Sunday thoughts: The school system of the future?

I spoke at a small event this weekend on the topic of “the school system of the future”. The idea was to look 5-15 years into the future and provide some introductory remarks for a group discussion. A lightly edited version of what I said is set out below.

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I want to talk about school structures and managing a school system over the next little period, and then secondly place – and end with a little discussion on technology and AI – mostly about the impact of it, rather than the technology itself.

1.      Structures

Why it matters.

“We were saying, forget about complex, institutional structural reforms; what counts is what works, and by that we meant outputs. This was fine as a piece of rhetoric; and positively beneficial as a piece of politics. Unfortunately, as I began to realise when experience started to shape our thinking, it was a bunkum as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards. How a service is configured affects outcomes” Blair, The Journey.

Or as I tend to put it, less eloquently – where do higher standards come from? Where do teachers get recruited, developed, and retained? Who decides what state funding is spent on? It is in the design and incentives of these structures that policy is made and enacted. So it really does matter. I personally think the answer is academy trusts, but the same logic applies if you think the answer is LA management of schools, or an entirely free system with no governance, or indeed a voucher system that moves students between state and independent schools.

If the prompt for my remarks is what will the system look like over the next 5 years, and over the next 15, I would make four observations:

One is I think we have reconciled now what growth and minimum standards and size looks like, and have a much better shared understanding of that. But I don’t think we do have a view as to what an end point looks like. It’s now twice that DfE have formally committed to universal academisation, once under Nicky Morgan in 2014 and once just recently in the last white paper under Nadhim Zahawi. I suspect we’re some way off that once again, if ever, becoming policy. Someone senior said to me the other week, surely we can’t continue with this fudge? To which I replied with a line shamelessly stolen from a management consultant who does a lot of political due diligence and advising buy side investors. One of his clients was complaining about an element of what they saw as inconsistent or irrational policy and that this was obviously going to change, so they should value the company they wanted to buy assuming that this would happen, and he said “government – any government – can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent”.

I’m not bashing government, but I would say that our default assumption should be that in the absence of a stimulus, current tramlines continue, and that this is consistently underestimated as policy. So I want all schools to be in a strong family of schools, but I don’t think we’ll be there in 5 years and maybe not in 15.

Secondly, on failure and rebrokering.  It seems to me a gap in the regulatory architecture that in many instances we cannot tweak the system locally unless and until there is individual school failure. I don’t want to spend too long talking about schools switching between MATs, but it seems implausible to me that we have to assume that the current configuration is the best one, and I think that will need to change in the next few years.

Thirdly, on steering the system. I think this is in a real mess. Some parts are heavily centralised, some bits are nominally decentralised, some things the state is very prescriptive about, some things it mandates state schools to do but not independent schools to do, some are required for both, some things are deliberately left to MATs, and some are theoretically left to MATs but are not really, via non statutory guidance. I don’t think this can hold in the next 5 years. I don’t know what DfE will do, what LAs will do, what Trusts and schools will do, but my provocation is, without being all Dominic Cummings, that we are bad as a country in dealing with complex systems, and this will need to change.

And lastly, extended days and childcare. Its worth recalling that the decisions made as recently as 1997 were the first time that we had some form of standardised early years provision via the state – the pre 97 system was a real patchwork. And that was actually a quite rare example of a really significant ideological shift, in that Labour felt, quite strongly, that pre 5s education was part of the welfare state and that we should have far greater standardisation of what u5s should expect and receive. And actually the Tories haven’t moved away from that. I think this will only extend over the next 5-15 years. We’ve gone from a patchwork system, to what will be quite a fixed system, in that I suspect in the next 5-15 years almost everyone will take up fairly standardised offers from at least 2, which will be pretty universal, and delivered increasingly through schools and school based nurseries (and an extended school day), and this childcare / school distinction for u5s will break down. Some people will hate that, espcially those who are more socially conservative – because it’s an expansion of welfarism into the domain of the home and the family – but it will happen, and it will be a shift similar to that of 1944.

2.      Place and partnerships

How locally based are MATs? I don’t mean physically, but conceptually.

I think less so than unis, even though the latter are far bigger.

I love the belief and mindset around schools and groups of schools being civic trusts, or strong families of schools, who hold trust on behalf of children. There are some brilliant examples. But I don’t know how representative this is of a mindset among the median school leader and school trust, or median LA.

My provocation is this will change because of external pressure, rather than be led from the sector.

Place has been underplayed in recent years, but will come back into policy in a large way, and this includes the place based elements of what MATs do, principally led by Mayors.

