In my previous article, I explained that England’s government seems determined to move away from a set of education policies that have been very successful, and that have attracted significant international attention.
In this post, I am going to explore the issue further. It’s a long post, split into 5 parts, so I’ve added internal hyperlinks here.
What are these policies?
Let’s just review the policies that are changing.
There are two proposed policies that are getting a lot of attention. Neither of these has happened yet, and the details of how they will work are sparse.
Vocational qualifications. The government want to create new vocational qualifications for 14-16 year olds to study, and to incentivise these in league tables.
Oracy. The government want to increase the status of oracy – better known as speaking and listening - within the English curriculum.
There are two other policies which have already happened. These have not got that much attention, even though they are both pretty significant.
Removing the EBacc. In November 2025, the government removed a league table metric called the EBacc which measured GCSE attainment across five academic subject areas. Removing this appears to have precipitated a significant fall in the numbers studying Modern Foreign Languages GCSEs, as it was the only part of the accountability system that incentivised it. It is possible that in August 2028 England will have the smallest cohort ever taking MFL GCSEs.
Generic skills assessments. This is a very significant development that has received much less attention than it deserves. Essentially, a government quango, Skills England, have created the UK Standard Skills Classification, a taxonomy of the skills required for employment which includes 13 Core Skills which are described as “generic and transferable”. Earlier this month, the government published an Employability Skills Framework based on the SSC, which encourages employers and schools to assess young people against statements like “can speak positively about change” or “can use numbers with confidence”. This approach is making its way into guidance for schools, including some statutory guidance. I have heard from heads and senior leaders that it is being recommended at training events and that it is also influential within the ongoing work to implement the curriculum and assessment review.
I realise all this might sound very arcane, but it is something I have written about repeatedly over the past 15 years, including in my 2017 book Making Good Progress. It is essentially one of the major practical differences between a skills-based curriculum and a knowledge-based curriculum. Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), which is one of the emblematic examples of a skills-based curriculum, is organised around such statements. (Interestingly, in 2023 a senior official who had been involved in the development of the CfE described such statements as “childish rubbish”.) England largely removed this approach from its curriculum in 2014. So the fact that skills-based grids are making a comeback is hugely important.
This was the future, once
All four of these policies aim to reverse reforms that were brought in under the previous Conservative government. In each case, the Conservatives flipped the switch one way, and Labour are flipping it back. That is to say, these policies are not really the product of much fresh thinking or original analysis. That doesn’t necessarily make them wrong: if a reform isn’t working it is acceptable to go backwards and fix it rather than plough on regardless.
However, whilst it doesn’t make them wrong per se, it does mean we are entitled to critique them by looking at the problems that were caused when these policies existed in the past. In my case, all four of the “new” reforms being proposed by Labour were in their heyday when I started teacher training in 2007. So here is a summary of how all four policies worked – or often, didn’t work - in practice.
Incentivising vocational qualifications from 14-16. Back in 2007, a much wider range of vocational qualifications had parity in the league tables with academic GCSEs. As a result, they were widely promoted and encouraged by schools. However, many of these qualifications had very little – sometimes even negative – labour market value. In some cases, qualifications that had been developed for maybe 5% of students who really struggled with learning were badged as being equivalent to far harder qualifications, in order to give them parity of esteem. The result was that these qualifications ended up being taken by significant proportions of the national cohort, and in some schools by the entire cohort.
Speaking and listening assessments. Again, back in 2007 I taught the old English Language GCSE, which had a speaking and listening coursework component. It took a lot of teacher and class time to administer, was very hard to grade reliably, and ended up being a contributor to grade inflation. Amanda Spielman, who was a senior figure at Ofqual at the time, has pointed out in a recent Substack that whilst just 4% of foundation students reached a pass grade in their written exam, 71% reached the same passing grade in their spoken coursework.
Foreign languages. If you have no specific reward or incentive for MFL in the accountability system, numbers tend to fall off a cliff. In 2004, the then Labour government removed the requirement for all students to study MFL to 16. By the time I started teaching in 2007, I was co-teaching English classes with former French teachers, because there weren’t enough kids studying French for them to have a full timetable. The introduction of the EBacc was a relatively modest incentive to study MFL which stabilised numbers and capacity – at a much much lower level than in 2004, but still, it stopped the complete collapse. Getting rid of it seems to have precipitated another collapse in numbers and capacity which will be incredibly hard to rebuild.
