What's the point of education? Student edition

I have been writing a blog series on “What is the point of education?” here we have the student edition. 

Last year, Izzy Garbutt MYP for Wigan and Leigh made an impassioned speech where she stated the education system was failing young people. She made the speech having just completed her GCSEs a few months prior. Her speech went viral and was cited by many news outlets at the time. She described the impact our education system was having on young people’s mental health with its sole focus on academic progress. She articulated the damage such an impersonal system has on the individual. We are working with humans, yet we reduce them to hard data points.

Around the same time, HundrED, an organisation specialising in innovation in education, and Big Change, a charity devoted to preparing young people to thrive in life, produced a document outlining their findings in how to implement education transformation. They found: 

“Innovations focused on student agency strive to put students in the driver’s seat of their own education, recognising student agency is closely connected to student motivation, wellbeing and the sense of meaning and purpose that children make of their learning.”

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to work with a group of post 16 students, most of whom had also finished their GCSEs. They were doing vocational courses that would lead to high chances of employment should they complete their courses successfully. I asked them a series of questions about the point of education. Their experience was as follows.

Over 90% of students who completed the questionnaire took their GCSEs in either 2023 or 2022. Only one person sat no GCSEs at all, the rest took most or all the exams they were entered for. Although over half had good attendance (over 90%), 79% believe their life chances are held back because of their GCSEs. Reasons for this include “I feel I was taught the wrong things”, “I felt I was always failing” and “it feels so controlling and limiting of what I can actually do”. Most respondents did not enjoy the experience of sitting exams, and do not see the point in GCSEs. They say “no one asks for them now”, “I can do much more than what is on a GCSE exam” and “they put you under unnecessary pressure” to explain their indifference. Over two thirds did not feel they had a successful school experience. When invited to explain why, they stated “the teachers didn’t care about us, they told us to be quiet and get on with it”, “I felt very unheard”, “my teachers changed all the time”. They also described personal circumstances that were not effectively resolved such as bullying or a home life situation that impacted school but was not taken into account. 

It is clear from Izzy Garbutt’s speech, the research carried out by Big Change and HundrED and my small piece of research that young people need agency in their education experience. Learners are the most important stakeholder in education, they are feeling unseen, passive in a system that requires them to develop in a specific way. No wonder they are struggling. 

Our students are voting with their feet. There is an increasing trend of young people opting out of education. Figures from the ONS have calculated the rise in absenteeism to 27.6% in Secondary. It particularly affects the disadvantaged with 40% of those regularly absent from school being on FSM. The age group reporting the highest absenteeism is KS4 and KS5.

According to the IoE, the drivers of absenteeism include financial difficulties, mental health issues and special educational needs provision. This is compounded by a shift in parental attitude showing an increase in apathy around school attendance to 28% in figures from the CSJ, as parents are less likely to encourage their children to attend school everyday. 

As a secondary school teacher in a school serving the poorest members of our community, I see the impact of this broken system daily. The learners don’t see the point of education. Parents are frustrated about resources going into upholding uniform policies rather than making learning accessible. Local businesses say school leavers are “knowledge rich, skills poor”. This makes the young person fearful for the future because they are academically failing subjects they don’t care about.

This is where teaching them entrepreneurship can come in. It teaches them to back themselves, test their ideas, engage with their community around them and find solutions to the problems they see. It requires them to be part of the solution, valuing their contributions and developing a sense of ownership in the world around them in a positive way.