs better understood and responded to. I want young adults to have the skills needed to secure work and play a useful role in society.
I also happen to believe that the way to achieve these things, and much more, is to foreground educational standards: calm and orderly schools; a knowledge-rich curriculum; explicit instruction based on evidenced pedagogic principles; assessment which generates valid inferences about progress…
We should weigh up the cost of our decisions carefully. It is not whether a new policy or strategy is a good thing but whether it is a better thing than what it replaces and distracts us from.
Joel Kenyon
Why Teachers Agree to Things They Hate: Groupthink
Joel Kenyon is a science teacher and writes about the experience of meetings where nobody wants to be the first to object. He makes a case for a professional devil’s advocate to challenge new proposals. I think this applies to government as much as to schools.
In every meeting, especially leadership meetings, there should be one person who is the professional devil’s advocate that, ideally, changes in every meeting. This one person should provides the tension relief for others to potentially speak. This should not be performative. The role should be clearly laid out, often with strict questions such as “what is the workload implications?” “what is the trigger to say this doesn’t work?” and “what should we remove to allow teachers to do this?”
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For example, in a recent meeting I had about having Year 11 completing all six science tests in Mock 1, despite them not being all taught to content, nobody said anything until one person broke the tension. It was unfair, it set the pupils up to fail, and was a large burden on staff to complete all this marking. Suddenly, multiple other staff started to say the same thing. Groupthink was averted.
Kevin McLaughlin — Talking about teacher education
I am a big fan of breaking complex skills into small steps. People often associate that approach with academic subjects - phonics for reading or times tables for maths - but I think it applies much more widely. I have written about it in sport, including marathon running and football. Kevin McLaughlin is a senior lecturer in primary initial teacher education, and in this article he shows how it works in art, with a great title: “Phonics for the paintbrush”.
Art needs to be taught just as much as we teach children how to read. Mark making, tonal value, line weight, colour blending, composition, tool control - these are the skills equivalent to blending, segmenting writing your first word. Teaching these skills explicity hands every child the keys to the door of artistic creativity, it demystifies art and stops it been seen as a subject only for the talented. There are skills that need to be taught and these skills need to be practised and embedded.
Claire Stoneman
Claire Stoneman is a headteacher in England and writes about what it actually takes to improve a school. What does it take to turn good intentions into actual outcomes?
In schools, hope may be the buoy on hard days but, my goodness, plans, precision, systems and - most importantly, people - are the enablers. It takes graft - and in schools in challenging contexts a relentless, dogged, insistent graft over weeks and months and years - to sustainably improve.
Assessment and AI
Elisabeth Bowling
AI and marking? A hate (and then a love) song
Elisabeth Bowling is a senior Trust lead and has a thoughtful piece about how you can and cannot use AI to support marking - with reference to Comparative Judgement!
Reading pupil work isn’t a removable task that runs separate to planning. You can’t plan without it. Without close understanding of what children know and do, you’re planning in the dark. You have no real idea who can do what in more independent conditions. In-class AFL takes us some, but not all of the way.
Dr Sarah Dowey
A Mark Scheme Is Not a Shared Standard
Sarah Dowey is a senior Trust lead, and here she writes about the challenges of marking and moderation, and the way assessment feeds back into curriculum planning.
Knowledge learned in Year 8 shouldn’t have to justify its existence by appearing verbatim in a GCSE mark scheme. It should justify its existence because it makes scholars better readers.
Michael Slavinsky
The AI-Homework Impasse: Why we need to rethink what we send home.
Michael Slavinsky is a former languages teacher who now runs Languages for All, preserving and extending access to advanced language study. In this article he addresses one of the most pressing practical questions facing teachers, and offers three suggestions that I thought were excellent.
If the goal of homework is to make students think hard about the material, we are failing; technology has eliminated the friction required for learning.
So there's more than "just one voice singing in the darkness"
Top call Daisy!
Thank you for the shout out!
Very pleased to be referenced here amongst such distinguished company - and there are several new to me to add to my read list.