Skills statements. Around 2007, Assessing Pupils’ Progress grids were widely promoted by the government as a method of internal assessment and curriculum planning in schools. The APP grids were lists of generic skills which teachers had to tick off. I have written extensively about the problems they cause: they are unreliable, time-consuming, and make it much harder – sometimes impossible – to teach the small steps of knowledge which make up complex skills. Interestingly, the APP grids were themselves a retread of a previous attempt to create an overarching skills framework. The original national curriculum from 1989-90 had lists of attainment targets which were so unwieldy that within just a couple of years a major review had to be called to overhaul them. There seems to be very little institutional memory within the DfE of all the problems these types of statements cause.
So the major question, of course, is will this time be different? Will the government learn from how these policies went wrong in the past and find ways of avoiding those problems? It doesn’t seem likely. The two policies that have already been implemented are very similar to those from 20 years ago, with no recognition or mitigation of their flaws, and they are having predictably similar outcomes. It is hard to feel particularly optimistic that oracy and vocational qualifications will be any different.
In the past few months, we’ve all been engaging in high-level debates about the general principle of teaching oracy and vocational qualifications, and of course, there are genuinely brilliant examples of both which I would be happy to support. In my post on vocational qualifications, I talked about how taking the London Knowledge taxi driving test changed my grandfather’s life. I could also wax lyrical about all the debating competitions I took part in as a student and a teacher, and the important skills they teach.
But are the government going to introduce a set of vocational qualifications with the rigour and labour market value of The Knowledge? Are they going to introduce an oracy programme that teaches students to construct compelling arguments and respond thoughtfully to questions? Or are they going to introduce some vocational and speaking and listening qualifications that involve some box-ticking activities that have a 100% pass rate and quickly get regarded by everyone as a bit of a joke?
Again, we await the details, but it is perfectly legitimate, based on all the rhetoric and evidence so far, to be concerned that the latter is more likely than the former.
What is the government’s rationale for this?
The government’s justification for all these changes is that the Conservative reforms may have succeeded in raising academic standards, but they have caused big social and economic problems. So it’s worthwhile trading off some of the academic success to gain some other benefits.
What are these alleged social and economic problems?
In one of her first major statements as Secretary of State, Lucy Powell established the line that has become a repeated talking point of Labour politicians: that Conservative education reforms may have led to higher school standards, but they also caused many students to end up not in employment, education or training (NEET).
Alan Milburn, who led a government review into young people and employment, has similarly argued that schools’ focus on GCSE success comes at the expense of preparing young people for work.
The problem with this argument is that there is very little evidence for it. Yes, NEET rates in the UK have risen over the past few years. But they have risen across the whole of the UK. And education is a devolved power in the UK. Scotland and Wales have taken completely different paths to England on education in the past two decades. If Conservative education reforms were causing NEET rates to spike, we’d expect to see the increase in England only, or at least a bigger and faster increase in England. But we don’t. In Wales, for instance, the NEET proportion is higher than in England and has increased at a faster rate than in England.
Not only that, but there are myriad other reasons why NEET rates might have spiked. For example, over the last few years it has become a lot more expensive in real terms to employ a young person. It seems plausible that this might be having some kind of impact on the NEET rate.
More broadly, I think the underlying argument here – that getting better at literacy and numeracy will somehow make you less equipped for the job market – is utterly fanciful. There is an entire research literature on how literacy and numeracy lead to better performance in the job market. It is one of the best attested findings in education economics. There is also very persuasive evidence that this is because literacy and numeracy are extremely valuable skills, not just because of the signal sent by a qualification. Not only that, but the most recent research shows that students who leave school with five good GCSEs, including English & maths, have lower NEET rates than those without those qualifications. Essentially, even with all the structural reasons that have made it harder for teens to get jobs, it is likely that one of the best ways to avoid NEETdom is to do well at maths and English.
One possible counter to what I have said above is that when you compare across countries, less skilled workers in a rich country earn more than better skilled workers in a poor country. Functionally illiterate workers in the US earn more than the median-skilled worker in the UK. Highly-skilled workers in the Soviet Union earnt less than median-skilled workers in the UK. But these discrepancies have very little to do with the relative performance of each country’s education system, and much more to do with the structure of each country’s economy. As I’ve written before, policymakers would do better to focus on fixing some of the UK’s glaring structural economic problems than take an axe to one of its few public policy successes.
