Education As I've mentioned, I was there in my twenties thinking I knew plenty, thinking I had it figured out, only to realise by the time I hit thirty that I actually knew nothing, or at least nothing of any particular use. The business had collapsed, the financial crisis had wiped out what was left, and I found myself asking why I was at 30 years old finding out things I should have known years ago. Basic things, how money actually works, how the system around me is set up, why certain things keep happening to ordinary people while the people at the top seem to land on their feet every time. So ask yourself, because I can't speak for everyone, but were you taught about taxation at school? Not the word taxation, the actual mechanics of it, how much of your income goes where, what your employer pays on top before you ever see a penny, what council tax is really funding, what national insurance actually covers? Were you taught how government works? Not the nice version with a diagram of parliament, but the real version? How lobbying works, how political donations influence policy, how a bill becomes law, and who benefits from the ones that pass? Were you taught how corporations operate, what a shareholder is, why a company might announce record profits the same week it lays off a thousand people? How share prices affect your pension without you ever being told? Were you taught about credit, how interest compounds, what a credit score is, how easily you can wreck yours at 18 and spend the next decade paying for it? Were you taught about mortgages, how they actually work over 25 years, what the bank really makes from you, what happens when rates go up and your monthly payment jumps by hundreds? Were you taught about insurance, what you actually need versus what's a waste of money, how the whole industry is built on the assumption that most people won't read the terms. Were you given any careers advice that was genuinely useful? I remember sitting in front of someone for about 15 minutes who asked me what I was interested in and then pointed me vaguely in a direction that may as well have been picked at random. There was no conversation about starting a business, about self-employment, about what industries were growing, about what skills would actually be valuable in 10 years. It was pick something from this list and off you go and good luck. But algebra. Algebra was vital apparently. Quadratic equations, that was going to see you through. And I'm not saying maths isn't important because it obviously is, but when you're teaching a 16-year-old how to solve for X while not teaching them how to read a pay slip or understand a tax code, you have to ask yourself what the actual purpose of this system is and who benefits from a population that can pass an exam but can't navigate the financial world they're about to be thrown into. And then there's the uniform, shirt, tie, blazer, black shoes. We dress children up like little office workers from the age of eleven and nobody questions it. Who decided a tie was essential to learning? What does it actually do other than teach compliance from a young age? You will dress how we tell you. You will sit where we tell you, you will learn what we tell you. And when you leave here, you will slot into a workplace that expects the same thing, and you won't even question it because you've been doing it since you were five. I'm not saying teachers are the problem because most of the teachers I've come across are brilliant people who genuinely care about the kids they teach and do an incredible job despite being underfunded, overworked, and buried in paperwork that has nothing to do with actually educating anyone. The problem is the system they're working inside, and to understand why the system is the way it is, you have to look at how it started. Before the 1800s, there was no national education system in England at all. Only a tiny fraction of children received any schooling, and what existed was almost entirely run by the church or set up by wealthy benefactors. Grammar schools went back to Tudor times, funded by merchants, teaching Latin and Greek to boys destined for the priesthood or the law. The great public schools like Eton and Harrow were financially out of reach to anyone except the ruling class. For poorer children there were charity schools and dame schools, usually run by old women or retired soldiers who taught basic reading, writing and arithmetic for small fees. For centuries, education in England was either religious training or a privilege for the rich, and the vast majority of children got nothing at all. The Industrial Revolution changed things, but not for the reasons you'd hope. Britain was being transformed by factories, mills and mines, and the population was exploding, but children were part of the workforce, not the classroom. By 1850, it was clear the country wasn't investing in its people, and the schools that existed, still mostly belonging to the churches, couldn't provide enough places or a proper education. So why did the government finally act? Three reasons. All documented. First, industrialists wanted workers who could read instructions, follow processes, and operate machinery, and they lobbied parliament hard on the basis that mass education was vital to Britain maintaining its lead in manufacturing. Second, Germany was seen as a serious rival, and it was widely believed that their industrial success was down to their education system, Prussia having had compulsory primary education since the 1760s, while Britain had nothing. And third, the voting franchise was being expanded, and politicians were nervous about uneducated people having a say, with one MP warning Parliament in 1867 that they should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters. The 1870 Education Act was the first piece of legislation to deal specifically with education in England and Wales. It set up board schools in areas where there weren't enough, but it didn't make attendance compulsory everywhere, and parents still had to pay fees. Compulsory attendance for ages 5 to 10 didn't come until 1880, and even then truancy was rampant because families couldn't afford to lose the income their children earned. Fees weren't abolished until 1891. The school leaving age was raised to 14 in 1918, and it wasn't until 1944 that free secondary education for all was finally established. The purpose of the