Schooling is way too precious a commodity to hand over to politicians of any shade or enlightenment. Unless education is effectively taken out of the hands of our political parties; schools and teachers will continue to be the victims of an endlessly debilitating cycle of politicised ping pong. The latest game has literally started with a vengeance. Labour are busy dismantling the private sector, whilst overburdening the state sector with the human fall out and huge additional costs, so that we now have an everyone loses policy. 

I could dedicate this piece to detailing the precise damage Labour’s punitive education tax is already causing, but I’m much more interested here in the bigger, international educational disease it’s just a footnote to. The courts will very soon literally be the judge of Labour’s policy. 

In Scotland the introduction of a Curriculum for Excellence turned out, in the grubby mitts of nationalists, to be nothing more than a covert project to politicise schooling, yet it’s a model Wales is well on the road to copying. In the US and much of the UK, schools have been widely regarded as convenient levers for the politically minded to yank on, at every imaginable opportunity. For as long as I can remember, the relentless direction of travel in education has been towards greater, and more overt politicisation of schooling. But this trend is now meeting seriously well-organised resistance. 

The last few years have seen a notable increase in discussion and often real classroom activity, around the delivery of a classical education. In the US, Europe and here in Great Britain, academics and professional teachers have shown an increasing appetite to challenge the relentless march of innovative, progressive initiatives in schools that merely reflect ephemeral contemporary political issues and concerns, whilst belittling the acquisition of historically valuable knowledge and the development of skilled scholarship. 

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence is being increasingly challenged by teachers and parents, as anything but excellent. In Hungary, Mathias Corvinus Collegium, the country’s largest interdisciplinary educational institution and research centre, is busy organising and delivering classical education events, including very strategically, in Brussels, and there is a burgeoning movement around classical education in the US that taps into the extensive home schooling world there, as well as formal schools. In Britain increasing numbers of State schools identify themselves as being part of a wider movement to instil knowledge acquisition at the centre of all they do, and might loosely be termed knowledge-based schools. 

What unites all of these initiatives is their desire to turn back the progressive tide. 

Yet what these discussions always fail to grasp is where all this change has really originated. The people most involved in the debate simply don’t understand that it’s no accident all this change has occurred alongside an explosion of technology in educational institutions. After staff salaries, technology will today inevitably be the second highest cost on the budget of any educational institution; village primary school or Russell Group university. As little as forty years ago: it didn’t even appear. 

Politicians don’t have sufficient knowledge to challenge the messages they are sold by chief executives

Academics spend most of their lives in a rarefied world, yet rarely realise that. They always, and quite understandably when you think how education is structured, believe they are the clever ones. They simply don’t know that the business world, including technology business, is full of very clever people, and that they invest heavily in cultivating relationships with politicians. There is an equally simple reason why business people do this. Those clever business folk understand that all governments like to spend vast sums of money on education. 

Yet it’s extremely difficult to reach the level of influence a dozen or so major technology businesses have built up in just a few decades. I’ve advised quite a few edtech start-ups and I cannot recall one that ever made the transition effectively from relying on individual customers, to winning even one of those lucrative, government-funded contracts. 

The change classical educators are so concerned about comes directly from those few major businesses that have not only made that step successfully, but who have become so influential and repeatedly good at it, they decide what schools and educators do; not the politicians. Time again I see people citing data sources in education which if they knew their origin and commercial history, they would never dream of trusting. 

The high priests of this are the OECD whose education business plan is a work of genius. Persuade whole countries that it’s educationally meaningful to compare the performance of their entire school systems, based on nothing more substantial than exam results, then sell the very same countries additional tests to convince them they are in some kind of competition with each other. 

Here is just one statistic for you to ponder. At the last round of PISA tests, 2022, only 175 schools in England took part and only 5,045 pupils took the tests. To appreciate just how naïve the politicians are, simply imagine the range of behaviour, incentive and motivation you will find in fifteen year olds taking a PISA test, often by computer, in countries as varied as the US, Paraguay, Brunei or Mongolia.

So my concern is that this important debate is taking place miles away from where it needs to be. Anyone wanting to see the progressive tide reversed needs to understand that conversations are taking place all the time between senior business figures and senior politicians, and their key representatives, in which the politician is always merely a naïve puppet. They never have sufficient knowledge or relevant experience to challenge the messages they are sold so skilfully by sales directors and chief executives. 

AI is just the latest iteration of a successful “innovation is always good” strategy which Silicon Valley has refined to the point where it is really quite a beautiful thing to witness. Labour’s education minister, Bridget Phillipson, has already been predictably delivering the messages about the benefits of AI she’s been sold, just as people are realising all that stuff about her education tax raising money to recruit 6,500 new teachers was nonsense. 

So if you like the idea of a return to a classical education, or if you want to see schools and universities pull out of the progressive stream which they have been immersed in for decades, then start talking directly to the clever people who matter. But at least understand that you won’t find them in any university, school and most especially not, in any political party.