Will these reforms raise academic standards? No. Will they make children happier? Also no.
There have been other attempts by politicians and writers to link other bad outcomes to the Conservative curriculum reforms, but all of these attempts also fall foul of a basic “UK nations check”. For example, the Labour MP Helen Hayes, who is Chair of Parliament’s Education Select Committee, has argued that England’s GCSE English Literature curriculum is a “catastrophic failure” because it does not “foster a love of reading in children.” Again, it is true that the proportion of children in the UK reporting that they enjoy reading has fallen dramatically, from 54% in 2014 to just 36% in 2026. However, all these numbers and trends are very similar across England (55% to 36%), Wales (53% to 33%) and Scotland (55% to 37%).
Helen Hayes goes on to claim, in a letter to the Secretary of State, that England’s “dispiritingly dull” English Literature GCSE has led to English Literature A-level numbers falling by 21% between 2015/16 and 2024/25. What she fails to note is that Wales deliberately did not adopt England’s GCSE reforms, and chose to retain many of the pre-reform features of the GCSE. A-level English Lit entries in Wales fell by 42% over the same period.
In August, the London Review of Books published an article on the NEET crisis which linked youth disengagement to school discipline and exam pressures. The second half of the article routinely used British statistics to criticise English education policies, with no mention of Scotland or Wales, and no reference to the fact that education is a devolved power in the UK. In June they published an article directly blaming Gove’s traditionalist curriculum & assessment reforms for the fall in the numbers studying English Literature at university, again with no mention of the bigger A-level Eng Lit decline in Wales.
I used to subscribe to the LRB as a teen and remember reading lengthy articles by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn about “Ukania”, which was their term for the peculiar political order of the United Kingdom. The current editors seem to have a weaker grasp of the status of the UK. Unfortunately, their lack of understanding is having an impact on the international discourse: foreign educationalists are taking their arguments at face value and also conflating England and the UK.
I have waded through a number of these arguments, and combed through detailed data on the relative performance of England, Scotland, and Wales on a number of different metrics, including mental health and attendance data. When you do so, it is extremely hard to sustain any kind of argument that England’s educational policies have caused lots of negative side-effects, because most of the negative social & economic trends we see in England are also present in Scotland and Wales.
The trade-off that does exist
So whilst the government are very keen to create trade-offs that don’t exist, they are extremely reluctant to accept the trade-offs that do exist: notably that certain curriculum and assessment reforms can and will weaken academic standards.
This is because curriculum and assessment reforms are dealing with a fundamentally scarce resource: time. People often think money is the biggest constraint, and it is certainly a constraint, but budgets can be increased in a way that time cannot. Time is the currency of learning. It is extremely limited, and indeed in some ways finite, in that you really do have a fixed number of hours at certain ages when you are most receptive for learning.
The government’s claim is that their reforms will not weaken academic standards because the core of English and maths will be protected. But academic standards are about more than just English and maths; in fact, English and maths are about more than just English and maths. History, geography, RE, science, and MFL all help develop vocabulary, applications of numeracy and understanding of grammar. And history, geography, RE, science and MFL will all get badly squeezed by policies that incentivise new vocational qualifications. Already, we are seeing that some of the schools that are pioneering the new vocational approach are doing so by restricting and reducing their subject offer to 14-year-olds.
Again, we have been here before within very recent memory: I pointed out in my previous article that one of the consequences of the previous push for vocational qualifications was not just that the humanities and languages lost out. It also meant that valuable technical subjects like design & technology got squeezed too, in favour of new vocational qualifications which could be taught cheaply to a big class but which had very limited labour market value and didn’t teach the same kinds of useful skills as DT. In 2007, a common pathway for lots of students was English, maths and a BTEC that was worth 4 GCSEs. Yes, English and maths were protected, but does that really count as a broad and balanced curriculum?
The other scarce resource we are dealing with is senior management time and institutional capacity. Again, it is tempting to think that providing schools with new pots of money and more staff means they can take on ever more functions and responsibilities. But institutions don’t work like that. If you look at the most high-functioning organisations in the public and private sector, they tend to be organised around a couple of important priorities. You can’t prioritise everything. If one thing is a top priority, then by definition something else is not.
In the case of senior managers in school, what do you want the senior manager to focus their marginal unit of effort on? Thinking about how to improve pedagogy in the typical maths lesson? Or combing through equivalencies tables to find the easiest new qualification that counts in the league tables?