system, and this is where the historical record is quite clear, was summed up by the historian R. H. Tawney, who wrote that the education system aimed at producing an orderly, civil, obedient population with sufficient education to understand a command. Elementary schools were founded for working class children to maintain the existing social order. The rich had their public schools and their universities. Everyone else got just enough to be useful and not enough to be dangerous. And this connects to something that I think gets overlooked. As the state gradually took over education from the church, as children spent more of their formative years in a system designed by government rather than one designed by clergy, something shifted. We slowly stopped being a particularly religious nation. The numbers tell the story clearly. UK church membership was around 10.6 million in 1930, roughly 30% of the population. By 2010 it had dropped to 5.5 million, about 11%. Church attendance fell from 6.5 million in 1980, nearly 12% of the population, to just over 3 million by 2015, about 5%. The Church of England's own numbers nearly halved between 1983 and 2014, from 16.5 million, identifying as Anglican, to 8.6 million. Meanwhile, people with no religious affiliation nearly doubled in the same period, from 12.8 million to 24.7 million. By the 2021 census, Christianity had fallen below half the population for the first time. Now is that a coincidence? Is it just that people naturally drifted away from religion as the world modernized? Maybe. But consider this. For centuries the church controlled education, and the population was overwhelmingly religious. Then the state took over, redesigned the system around its own needs, and within a few generations the country went from one of the most religious in Europe to one of the least. Whatever you were taught as a child, whatever system shaped your thinking in those formative years, that is what sticks. The church knew it, which is why they fought so hard to keep control of education. The state knew it, which is why they eventually took it. If you want to shape what a population believes, you don't need to preach to adults. You just need to decide what their children are taught. I'm not an expert in this subject, but it just so happens I know one. My wife is two years away from becoming a doctor of education, and when I told her what I was writing this, she had plenty to say about it, and she's far more qualified than I am on this subject, so I'm going to let her expertise do the talking here. Teaching in this country was originally a male profession. When women began entering it in large numbers during the Victorian era, something happened that will surprise no one. The pay dropped, female teachers were paid significantly less than their male counterparts from the start, and organizations like the National Union of Women Teachers had to campaign for decades just to get anywhere close to parity. Equal pay in teaching wasn't agreed until 1961, and even then it was introduced gradually. So the moment women entered the profession in numbers, the profession was valued less. The work didn't change, the children didn't change. The only thing that changed was who was doing it. But the pay wasn't the worst of it. From the late 1800s through to the middle of the 20th century, local authorities across Britain operated what was called the marriage bar. If a female teacher got married, she was required to resign. If she was already married, she could be sacked. A senior British judge said in 1925 that the duty of a married woman is primarily to look after her domestic concerns, and it is impossible for her to do so, and to effectively and satisfactorily act as a teacher at the same time. That was the law. A woman could dedicate years of her life to training and to the children in her care, but the moment she wanted a family of her own, she was out. Eighty per cent of women teachers automatically resigned on marriage because they had no choice. Some got around it by marrying in secret and living apart from their husbands. Some had engagements that lasted years because they couldn't afford to lose their income. One woman, Joan Stacy, was engaged and facing the prospect of giving up her career when the marriage bar was finally lifted by the 1944 Education Act. By the time the law changed, her fiance had been killed in the Second World War, and she spent the rest of her life teaching. She later said, It took many years for men to tolerate us women. They would scorn older women and say, poor old dear, she's not married. Professor Ted Ragg of Exeter University called it what it was, pure prejudice enshrined in law. And while the marriage bar was in full force, a breakaway union of male teachers called the National Association of Schoolmasters was arguing that because men were intellectually superior to women, women shouldn't be allowed to teach boys at all. This wasn't some fringe opinion. This was an official position of a recognized teaching union in the 20th century in Britain. So the institution of education, which was supposed to be about developing young minds, was itself built on the idea that half the population couldn't be trusted to do the job properly and should be punished for wanting a normal life. The marriage bar wasn't lifted until 1944. Equal pay didn't arrive until 1961. The Sex Discrimination Act preventing discrimination in promotion didn't come until 1975. And even now, in 2026, teaching remains one of the most undervalued professions in the country relative to the skill and dedication it demands. Now, I guess most people will think, well, it's not like that now, so wanted to find out what's actually being taught now. It's been a while since I was in school, or more accurately, how it's being measured, because this is where my wife really gets going, and I can't say I blame her. The national curriculum was introduced in 1988 under the Education Reform Act. The idea was that every child in the country would follow the same broad programme of study and be tested at regular intervals to make sure standards were being met. On the surface, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it created a system where it became all about the test and not the learning. SATs, Ofsted inspections, league tables, progress 8 scores, all of it funnels down to the same thing. How well can a child perform in a timed