Lucy Kellaway: what is the point of schools?

Next week it will all be over. 

Nine million children in England will put on their uniforms, which most of them have not worn since December, and head back to school. Nine million mothers or fathers will heave a sigh of relief at no longer having their Zoom calls interrupted by having to chivvy their children or trying to home-school them about ionic bonds or subordinate conjunctions. Nearly 500,000 teachers will close the laptops on which they have been communicating with students on Zoom, Loom, Teams and Satchel One, and prepare to meet them again in the flesh.

Yet in a way it’s not over. Coronavirus has disrupted education, literally so, by stopping it in its tracks for two extended periods. That break has given all of us — teachers, parents, policymakers — space to wonder if getting back to normal should really be the goal — or whether there’s some improved version of normality that we should be aiming for instead. 

Neither is it over for the children themselves, who have missed a total of 20 weeks’ education — more than half a full school year. Covid-19 has left scars that the government’s promise last month of more money for tutors and summer schools is not easily going to heal.

No child will be left behind as a result of learning lost during the pandemic, Boris Johnson loftily promised as he doled out a few extra quid. Come to school with me on Monday, prime minister, and we can assess the scale of the damage together. 

On second thoughts, I withdraw that invitation because, were he to roll up at my school next week, he might draw the wrong conclusion. If September was anything to go by, the return itself will be smooth. Even with the additional faff of supervising children as they stick swabs up their noses and down their throats to test for the virus, the routine of school will triumph, as it always does. Last time, I feared that my students would have gone wild and have forgotten how to tie their ties and write the date at the top of their exercise books. But these habits turn out to be buried so deep in their psyches that it takes more than a couple of months’ lockdown to shift them.

What is scary is not the size of Covid’s impact, but the unfairness of its distribution

The same is not true, however, for the skills and knowledge that schools exist to instil. 

The evidence points to large, uneven gaps. There is a much-quoted Dutch study that shows children who missed eight weeks of school during lockdown were still a full eight weeks behind when later tested — while the more disadvantaged children had gone backwards, losing about 12 weeks’ progress. This was despite the fact that the Netherlands has some of the best internet access in the world — which tells us that the remote teaching we’ve all been sweating over these past two months might be better than nothing but is the feeblest imitation of the real thing.

Even more scary is a study by Daisy Christodoulou of No More Marking on British 11-year-olds who started secondary school in September, which found that their writing was 22 months behind where it ought to have been. This is borne out anecdotally by teachers, who complain that the current Year 7 is the least mature and weakest they have ever come across.

Last month, the Institute for Fiscal Studies added to the gloom by estimating that children will lose on average £40,000 in lifetime earnings as a result of the pandemic. Across the economy, that amounts to £350bn — nearly four times the government’s education budget for one year.

This number sounds terrifying, but is based on such heroic back-of-an-envelope assumptions that it doesn’t alarm me especially. What is scary is not the size of the average impact, but the unfairness of its distribution.

If I think of the students I teach, the top quarter of the class appears no worse off after having missed so much school. They have mainly toiled diligently online through two lockdowns, and any small holes will be easily filled. Their lifetime earnings won’t suffer one jot. Even for the middling students, what surprised me last time was how fast they caught up. During the winter term I was hell-bent on teaching as efficiently as I could and they were equally hell-bent on learning what they needed to. By Christmas my average GCSE student was not far from where they ought to have been, which was heartening (even though it made me wonder how ineffectual my normal lessons must have been that students could miss half a year of them with impunity).

By contrast, what surprised me in the opposite direction was the dire straits of the bottom third of the class — most of whom are from deprived backgrounds. The ones who do not speak English at home were in the worst state of all, one student asking me in September: “Miss, what does ‘meeting’ mean?”

Last week, finally, after eight weeks of consistent nagging, one of my more chaotic 15-year-olds handed in a piece of basic revision on shifts in demand and supply curves. My delight at seeing he had submitted a maiden piece of work subsided when I went through it. Every single answer was wrong, which was particularly alarming as a year ago he could have completed them all correctly. 

While I’m writing this, my phone pings. It’s an email from school telling us that on no account should we contact an individual student because the stress of lockdown has got to her and she is in no fit state to complete work. These messages have been a regular feature of the pandemic — a not insignificant number of our students are simply cracking up. 

Whether rich or poor, resilient or not, all of these children have missed something that they will never get back

I remember talking to a seasoned headteacher just before schools returned in September. I was wringing my hands over teenagers’ mental health but she shrugged and said: kids are more resilient than you think — they’ll be OK. When I got back, I found she was right. The vast majority, at least on the surface, were OK — they seemed to take both staying at home and returning to school in their stride. But there was also a minority who were evidently not — who had lost self-confidence, who are depressed, anxious, not sleeping, or all three.

Yet whether rich or poor, resilient or not, all of these children have missed something that they will never get back. Entire year groups leaving school last year did not get to say goodbye to their friends. There was no Year 11 prom or prize-giving — rites of passage that are so important in children’s lives were simply cancelled.

More than that, two year-groups of 16- and 18-year-olds over two successive years have been denied the chance to prove themselves in exams that their entire education since the age of four has been directed towards.