The political philosophy of triangulation
One of the most influential educationalists behind this set of policies is Peter Hyman, who was an official adviser to Keir Starmer before 2024, contributed to Alan Milburn’s report on NEETs and is rumoured to be writing Andy Burnham’s Ten Year Plan. We participated in a webinar on education policy over the summer, and he suggested that one way you could give students a mind-blowing experience at secondary would be to relocate the school for half a term to a zoo and for half a term to a forest. I think it is just unrealistic to argue this wouldn’t involve some compromise of academic standards.
I’ve had a few debates with Peter over the years. I think one of his most impressive characteristics is the ability to outline really quite radical proposals (like relocating a school to a zoo), at the same time as insisting that he is completely committed to high academic standards. The phrase I always associate with Peter is “both…and”. Relocating the school to a zoo is never in tension with academic standards; it is always just a more powerful and innovative way of raising standards. This kind of thing is often rhetorically very effective, and is in fact a technique I remember teaching in the sixth-form debating clubs I ran. But of course, a powerful rhetorical flourish is just that: a powerful rhetorical flourish. It is not a truth-claim.
The both-and rhetoric might remind you of a certain famous politician – and you’d be right, because Peter was Tony Blair’s speechwriter. Blair was famous for “both…and” arguments, and for the concepts of the Third Way, or triangulation.
Its central insight was that the opposing political party might have some good ideas, and that adopting those ideas could be both sensible policy and successful politics.
Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” is the classic example. There is no inherent contradiction between supporting effective punishment and trying to prevent people becoming criminals. You can favour both prisons and youth clubs.
I have a lot of sympathy with this idea. It is true that a lot of politics polarises in very unhelpful ways, that there can be truth on both sides of the political spectrum. So for example, I do think that current debates around AI in education have got quite polarised, in that you have a camp of people who don’t want any use of AI at all, and another camp who want to plug kids into the matrix aged 5. I am probably arguing for a “third way” on that issue.
I would say that there are two important preconditions for the triangulation strategy to work well.
The first is that the hardest but most important bit of the triangulation strategy is doing the thing that your own side dislikes the most. Voters have no difficulty believing that a Labour government will care about youth clubs. But they do need to be persuaded that a Labour government will also care about prisons. And of course, Tony Blair went beyond just the rhetoric on these issues. He really did design and implement policies like ASBOs that were outside of Labour’s comfort zone. I do think that for Blair, the whole third way / triangulation concept was not just a gimmick or a way to win power. Whatever you think of his policies or their effectiveness, he took seriously the point that the other side might have legitimate concerns and sensible ideas that should be listened to.
But a lot of Blair’s successors want to get the electoral benefit of triangulation – and the nice fuzzy feeling that comes from sounding moderate and denouncing your opponents as extremists - without doing the hard yards that Blair did of challenging some of their base’s most cherished views.
What a lot of politicians have learnt from Blair is not that you have to take the concerns of the other side seriously, but that you just have to sound like you do. Saying “both…and” is like the magic amulet that lets you sound sensible and grown up and centrist and non-partisan.
And this results in some very bad faith arguments which I think are extremely toxic in the long term for democracy, because they involve politicians saying they care deeply about certain problems at the same time as they implement policies that will just make those problems worse.
The other necessary condition for triangulation to work well is that you have to accept that it doesn’t eliminate trade-offs, but that it might enable you to find better or worse ways of resolving them. This generally requires some fairly sophisticated and thoughtful understanding of policy.
Let’s take a simplified historical example. Imagine we have a country with no cars. Then cars are invented, and start becoming a bit of a menace by being raced at high speed through ordinary streets. Anti-car groups spring up to lobby the government to ban them. Pro-car groups organise too, and lobby the government to let things carry on as they are.
The politicians need to decide what to do. The bad faith and toxic thing to do would be to give lots of speeches saying you care a lot about both sides, and that you will preserve the rights of both the car owners and the pedestrians – and then just give one side everything they want. For extra gaslighting brownie points, you keep pretending that your policies really have been even-handed through the use of brilliant rhetorical flourishes that you learnt in oracy class – eg, we aren’t prioritising efficiency over safety, we are achieving safety through efficiency. See what I did there?
The more sensible and fairer thing to do is to broker some kind of genuine compromise, and in a lot of ways, that is what politics is: the art of compromise.