written exam on a specific day? My wife puts it simply, and she's right, it's basically a memory test. Whoever can remember things best does better on tests, and that's no way to measure what a child actually knows or what they're capable of. A kid who can strip an engine, grow food, build a wall, code a website, care for someone who's ill, solve a problem nobody's thought of yet, that kid might score a three on their SATs and be written off as below average before they've even started. Even the head of Ofsted himself, Sir Michael Wilshaw, publicly criticized the system as one size fits all and said it was letting down students who don't fit the academic mould. Teachers have said repeatedly that summative exams rely too heavily on memory rather than the application of knowledge and understanding. Research by UCL found that the need to achieve good SATS results shapes everything about year six, what teachers teach, how they teach it, and how the children feel about themselves. Schools end up teaching to the test because that's what they're measured on, and the things that fall off the timetable are exactly the things that might actually engage the kids who are struggling, art, music, design, technology, cooking, sport, anything that involves doing rather than memorising. There's a saying in education, weighing the pig doesn't make it any heavier. You can test children every week for a year, and at the end of it you haven't taught them anything. You've just measured them repeatedly and stressed everyone out in the process. The system creates data, mountains of it, spreadsheets and graphs and colour-coded tracking charts, and none of it tells you whether a child is curious, kind, resilient, creative, or capable of solving a problem that hasn't been written on a whiteboard yet. And think about what we're not teaching them. We talked earlier about how nobody teaches you about tax, mortgages, credit, how to manage money, but go further than that. Why aren't we teaching children to grow food, to generate their own energy? How does a car engine work? Or these days an electric one, how to repair a boiler or even build one, practical skills that would give people genuine independence, the ability to feed themselves, heat their homes, fix things when they break. These aren't luxuries, they're the basics of survival, and the system has no interest in teaching them because independent people are harder to control. A population that can feed itself, power itself, and fix its own problems doesn't need the same institutions that a dependent population does. Here's where it gets really insidious because the system doesn't just fail kids equally, it fails them according to how much money their parents have. School admissions in England are based primarily on where you live. Your child needs to be in a school's catchment area to have the best chance of getting a place. That sounds fair until you look at what happens to house prices around the schools with the best offstead ratings. Research has shown that the average house price in the catchment area of an outstanding school is around£331,000, which is 41% more expensive than a home near a school rated inadequate, a difference of roughly£96,000 just for the postcode. The London School of Economics estimated that living within the catchment of an outstanding primary school adds up to 8% to a property's value compared to similar homes just outside it. In one London borough, a home in the catchment of an outstanding school costs 81% more than the average for the rest of the area. So what happens is this: a school gets a good offstead rating, house prices in the catchment area go up, wealthier families move in because they can afford the premium, the school's intake becomes more affluent. Wealthier children tend to arrive better resourced, better fed, more supported at home, with parents who have the time and education to help with homework and fight for extra provision if needed. The school performs well in the next round of tests. The offstead rating stays high, the house prices go up again, and the cycle continues. Now look at the other end. A school in a poorer area gets a low offstead rating. The families who can afford to move away do. House prices drop or stay flat. The school's intake becomes more concentrated with children from disadvantaged backgrounds, children who are more likely to arrive with additional needs, less support at home, less access to books and resources, sometimes less access to regular meals. The school struggles and the test results reflect the challenges. The offstead rating stays low or drops further. Funding doesn't increase to match the need, and the cycle continues in the opposite direction. It's a self-perpetuating circle that keeps the best schools the best and the struggling schools struggling, and it has almost nothing to do with the quality of the teachers. A brilliant teacher in a school rated inadequate in one of the most deprived areas of the country is doing ten times the work of a teacher in a fully resourced, outstanding school in a wealthy suburb and getting paid the same or less for it while being told by the data that they're underperforming. The system measures the outcome and ignores the starting point, which is exactly how you design something that looks fair on paper and is deeply unfair in practice. One in three parents have considered moving home specifically to be near a good school. Parents are willing to pay on average nearly£29,000 extra for a property in a desirable catchment. In Kensington and Chelsea, where 67% of schools are rated outstanding, the average house price is£1.475 million. In the poorest parts of the country where schools are struggling most, you couldn't buy a garage for that. And we wonder why educational outcomes follow income so closely. The head teacher Ruth Perry took her own life after her school was downgraded to inadequate by Ofsted. One word on a report, one judgment that reduced years of work and dedication to a single label, and it destroyed her. That tragedy sparked a national conversation about whether a system that boils complex institutions down to a single word is doing more harm than good. Ofsted has since announced plans to scrap the single headline grades, but the damage has been done for decades, and the structural inequality it created in the housing market and in school funding won't disappear with a policy change.