Review of 2023

The name said it all: Requires Improvement: Urgent change for 11–16 education. Published in December – and focus of Parliamentarians call for change, our penultimate blog of the year – it was a report from a House of Lords cross-party education committee which had concluded that the education system for 11–16-year-olds is “failing pupils” and moving in the wrong direction, “especially in relation to meeting the needs of a future digital and green economy”.

This damning verdict followed major interventions from the Times Education Commission and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, both of which produced heavyweight reports in 2022 arguing the case for radical change in education in the UK. (The Times Education Commission, which consulted more than 600 experts, concluded that Britain’s education system “is failing on every measure”.)

‘Requires improvement’ is of course an allusion to one of the four Ofsted judgements. Pressure has been mounting on England’s schools inspectorate all year since the suicide of a headteacher called Ruth Perry in January following an ‘inadequate’ judgement arising from safeguarding concerns. Her school had previously been rated as outstanding. The inquest into her death concluded that the Ofsted inspection had “contributed” to her death.

Our trilogy of blogs – Ofsted under the microscope (March 31), Alternatives to Ofsted (April 7) and A testing regime that impoverishes education (June 9) – all made the case for an end to high-stakes accountability, which (we argued) results in skewed priorities as schools inevitably focus their attention on quantifiable outcomes, exam results above all. We said that it damages children’s lives because they do not get the enriching educational experience they need and deserve.

There was also an interesting intervention in November from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which we discussed in our blog Thinking beyond Ofsted. The IPPR called for a “transformative shift” in school inspections, moving away from high-stakes, top-down accountability and “punitive control” to a system that “combines high standards with an approach that empowers schools and teachers to innovate and excel”. (The IPPR also joined others in calling for an end to single-word Ofsted judgements, though not Ofsted itself.)

The coronation of King Charles was arguably the most significant national event of 2023 in the UK. Volunteering was a major theme of the coronation. Schemes such as the Coronation Champions Awards and the Big Help Out, the latter involving six million participants, reflected the new king’s lifetime of public service.

LBL emphasises the importance of community pride and activism, and – in a similar way to volunteering – promotes agency and empowerment. Volunteering and community go hand in hand. In our blog Volunteering in decline? we wrote:

Six million is a lot of us. However, as the organisers themselves say, The Big Help Out is not for one day only. We need to nurture the volunteering spirit. Our communities are precious, but many are in trouble. Volunteering in itself will not mend a broken community but … it is a glue that can help bind a community together.

Meanwhile, in his Christmas message earlier this week King Charles talked of protecting the planet as being a spiritual duty. (He also gave the key address at the recent COP28 climate change summit in Dubai, of course). “To care for this creation is a responsibility owned by people of all faiths and of none. We care for the Earth for the sake of our children’s children.”

We blog regularly about the health benefits for people of all ages of getting out and about and enjoying our green spaces. To state the obvious, time spent in nature is something to be encouraged, promoted and supported. And at the heart of LBL is the belief that children and young people need to be learning about and – crucially – experiencing nature and the environment in a thorough and systematic way.

In our blog Valuing time spent in nature, we wrote that LBL is about ensuring that:

• nature and the environment are a key focus of the curriculum for all children and young people
• children learn about the benefits of regular interaction with nature and the environment
• children learn about the importance of looking after nature and the environment and the need for sustainable living
• children learn about the actions that we can take at individual, community, national and global levels to help safeguard the planet’s future
• children have access to green (and blue) spaces so that they can actually experience and enjoy nature and the environment

Our July blog Tackling grim health projections highlighted health projections from the Health Foundation, indicating that more than nine million people in England will be living with major illness by 2040. That is nearly one in five of the population. More worrying still, the rate of increase is going up not down. Cancer Research UK published figures in 2022 suggesting that 7 in 10 people in the UK – 42 million people – could be overweight or obese by that same date of 2040. Meanwhile, it has been predicted that the number of diabetes cases around the world will double by 2050.

That is why we have continued to argue, in blogs such as A prevention-first approach to health, that we need to prioritise children’s physical health to help tackle obesity and improve wellbeing more generally.

It means teaching children healthy habits for life and ensuring that they are able and supported to live active lives. Our blog Supporting PE in schools highlighted analysis from Youth Sport Trust showing that 4,000 hours of PE have been lost from the curriculum in state-funded secondary schools in the last academic year and that the amount of PE and sport in secondary schools in England has fallen by more than 12% since the 2012 London Olympics.

A real vision for school sport focused on the work of former world champion rower and Olympic medallist Cath Bishop – her plea for a “fundamental rethink of PE and youth sport” and also her broader ambition of re-defining what we mean by success. Her thinking, we said, “chimes with the thinking that underpins the Life-Based Learning approach to children’s education and development”:

• Developing a sense of purpose and meaning beyond simply coming first or hitting short-term targets
• Focusing on constant learning, progress and personal growth rather than outcomes and extrinsic rewards
• Prioritising cooperation and collaboration over competition, creating authentic relationships rather than transactional ones

We explored this idea of the need for a major rethink and recalibration in a trilogy of blogs – Collective action on obesity (10 May), Shifting the Overton window (3 May) and A strategic approach to tackling obesity (27 April) – on the theme of obesity and so-called ‘nanny statism’. The stimulus was a report issued by the Institute for Government which argued that ministers’ fear of nanny statism is constraining effective government action on obesity. Its call for a “robust long-term strategy” chimed with another of the key LBL principles – that we cannot continue on our current path.

Whether you an old friend of LBL or a new visitor to the site, many thanks for taking the time to read our review of the year. All our blogs from 2023 and earlier are available on the website. We add new blogs at least once a week. Each blog is about a three-minute read: short and to the point, but also packed with evidence of the urgent need for change in education, from early years through to adulthood.

The campaign to reimagine education – to rethink and recalibrate – will go on in 2024 and beyond.

Happy new year!

Image at the head of this article by Natalia Lavrinenko from Pixabay.