Fifteen years ago, we had a big old debate about education in England.
It largely took place online, with Twitter in particular becoming a kind of digital agora for how schools should be run.
This revolutionary zeal was supported with strong downward pressure from a government with an incredibly clear vision, and an upward momentum of teacher-bloggers unafraid to challenge and smash shibboleths.
The core battlelines were around whether traditional or progressive approaches delivered better academic outcomes for kids, especially poor kids.
The sometimes heated nature of disagreements led some to paint the other side as baddies. In reality, everyone wanted kids to do well. They just disagreed about the best way to achieve that.
But increasingly, we didn’t have to imagine or speculate.
The jury is in, but a new conversation bubbles
The free schools policy and devolutionary principles of academies allowed leaders to put their money where their mouth was. We could start to point to actual schools operating along those espoused principles and ideologies.
And the jury is in. On the point of “what supports children to make great progress and equip them with amazing grades”, the trads unequivocally won. It’s just not credible to look at a progress 8 table and come to any other conclusion.
But a new conversation is starting to bubble, taking us back to first principles.
Champions of progressive philosophies have begun to concede that it’s true that if you want to optimise for exam grades, then retrieval practice, drill and thrill, explicit instruction and militant discipline wins.
But they are now (and perhaps have always been) arguing that we simply shouldn’t (only) optimise for that.
Too much gets lost
Essentially, they say that too much gets lost, too much that is important. They point to persistent attainment gaps, poor mental health, drops in engagement and enjoyment with school, and a narrow and repetitive experience for kids in classrooms.
They argue that stuff that doesn’t show up on league tables but really matters has evaporated, and that we should be willing to sacrifice a bit of efficiency, a bit of knowledge in long-term memory, for some of that stuff.
And increasingly, I’m hearing lots of traditionalists quietly agreeing with them.
It’s not a complete volte-face. They still believe in taking content seriously, sequencing curriculum and prioritising teacher-led instruction. But many have become uncomfortable with the logical conclusion of the ideology they championed.
Some schools have publicly pursued a “purist” vision of traditionalism, which appears to many previous allies to have prompted an arms race, where the approach is approaching a caricature of itself.
For these trads, there is a “not in my name” sort of objection. “I believe in this stuff, but I don’t mean that.”
Others, interestingly, have had their own kids move through the system and seen them become disillusioned and disengaged with school as a result of the sorts of policies they argued for.
And some just argue it’s a different time, with different problems to solve.
A political vacuum
Whilst it may have been necessary to correct against ropey pedagogical practices and woolly curriculum articulation, this is no longer the principal challenge facing school leaders and teachers in 2026.
All of this is taking place in a fascinating broader context.
In contrast to the Gove years, there is essentially a political vacuum when it comes to a government vision for what schools should be and do.
And this is precisely at the point where parents’ expectations are often painfully misaligned with a school’s goals and capabilities.
The old argument for getting every child “climbing the mountain to university” also feels far less relevant to many school leaders, parents and kids, due to huge student debt and poor graduate outcomes.
These debates are important. They can sharpen intuitions, build consensus, tease out nuance and allow for testable hypotheses. So although they may not play out online in the same way as a decade ago, we should keep the conversation going.
Your thoughts