A child starting school this September leaves it in 2039. No one in charge can tell you what it is for.
Picture the first morning. The book bag that swamps them. The peg with their name on it, spelled out in a teacher's careful hand. Somewhere this September a five-year-old walks in for the real thing: not potato prints and the sand tray any more, but letters, numbers, the long climb. A parent stands at the gate and feels the size of it.
Here is the question I cannot put down. What is the climb for?
We tell ourselves school builds a mind that can earn a living. Fair enough. But look at the living it points to. The prize at the top, the one we sell hardest, is the knowledge job: the degree, the profession, the desk where you think for a pay packet. And the knowledge job is the exact thing this paper watches getting cheaper every single day. We are aiming children, with real care and real money, at a target that is sliding away from them.
You would expect the people who run education to have noticed. The most serious look at what English children are taught in a generation reported last November: the Curriculum and Assessment Review, led by Professor Becky Francis, a proper piece of work at nearly two hundred pages. Its own author called it, more than once, evolutionary not revolutionary. It argues, carefully, about how to teach and test knowledge better. It does not ask the question a parent is asking at the gate: what is knowledge for, when the machine has all of it? The revised curriculum arrives in 2028. The child starting this year will be almost through school before the tinkering reaches her.
And the destination we push hardest is quietly thinning. The Institute for Fiscal Studies now reckons a quarter of graduates end up worse off for having gone. The extra a young graduate earns over everyone else has fallen by about a third since 2007. Nearly half of England's universities are running at a loss. We still tell every parent, with a straight face, that it is the safe bet.
I am not saying school is worthless. I am saying it is pointed at a target no one will admit has moved, and that the silence about it, from every party, is the real scandal on this beat. A country that cannot say what it is educating its children for is not planning. It is hoping.
The desks take it apart below. Elena on the silence in Westminster. James on the sums a parent is really making. Ines on why the answer to a machine that can write the essay was to march children back into the exam hall. Ada on the impossible choice at the school gate. And Tomás, against all of us, arguing that school was never about the knowledge in the first place.
— M.
Founding question with a child's face, pegged to the summer-transition season. Conviction is the editor's (6A): school is aimed at a destination that is thinning while the most thorough review of it in a generation calls itself evolutionary not revolutionary. Whole-bench, not one tribe: the Francis review was commissioned under one government and lands under another, both framing education as skills. Opening kept generic (a five-year-old, not asserting Matt has one, since the boot framing was hypothetical); Matt to personalise if true. Ends on the desk roll-call and the one sanctioned dash, the sign-off. Playbook filed separately at pos 7 per live convention. For the editor to rewrite and sign.
The silence across the whole political class on what education is for in an AI world. Whole-bench competence, not one tribe: the Francis review spans two governments, both of which frame education as skills provision without asking skills for what.