If we forecast what future Mayors could do; we could have schools leaving trusts (especially if they are failing) and switching back to LA management. We could have far more organised scrutiny. Mayors could even get into issues which they don’t touch now - if we look at places like Manchester with what is essentially a made up Manchester 14-19 qualification, we can imagine that in 15 years that is far more formalised, and GMCA and others may seek to get more and more involved via curriculum. And they could also play a bigger role on funding - at the moment, the distinction is that for post 16 funding, sure, devolve it all, but for pre 16 school funding, no way. But is that a defensible or logical line to hold? It wasn’t that long ago that we had no NFF, that Local Authorities did at least in part determine their own per pupil spending, and we could easily return to that again.

Independent schools are probably the least place based of any schools – or at least the larger, more famous, HMC ones are. There are exceptions of course, largely in more working class communities in the North. And some smaller prep schools are local by pupil recruitment, but not especially so by mindset. You go into a London prep, a Kent prep, or a Yorkshire prep, and they’re more or less the same. And you go to a large HMC school, and they think globally for staff and student recruitment, even more so for some than nationally, let alone locally.

I spend a disproportionate amount of my time talking about the future of the independent sector especially post VAT if that happens - I don’t want to get into that here - but I think we will see 4 trends in the independent sector over the next 5 to 15 years. One is that a fair few small prep schools will just close. Secondly I think we will see a reasonable amount of M+A and school groups emerging. Thirdly, I think we will see some more groups like UL, or King Edward VI in Birmingham, or Warwick most recently, formally having state and independent schools in the same group, which is really exciting. And fourthly, I’m afraid that while some independent schools will lean into state engagement more, some will retrench post VAT, and cause further damage to their reputation

3.      Technology and innovation

Often times, people predicting the impact of technology in schools are like economists predicting recessions, who have successfully done so for 9 of the last 5 recessions, as said Paul Samuelson as far back as the mid 1960s.

It is worth noting that in many ways we have made almost zero progress in twenty years:

“The gap between the best and worst ICT provision is unacceptably wide and increasing. In the most outstanding examples, ICT is starting to have a pervasive impact on the way teachers teach and children learn. But the quality, diversity and extent of pupils’ ICT experiences vary widely between schools”. Ofsted 2004

“There has been significant advances throughout the UK in the development of technology infrastructure and connectivity, and similarly remarkable growth in the amount of electronic materials rich in resources for learning, yet the increase is chaotic, provision is patchy and quality is variable”. BECTA 2004

I’m not negative on the impact of technology – one can’t be – but I am cautious as to what grand plans for technology, including but not limited to AI, means in practice for the median school.

The question that interests me, as a non-technologist and a policy wonk, is what is the role of the school system, and government, when it comes to technology, especially AI.

Is it

• Regulation - what products can and can’t do

• Buying on behalf of schools (purchasing consortia etc)

• Advising schools via kitemarks or similar

• Setting “guardrails” at the supplier end

• Inventing specific ed tech products themselves

• Funding schools to take this up more quickly

My sense is that technology in education to date has been more successful at back office than front office. AI may change that - I can see, in principle, huge benefits in personalised learning / tutoring both for catch up and stretch activities.

But I am very struck by the work of Onward, who consistently show both that the UK is doing phenomenally well in AI and other frontier tech in terms of patents granted, or foundational models launched, or people doing PhDs, or researchers and papers being cited - more than the rest of the EU, often second in the world - but also that we are an order of magnitude behind the US in this, and that we simply can’t match that.

So my default sense is that when it comes to AI in schools:

• It will be invented by industry, and not in any way affected by anything the UK government does

• It will be invented in the US

• It will start in universities and flow down to schools, rather than vice versa

• Whoever ultimately nails this will make billions

• The state will always be playing a catch up role (maybe that’s by definition)

• Only once we have a dominant technological platform will schools and teachers be able to adapt it at scale (like what happened with Microsoft)

• The basics will hold schools back more so than anything else

• Online exams are something of a red herring for the mass adaption of tech

Which leads to a conclusion for a pretty passive role for the state, and for schools, while we see what happens (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach using it, or alert children to the benefits and opportunities of it, but let’s not make it a core part of our future industrial strategy, for example)

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So in conclusion, there’s 8 provocations for the next 5-15 years:

Structures

1. We won’t have universal academisation

2. Steering a complex system is a mess and will need to change

3. Childcare and U5s provision will become a core part of the welfare state, essentially starting primary education at 2-3.

Place

1. Mayors will be a thing in pre 16 education and will make schools more placed based

2. The independent and state sector will generally move closer together, but some independent schools will resist this, to their cost

Tech

1. It will have an impact, but everyone says that about everything

2. We don’t know the state’s role in frontier tech and until we work that out, we shouldn’t try to do much else

3. AI won’t be led by schools, or the UK more generally - it will be a US thing, just like Microsoft was for ed tech in schools - and we should be relatively passive, considering that