But the problem is there are a lot of different types of compromise. Imagine one sensible centrist politician decides the best possible compromise is a 40mph speed limit on all roads. This is definitely a compromise between the two lobby groups. But it’s a pretty poor compromise. 40mph is fast enough to be very dangerous on residential streets, but nowhere near fast enough to allow for efficient travel flows on motorways. In everyday life, we call this the worst of all worlds.
Imagine another sensible centrist politician who decides that the best compromise is to create special roads that have no speed limits – we could call them autobahns – and to create other special roads where cars are completely banned – we could call them medieval town centres. That is also a compromise, but probably one that is going to make more people happy. True, it won’t make everyone happy, but let’s say it makes 75% of people happy, as opposed to just 25% with the bad compromise. That’s an improvement.
So, the two flaws which sink triangulation are a) bad faith behaviour, when you pretend you are interested in one side of the argument but you really aren’t, you’re just using the rhetoric. And b) incompetence, when you really are trying to reach some kind of middle ground but you just annoy everyone because you design a really bad middle ground.
Policy alternatives
Out of the four policies I outlined at the start, I think the final one is just beyond redemption. But for the other three, I can recognise that there is some kernel of an important idea there which it would be possible to implement in a sensible way. Yes, schools could do more to prepare students for the world of work. Yes, speaking and listening skills are important and could be taught and assessed better. Yes, the EBacc was a clunky measure that it should be possible to improve on. In theory, it should be possible to design policies that achieve these aims and do not compromise academic standards. So in the spirit of triangulation, here are three policies which variously promote vocational learning, encourage oracy, and mitigate the impact on MFL of the removal of the EBacc.
Retaining strategic foreign language capacity: It definitely is true that there are structural reasons why MFL is struggling. English is the world’s global second language, and AI is getting better and better at translation. The consequence is that we probably don’t need every student in England studying a foreign language to age 16. However, that doesn’t mean we should have a free for all and just leave it all up to the individual student. First, I think we need to retain some capacity such that every secondary student has the option to study a foreign language. If we leave it up to individual students and schools, the risk is that foreign language teaching capacity completely withers, and that students who want to study MFL or would be good at it just never get the opportunity.
Second, we need to think a lot harder about the function foreign language learning is likely to play in the economy & society. Obviously, this is hard to predict. But I suspect that even if Star Trek style earbuds come to pass, the military, espionage and diplomacy are still going to have demand for fluent foreign language speakers. Indeed, at the moment, the Foreign Office has requirements for foreign language speakers, and it actually pays adults a full-time wage to study foreign languages full-time. The failure rate is enormous and expensive: one article estimates that “it costs around £300,000 to train one person not to speak Arabic.”
So if we combine together all of these requirements – the need for more vocational education, the need to preserve foreign language teaching capacity, the need for the FCDO to have fluent linguists - one policy could be to develop a set of new FCDO-sponsored 14-19 vocational qualifications that focus on advanced language skills in the languages they need the most, plus a programme of paid work placements in the school holidays. Students who completed all the qualifications would be guaranteed a job at the FCDO at the end of it, without having to go to university.
Parity of esteem for T-levels: I have a lot of objections to the concept of parity of esteem, but there are some specific areas where I think the phrase has some truth. For example, the new T-level qualifications do seem to be pretty rigorous and to lead to good job opportunities. It is possible that there is a group of students at around the 3-B standard at A-level who might be better off doing a T-level – but do not choose them because T-levels aren’t that well-known or prestigious. It’s also the case that one of the major factors in making T-levels successful is having committed employers providing placements and guidance. So why not raise the status and prestige of providing these placements by inviting every employer and their star student to an annual garden party with the King? This would be relatively cheap and I suspect would be welcomed more by the employers than devising yet another bureaucratic skills framework for them to complete.
Using AI to improve oracy assessment: Oracy assessment is another place where there is some potential to innovate. Technology has moved on dramatically since 2007. In 2024, we trialled an oracy assessment that used a combination of sample assessment and comparative judgement to make the process more reliable and efficient. You could add in AI and improve things even further. It would not be easy, and there are certain things that would still be too difficult to accomplish, but a government that really cared about improving oracy teaching and measurement could create a new assessment that helped both.
I am pretty certain that the government would not be interested in any of these policies, and that their reaction to all three would be: but what do they do for students who fail to pass GCSE maths and English? And they’re right: none of them address that issue. And that is because I don’t think oracy and vocational qualifications are a great solution for this group.
