We’re all aware of the recent PISA survey which showed that England has risen to 10th in the world in maths; 9th in reading; and 8th in science. This is up on England’s ranking in PISA 2022 which itself reported significant improvements compared to PISA 2009, in which England and the UK languished in 25th place in reading, 27th in maths and 16th in science.
Scotland’s ranking in PISA 2025 is 20th in science, compared to England’s 8th; 13th in reading compared to England’s 9th; and 25th in maths compared to England’s 10th place.
Scotland also in its raw scores saw a fall in reading and maths (in reading from 493 in 2022 to 488; in maths from 471 to 467). There was a slight increase in science (from 483 to 491).
Most policy makers are aware of the different approaches to education reform between the two nations: a knowledge-rich curriculum in England versus a competency-based curriculum (“The Curriculum for Excellence”) in Scotland. Phonics in England versus Balanced Literacy in Scotland; autonomy with strong accountability for schools in England versus local-authority controlled schools with weak accountability in Scotland.
But what few people understand is the key role that teachers themselves played in England in the debates about curriculum and pedagogy and the implementation of our reforms.
Teachers in England are blogging and writing; they have articles in the TES and Schools Week and other newspapers about the curriculum and about pedagogy. Bloggers such as Joe Kirby with “Pragmatic Education”, Katie Ashford’s “Tabula Rasa”, Jonny Porter’s “to learn is to follow”. Olivia Dyer wrote at “Edu Dyertribe”, Robert Peal wrote as Matthew Hunter, and there is a blog about reading, “The Reading Ape”. Then there’s Old Andrew by Andrew Smith, and of course, “To Miss with Love” by Katharine Birbalsingh of Michaela Community School. On Substack, we have the likes of Carl Hendrick, Adam Boxer, Tom Sherrington and Alex Quigley.
In November 2012, the TES reporter Richard Vaughan wrote an article on the rise of the teacher blogger, headlined “Where it’s @”. It opened with an interview with Andrew Smith, who was perhaps the most prolific of this new breed of commentator back in 2012. Smith started blogging anonymously on his website “Scenes from the Battleground” in 2006.
Smith’s writing in turn struck a chord with fellow teachers. By 2014, “Scenes from the Battleground” received its millionth hit.
Daisy Christodoulou, the former Teach First teacher and brilliant education writer, duly set up her own teaching blog in 2011, entitled “The Wing to Heaven”. Daisy’s blog was an instant hit amongst the growing community of teacher bloggers, who were energised to discover that – in direct contradiction to the claims made during their training – there existed considerable academic research in favour of teaching knowledge.
In 2015 Andrew Smith counted 1,273 active education blogs in the UK. And he noted how social media had given frontline teachers a voice, allowing them to stand up to those who had previously spoken for them:
“…educationalists can no longer claim a monopoly over educational thought,” he wrote. “Opinions that might be orthodoxy in academic journals, conventional wisdom among those training teachers or articles of faith held by like-minded professors of education, might be repeatedly revealed to be objects of derision among those who actually occupied classrooms.”
We then had researchED, founded by Tom Bennett, with its first conference in September 2013. Tom Bennett was an RE teacher at Raine’s Foundation School in East London.
The next year, 700 delegates attended the second annual researchEd conference held at Tom’s school on Saturday 6th September 2014. I attended the Conference for the first time, and it was one of the most memorably exciting days from my entire time in office. I saw hundreds of teachers – on the first Saturday of the academic year – giving up their weekend to share ideas, meet like-minded peers, and learn more about education research.
People tell me that this movement is almost unique around the world in terms of teachers driving the debate on fundamental issues of education policy and practice.
The Knowledge Schools Trust, for instance, with its Primary Knowledge Curriculum now being taught in over 400 schools. St Martin’s Catholic Academy in Leicestershire now runs training in secondary schools wanting to introduce a knowledge-based curriculum. There’s Reach Feltham. There’s Northern Education Trust, which led the approach to school attendance after the disruption caused by Covid.
The reasons for this are many – one of course is the availability of social media.
The other reason is the academies programme. This was started under the last Labour Government by Andrew Adonis when he was Tony Blair’s adviser in No.10 and then when he became the Schools Minister.
When Labour left office in 2010 there were 203 academies, which are state-funded schools in England that operate independently of local authority control. When the Conservative government came in we expanded the model to include primary schools as well as allowing good and outstanding schools to convert without needing a sponsor – there are now more than 10,000. Academisation gave schools the freedom to develop new and more demanding curricula. We also abolished the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which in 2007 had imposed a competency-based curriculum on all state secondary schools.