For some, this is a blessing as the grades granted by their teachers may give them the benefit of the doubt and be higher than what they would have got on the day, had they had to slog it out in the merciless silence of the school gym.

But for these year groups, and for others watching the mass cancellation of exams, it inevitably raises the question: what was all that education actually for?

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I’ve been wondering about this on and off ever since I became a teacher three-and-a-half years ago, but never has the question been more pressing than now. 

There are two halves to it. What is the point of school? And what is the point of the things children learn there?

The first one is easy and the pandemic has answered it emphatically, once and for all. School is to save children from spending their entire lives on Call of Duty and TikTok. It gives them somewhere to be all day, getting them out of their parents’ hair, and providing structure to their lives, without which most people — me included — don’t know what to do with ourselves. Even more important, what school gives to children is each other. What goes on in a school playground is almost as important as what happens in a classroom.

The enduring worth of school as an institution was rammed home to me when I saw Steve McQueen’s exhibition Year 3 at Tate Modern. On the walls were pictures of 76,000 of London’s seven-year-olds sitting on benches in their respective school halls, but what struck me was less how much London has changed (more than half of its children are now non-white) but how little schools have. 

Now, as then, we send children to school for six or seven hours a day, sort them by age and put them in classrooms with teachers. Almost every other aspect in the life of a modern child — how they play, how they eat, how they socialise — has changed beyond measure, but the form and routine of school persists. The reason is simply because it works — or at least works better than anything else anyone has come up with.

The much harder question is the second one. What is the point of the learning itself? This is something that no one in schools seems to agree on, which is a shame as it seems rather elementary. In the past few years I have shifted from extreme idealist to dogged pragmatist, but now Covid-19 has me swinging back the other way.

If this is education — stuffing facts into students so they can pass exams — then maybe it’s time to do something different

One day in early January I was at school, babysitting a handful of vulnerable students and kids of key workers who came to school during lockdown. Each sat two metres apart, wearing headphones through which they could hear their teachers’ voices. 

I wandered around the class to see what they were up to. Some were writing down the causes of the Prague Spring. Some were struggling with probability tree diagrams. One of my own students was listing the four ways companies can increase their price elasticity of supply. This was the stripped-down, bare bones of the curriculum, carefully designed by us teachers to give these students a grounding for future exams. 

As I looked at their faces I saw an impassive mask of the sheerest boredom. Vacant with a hint of despair. The thought presented itself to me: if this is education — stuffing random facts into students so that they can pass exams — then maybe it’s time to stop and do something different.

When I started out as a teacher, I thought it was my job to inspire. I wanted to teach my students about the real economy and real businesses. I wanted to prepare them for the world by telling them about it and interesting them in it.

I was fantastically, shamelessly rogue. When I was meant to be teaching 15-year-olds about the labour market, I would digress and get them to role-play arrogant investment bankers asking tight-fisted bosses for a pay rise. This, I thought, was the most useful thing I could do for them. If someone had taught me in Year 10 the most effective way of asking for more money, I wouldn’t have had to wait until I was 50 to give it a go.

Yet about a year ago, I stopped all that. The penny dropped: my view of education was at odds with the prevailing one. The point of education as currently configured is as a signalling device to universities and employers — students with the right exam scores are allowed on to the next phase of life. The children need the qualifications not to understand the world, but to make their way in it. 

The point of my job is to open doors for students, and exams are those doors. That means, under the current regime, that by being rogue I was doing my own students not a favour but a disservice.

Until the crisis, I had more or less made peace with the idea that my job was to help students pass exams, and slip in a bit of extra fun when time allowed. Two lockdowns mean that time does not allow. Ever. There is not a free second to do anything other than teach the sodding curriculum. And seen from these close quarters, studying the exam does not provide much in the way of education.

When I go back to school next week, I will have no choice but to buckle down and teach GCSE economics exactly as the OCR exam board tells me to. I will obediently tell pupils that there are advantages and disadvantages to countries of rising productivity — and that one of the disadvantages is that if one country increases its productivity then others might follow suit and end up overtaking it.

It pains me to have to teach such bilge. I despise the limited way of thinking that says you need two advantages and two disadvantages to everything and you must structure every six-mark answer in the same way. It is boring, stupid and bears no relation to the economy.

I will do this because it is my job. But it seems to me that it doesn’t have to be like this. It is perfectly possible that education could serve both functions — to learn useful and interesting things about the world and to get some qualifications that perform the same signalling function. As the students who do well in English also tend to do well in all essay-writing subjects, and the students who do well in maths generally do well in science, it seems daft to make students sit exams in all subjects. There seems no good reason why they shouldn’t sit exams only in core subjects, leaving the rest of the time free to be inspired, educated and stretched in something more intrinsically interesting than parroting exam technique.

This way, one half of education would send signals to employers and universities and determine which students get the place or the job. The other half would help them survive there, once they’d landed it.

I see this clearly now as I sit writing in my bedroom at home. The danger is that by next week, the hurly-burly of school life will take over and I will be so frantic teaching my mixed bag of students how to answer six-mark exam questions that I will stop asking if it makes any sense.

Lucy Kellaway is an FT contributing editor and co-founder of Now Teach, an organisation that helps experienced professionals retrain as teachers

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