I wrote in my previous post on vocational education that the government seems to think that students who struggle academically will flourish vocationally. But a lot of students who struggle academically also struggle with vocational courses: there is a modest positive correlation between academic attainment and being good with your hands. There is also a positive correlation between traditional academic measures of literacy and oracy.
What concerns me is that the government seems to be viewing oracy and vocational education not as policies in their own right, but as solutions to the problem of the forgotten third. But if it turns out that the data are right and that most students who struggle academically do not turn out to be star oracy and vocational students, what then? The risk then is that the government are tempted to lower the standards of whatever the new oracy and vocational elements are, so that the “forgotten third” can do well at them. But when that happens, those qualifications generally don’t have parity of esteem with more rigorous qualifications - and they don’t tend to have great labour market value either.
As I’ve written before, my preferred policy for the “forgotten third” is to find ways of raising all schools up to the standards of the best ones, such that fewer and fewer students fail to reach the grade 4 standard. It’s not to lower the standard such that fewer and fewer students fail.
Why are they doing this?
I’ve asked repeatedly throughout this article and the previous one why Labour are doing this. And I think the simplest answer, and one that is being obfuscated by all the misleading rhetoric, is that standards are not that high a priority for them. And actually, that’s fine. Politics is about different opinions. We all have different views on what school is for.
Standards are a very high priority for me. I think the purpose of a state school system is essentially about preserving and developing civilisation. Within that broad purpose, you can have different emphases: whether it is about national or global civilisation, whether the focus is more on preservation or development, whether it is more about the individual fulfilling their talents or the nation-state building capacity for its purposes, whether it is more about industrial and technical civilisation or cultural and historic civilisation. Some of my emphasis has shifted in the past few years, in ways that I will write more about in future posts, but the central point is that it’s about civilisation. It is about hard-won knowledge that is not innate, that is not inevitable, and that will die and wither if we don’t create institutions that value it and convince the next generation to value it.
I don’t think the government prioritise standards in the same way. I think they care about other things more: things like engagement, fun, creating “mind-blowing experiences”, “reimagining childhood”. I don’t care about those things as much as I care about standards. Maybe a decade or so ago I would have made the “both…and” argument, and said “we can re-imagine childhood through the medium of a knowledge-based curriculum” but not any more. About a year ago I wrote an article literally called “Why education can never be fun”, which argued that there is a trade-off between learning and fun which makes it very hard to prioritise fun. I am being honest here and admitting that I do not prioritise fun. I wish the government would do the same and more openly acknowledge the trade-offs inherent in their policies.
Obviously, I could be wrong! And the way we will know I am wrong is that when the government eventually make up their minds about what they mean by oracy and vocational, those policies will look more like my suggestions, and less like the ones from 2007. If that does happen, no-one will be happier than me to concede I was wrong! But I think we all know that is very unlikely, because my preferred policies and the government’s preferred policies flow from very different ideas about the purpose of education.
People do have radically different ideas about the purpose of lots of things, and politics is the way we manage these different ideas. A lot of people do agree with the government’s vision of education, and they have a democratic mandate to implement their policies. This is the direction of travel for the English system for the foreseeable future.
But whilst politicians have the power to implement their policies, they don’t have the power to bend reality to their will. And ultimately, this debate is not going to be settled by powerful politicians, or by elegant oratory, or by me writing excessively long posts on the internet. It is going to be settled by the reality of what goes on in schools. You can ignore the trade-offs that do exist, and invent some that don’t exist, but sooner or later the gap between what you have promised and what is actually happening will become impossible to ignore.
Education policy has to focus first and foremost on the forgotten third, and the reason it has failed to do so is partly because low educational attainment tracks disadvantage so closely; partly because many schools regard them as a structural inevitability; and partly because schools - and Ofsted - tend to measure themselves against a weak national average. (Only this week I heard a vigorous argument for recognising the children for whom ‘a 2 is a ceiling’ when I was critiquing a history cohort where over half failed to get a 4; and a school defending their 71% English and Maths 4+ rate among children with <90% attendance and no disadvantage or SEN.) There are schools who have been very successful in raising standards for all - but these are overwhelmingly in urban areas with large immigrant populations for whom education is seen as empowering; and, crucially, plenty of job opportunities. Raising standards in white British rural areas faces many more barriers.