“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Milton Freedman
Education systems around the world are struggling with a lack of teacher recruitment and retention. At the same time, in some countries there has been an emerging crisis in child mental health and absence from school. These are indicators of a sector in distress, a sector which is ultimately unsustainable.
The recruitment and retention problem is not the result of any single issue. It is often presented as a merely economic problem, but is actually a polycrisis. A polycrisis is characterised as a situation where a number of interconnected crises exist and impact on each other. It is usually used to explain the current global political and economic situation, but here is used to characterise the multiple issues facing teacher recruitment and retention
Recruitment and retention polycrisis (based on Quickfall and Wood, 2024)
If we then add to this issues with mental health problems, absence and behavioural issues which have intensified amongst children since the COVID pandemic, and we have entered into a period where education (as with wider public services) is under intense pressure, with declining resources and only the same old, tired ideas o how to make the system more sustainable.
The current system is broken. It is the result of over 30 years of a policy trajectory based in neoliberal economics through the guise of New Public Managerialism. The development of this agenda has seen the rise of public services as first and foremost economic processes. Thus, we have seen the rise of education as an activity which must be based on results, on productivity, and on efficiency. The consequence of this approach to education has led to a system driven by hyperaccountability, complex networks of sur/dataveillance which are enforced by agencies such as Ofsted and the Office for Students. Together with narrow conceptualisations of learning, curriculum and teaching, teaching has become ever narrower, and teachers have lost much of their professional autonomy. The government now effectively sanctions a narrow agenda for educating student teachers, based on narrowly defined forms of evidence which valorise cognitive science rather than whole child development. Ultimately this all leads to narrow, academically driven schools which are chasing targets, moulding children into equally narrow ways of understanding themselves and their education. It is a system which is wholly focused on exam results and demonstrating success in international comparative measures of outcomes; it is a system which fails to consider the wider human condition, child development and how we might create generative, promotive communities which help to produce well rounded individuals who have a thirst for learning, for developing successful life courses and who are positive members of communities within which they feel able to flourish.
Sketching an alternative
The quote at the top of this page by Milton Freedman needs to be taken seriously. It appears to be ever more clear that the global system has not recovered from the global financial crisis of 2008, the reverberations of which were felt in the UK with the biting impact of austerity. The subsequent COVID pandemic amplified the inequalities which already existed before and there is a growing sense of decline and creeping poverty in many communities across the country. Politicans appear to be incapable of imagining differently, leading to a complete lack of new ideas and policy directions. Hence, it is crucial that we begin to sketch out these alternatives. There will be many competing and contrasting ideas, as we are at the cusp of a paradigm shift in many areas of societal activity. Hence, the feeling of instability, unease and fear and anger swamping dialogue. But we have to remember that no single person will have all, or even many, of the solutions. It is by exploring, advocating, but most importantly listening and entering into dialogue that new processes and approaches will emerge. This website is one attempt to open up such a space, offering thoughts and a model for a new, perhaps very different education system.