It’s Still a Duck!

“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”.

So said my dad, often (1947-2016)

Today I’m writing about the proposed changes to the school curriculum and assessment in England from 2027. Obviously, it helps if you read the review itself, but I think you will get the gist without doing so (and unless you are an education nerd, I wouldn’t want you to).  Also, if you are genuinely after a deep analysis, there are proper commentators who will do that elsewhere…

Of course, as an education nerd myself, I did take the time to read the proposals.

Here’s my big summary:  It’s not a reform.  It’s a reformulation.  

Or, as my dad would say, no matter how hard people try and tell me otherwise, “it’s still a duck“.

Many of us have found the (enduring) metaphor of schools as factories useful for understanding the role of schools in propping up the industrial education complex (school-exams-college-employment).  The UK, starting with the Education Reform Act in 1988 (that’s nearly 40 years now by the way) doubled down on this model by introducing greater standardisation and market forces in the form of competition (publishing results and league tables for example – and Progress 8 and EBacc in more recent times) as the means to improve standards (and social mobility, so they argued).  Fundamentally, the factory model treats children as products of schooling.

But the biggest issue for me has always been this:  

Our children, whether they want to or not, are forced to play the game of school, and our society seems happy to accept that 40% of them each year will have the indignity of being labelled as failing.  I can not accept that this is OK.

We put our children through our factories from the age of 3 or 4… and then, after over ten years of preparation for a standardised test, we tolerate a defect rate of 40%.  If we were a good factory, maybe we would be having a different conversation. But not only are we a factory, but we are a truly awful one. Such a high-defect-tolerance factory would surely be unacceptable in most industrial settings.  

Why are we so apathetic about this?

As a society, when we tell (and then confirm with great clarity in writing) that 40% of our young people are failures each year, how are we expecting that to play out?  How does that play out in our communities?  How does that play out in the way that we might want to live in an inclusive and tolerant society?  How does it play out when our young people feel excluded from society?  How does it play out in the manosphere?  How does it play out in our politics?  How does it play out on our streets? 

The promise of education —of schools —to prepare children for work and life is hubristic at best.

Unless we change the way that we determine success, the other things that I like in the new proposals will just end up as window dressing.   Even if the curriculum broadens, as long as the purpose and measurement stay industrial, the factory model will endure.

A genuine post-factory system would need to go beyond the re-engineering of the syllabus. It probably means multiple forms of credentialing, flexible timing, mastery-based progression, and recognition of growth over time, all of which remain peripheral in the current proposals.

The new proposals sound progressive:  “skills for life,” “teacher autonomy,” “enrichment entitlement”.  But the structure of accountability will still dictate behaviour. Teachers will still have to continue teaching to pass tests, as that is how they will be judged; leaders will still schedule the school calendar backwards from exam weeks because the school’s reputation depends on it; and students will judge their worth by their grades because universities demand it.

Until those dependencies are broken, the new curriculum is simply a quieter factory with the same products, a smoother conveyor belt, and better branding.  Please tell me I am wrong!

Here’s a summary of what’s changing on the factory floor:

The Factory Model	New proposals…	What edures?
Inputs	A broader curriculum, richer life skills	Still compulsory national content; still linear key stages
Process	Less exam time, more teacher autonomy	Still GCSEs at 16 as a gatekeeper
Outputs	Broader skills rhetoric	Still single-sitting GCSEs at 16 as gatekeeper
Quality control	Move from exam overload to “balanced assessment”	Still national ranking; same statistical bell curve
Purpose	“Skills for life and work”	Still defines life and work through exam success

Ok, Mr Bacchoo, what do you want to see in UK education reform?

Well, to be clear, as a pragmatist, I don’t think a tipping point has been reached to dismantle the UK’s industrial complex – it is not just a UK complex, it is a global complex.  I want the national system to de-industrialise itself, but I would certainly not advocate for any anarchic revolution.  

The best way forward, I think, is to create more space for prototyping innovations on the factory’s edges.  I would certainly agree that there is no point in calling for change unless we know what will replace it.  But we will never reach a new model of education unless we make room for disrupters and innovators.  

I would like to see: 

• More investment in the design of assessment models that capture growth, not rank order.  
• the end of “pass/fail” language.
• more post-16 pathways that honour learning beyond exam metrics.
• how schools can authentically deliver both academic excellence and human flourishing.

My own school has recently phased out GCSEs, replacing them with a powerful new programme that increases access and challenge, offers greater flexibility in choice, and better aligns with the development of the skills and competences needed to flourish in the service of our mission.  

We know we have had a tremendous amount of resources and privilege afforded to us to achieve this (and it might not scale across a national system)—but the point is this: it can be done.  We are in the business of showing children what they can do, not what they can’t. And as a result…

100% of our students will now reach post-16 education without being told that they have failed.

That’s a reform worth writing about.

Finally,

I mentioned the need for space and investment in education innovation. I therefore find it extraordinary that the UK government has decided (without showing its working) to withdraw funding from state schools to offer the IB to students. The IB is the epitome of innovation in curriculum and assessment, and is respected globally as the gold standard of educational models. Instead of learning with (or from) or partnering with the IB, it has decided to marginalise it (denying access to those who might stand to benefit most in the state sector). There is an irony in that the UK sector wants to operate under market forces to drive up standards, yet is less tolerant of competition from outside the factory.

So yeah, the new proposals still look like a duck, it still swims like a duck, and it still quacks like a duck. You know what, it is a duck!