We know far more now about how children learn and the importance of knowledge in the curriculum, something the 2007 national curriculum had subordinated to the teaching of higher-order skills.
Two academics in particular have had a huge influence on the education debate in England. The first is E D Hirsch through his seminal book “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them”.
This book explains the whole notion of what some people call progressivist education and why it is so damaging, particularly to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. He explained its origins at Teachers’ College Columbia in New York in the 1920s, and their romanticist ideology based on the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They believed that children could learn through self-discovery and inquiry, and were hostile to explicit teaching, to knowledge and to exams.
By contrast, Hirsch explains how knowledge builds on knowledge, and that if you believe in social justice and helping children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds who come to school less knowledgeable than their more advantaged peers, you need to ensure that schools teach knowledge.
Hirsch gives the definition and explanation of progressivism. He cites two elements: “educational formalism” and “educational naturalism”. “Formalism”, he explains, “is based on the idea that inculcating formal skills is much more important than the transmission of knowledge”. He adds that “knowledge is considered less desirable than more ‘practical’ all-purpose goals such as ‘higher-order skills’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘metacognition skills’ and ‘critical thinking’”.
For Hirsch, these “higher-order skills” actually come from the acquisition of knowledge rather than the other way around. He writes that, “paradoxically, adequate attention to the transmission of broad general knowledge actually does lead to general intellectual skills. The paradox is quite stunning. [The US education system’s] emphasis on formal skills has resulted in students who are deficient in formal skills, whereas an appropriate emphasis on transmitting knowledge results in students who actually possess the skills that are sought by American educators – skills such as critical thinking and learning how to learn.”
The other key academic who had a huge influence in England is Daniel Willingham and his book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”. Willingham, a cognitive psychologist, explains the difference between Working Memory, where all the high-order thinking takes place, and Long-Term Memory, where all that we know and have remembered is stored.
He explains that working memory can only hold or remember half a dozen pieces of new information. Thus, for any high-level intellectual activity that requires significantly more than five or six pieces of information (in other words, all high-level intellectual activity) you need to be able to draw on information stored in the long-term memory.
As Willingham writes: “Working memory has limited space, so thinking becomes increasingly difficult as working memory gets crowded.”
He goes on: “Research from cognitive science has shown that the sorts of skills teachers want for students – such as the ability to analyse and to think critically – require extensive factual knowledge.” These skills are, Willingham says, “…intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long term memory...”
In other words, the evidence from cognitive science flatly contradicts received views in the education world that knowledge is less important than teaching skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and creativity. What is now clear is that only by having knowledge in your long-term memory can you perform those high-level intellectual activities. This evidence undermines the whole raison d’etre of the competency-based curriculum such as the Curriculum for Excellence.
I mentioned Daisy Christodoulou earlier. Her book, “Seven Myths About Education”, published in 2014, had a profound impact on the thinking of many thousands of teachers. For me, one of the key myths that Daisy explodes is that you can teach children the intellectual skills of an expert – how to work scientifically or think like a historian or a geographer. This is a myth. She makes the point that those experts have spent 20 or 30 years acquiring the knowledge that gave them the skills of an expert. You cannot directly teach the skills of an expert to a novice, she argues. Teach them the knowledge of the discipline and from that knowledge will come those skills. She also makes the point that these intellectual skills are therefore domain specific. Being a problem solver in maths doesn’t make you a problem solver when it comes to repairing your broken-down car.
The purpose of this article is to show what happens when you liberate a profession – when teachers are allowed to enter the “Secret Garden”. We have seen an explosion of thought and innovation and, as a result, a significant improvement in standards.
Teachers have driven the detail of educational reform. It’s why in 2010 our first White paper in government was titled “The Importance of Teaching”. We believed, and I still do, that more autonomy for teachers – combined with accountability – is the key way in which we could reverse the decline in our education system. And that belief has worked. So, to those teachers and head teachers I say, thank you.
And to policy makers in Scotland I say: trust teachers, the people actually in Scotland’s classrooms every day rather than in the ivory towers of university education departments or the Sellotape-strewn offices of local authorities. As the OECD, the organisation that runs PISA, repeatedly says, autonomy combined with strong accountability is the hallmark of all the highest performing education systems in the world. That’s how you ensure pupils have the best education and the widest opportunities to improve their life chances in a competitive and ever-changing world.
Sir Nick Gibb was Schools Minister in the UK government from 2010 to 2012, 2014 to 2021 and from 2022 to 2023.