“Education, education, education”: it’s a mantra that feels quite firmly in the past. But any future government that is serious about improving people’s lives and boosting the economy will need to make sure that the education system is not just fit for purpose, but thriving. 

At first glance, England’s international standing looks strong. England is fourth in the world for primary-school reading proficiency and significantly above average in maths and science in Years 5 and 9. It is also home to three of the world’s top ten universities. 

But the education system is struggling. Thousands of children start school every year without basic skills, the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers – which was closing before the pandemic – is now the highest it has been in a decade, and employers are not able to access the skilled workforce they need. Every level of the education system, from early years through to tertiary education, is struggling with workforce recruitment and retention, and since the pandemic, absence from school has become a significant challenge, with one in five children now persistently absent. 

Against this backdrop, global megatrends – like technological innovation, climate change, emerging global wealth, demographics and urbanisation – will also present new challenges and opportunities for the system. Can people gain the right skills to prepare for a green economy? How can universities take advantage of surging global demand for higher education without failing domestic students?

Shifting demographics will certainly have an impact. Low birth rates mean the number of children in the UK is projected to decline by 1.5 million by 2040, a drop equivalent to the full pupil roll for 2,100 primary schools or 200 secondary schools. This trend won't be felt evenly across the country: one in four local authorities anticipates a decrease in school intakes by 2026, but around one in seven expect an increase.

It’s a complex picture. To understand it, and the choices ahead for future governments, we did three things.

1. Worked with the Education Policy Institute to set out some of the fundamental facts and trends.
2. Conducted a two-stage Delphi exercise, surveying some of the UK’s leading education experts and emerging thinkers to get their take on the major issues and the interventions that could help tackle them.
3. Convened a group of leading experts to discuss the key choices the next UK government will face in both pre- and post-16 education. 

This report draws on the trends outlined by the Education Policy Institute and the insights shared with us by more than 75 education experts who took part in the Delphi process and in the workshops. As education is devolved, we consider policies the UK government could pursue in England. 

Early years education: a false dichotomy between quality and quantity

The early-years system must, at its core, serve a dual purpose: it needs to provide high-quality education to promote child development and school readiness, as well as providing affordable childcare that allows parents to work. Evidence shows it has the potential to be the bedrock of a healthy, happy and fulfilling life, with particular benefits for disadvantaged children. However, this focus on quality is too often portrayed as being in tension with quantity, with little consensus about how you achieve quality at scale in a way that is affordable for the taxpayer and for parents. We asked our experts what they thought the early-years system should prioritise – quality or quantity? Their answer was unequivocal: both. 

Despite tight budgets and pressures on the public purse, the Chancellor of the Exchequer committed to a substantial funding boost for the early-years system in the 2023 Spring Budget. This will subsidise 30 hours of childcare per week for all children in working families from the end of maternity leave until school starts, and was welcomed by parents and most in the sector. However, it raises serious questions about the feasibility of delivering such an expansion. It also risks widening the disadvantage gap, as it excludes children living in the poorest families. 

A strong workforce is essential to deliver the policy, and to tackle disadvantage in the early years. But the sector is already at breaking point, with 15,000 practitioners leaving from 2019-21. Nesta analysis shows that 27,500 new staff (an increase of 7-8%) are needed to meet increased demand when the extended entitlements come in. But it’s not just about quantity. Evidence shows that staff with more advanced qualifications can provide higher-quality education in the early years, yet the number of people starting graduate-level training has plummeted by 77% over the last decade. The challenge for the government is how to ensure the quality of education provided to young children is not compromised – and indeed improves – as it expands its early-years offer.

Our experts were clear that serious structural changes to the workforce needed to be prioritised, starting with pay and conditions. A new workforce strategy with short, medium and long-term actions was suggested as a sensible next step. There was a view that this should be geared towards incentivising early-years professionals to train towards qualified teacher status and increasing the skills of the current workforce. Proposals included resurrecting the Graduate Leader Fund, which had a significant impact on increasing the number of early-years professionals with a degree, and offering evidence-based continuous professional development. 

They were also clear that the funding system needed reform before the government committed more money, describing it as a potential “black hole” otherwise. Millions of pounds of early-years funding are ‘clawed back’ by the Department for Education each year, and local authorities continue to use further millions meant for early years to plug gaps in other parts of their budgets. One expert believed the system could operate more efficiently and cost-effectively if the funding routes were streamlined (there are currently eight spread across several government departments) and the system was made less complex for parents and providers. Addressing these inefficiencies could free up funding for a cash-strapped sector. 

Another suggested moving away from the current model of demand-led funding (where providers receive funding based on how many hours of care a child receives) to a supply-led model, where providers receive stable funding directly from the government or local authorities based on the costs of delivery (similar to the model that has recently been rolled out in Ireland). This would give the government more control over the outcomes they want to achieve as they could attach conditions. For example, they could require that providers increase staff wages or improve access for more disadvantaged children. 

The overwhelming consensus was that the current system is not delivering the outcomes that we need for our youngest children, and Labour’s commitment to a fundamental review of early years was welcomed. The key choice ahead is whether a future government is prepared to make the reforms and investment needed to achieve both quality and quantity in the early-years system. 

Crucibles of learning or the fourth emergency service: what are schools supposed to do? 

No matter which part of the education system we were talking to experts about – early years, schools, or post-16 – there was clear consensus that the government needs to be clearer about the central purpose of the system, and who is responsible for what. 

For schools, while their role in educating children is clear, they are increasingly overburdened with additional responsibilities. In the Delphi results, growing child poverty, reduced children’s services, and deteriorating levels of young people’s mental health were some of the top issues that concerned experts. Schools are often left to fill the gaps left by a struggling system and are dealing with these issues in different ways, stretching provision too thinly for some and leaving children underserved in others. 

And so, while there are fierce debates in education – and wider society –  over what is taught, how it is taught, and how pupils are assessed, our experts believed the immediate priority for improving outcomes for pupils was for the government to define the limits of schools’ responsibilities. This means spelling out who is responsible for solving different social problems, resourcing those services properly, and holding them accountable for delivery. 

Will those who can, teach? 

There is no doubt that improving teaching quality is the most effective way to raise standards inside the classroom. It is particularly important for disadvantaged pupils, who can gain an extra year’s worth of learning with very effective teachers. 

Recent government-led reforms like the introduction of the Early Career Framework, Oak National Academy (a digital curriculum service), and the re-endowment of the government-funded Education Endowment Foundation (the ‘what works’ centre for education) were cited as strong foundations to build an effective teacher training and support system upon. 

And there is growing evidence that school trusts can be an effective vehicle in ensuring that teacher development is a priority in every school, and that expertise and wisdom is shared across the system. But no matter how good serving teachers are supported to become, pupil outcomes will stagnate if schools can’t recruit and retain the staff they need. 

Teacher supply challenges are most acute in secondary schools – particularly in STEM subjects – and schools serving disadvantaged communities struggle the most. Staff shortages create a downward spiral for schools, forcing leaders to make decisions that lower teaching quality and increase teacher workload (such as using supply teachers or non-specialists), which then exacerbate the root causes of the shortages.  

Importantly, neither recruitment nor retention are the sole responsibility of the government. Schools, as employers, have a critical role to play, and evidence shows that effective school leadership is vital in creating the positive school cultures and working conditions that make teachers want to stay in the profession. But the government ultimately sets the framework that schools need to operate in, in terms of funding, regulation and accountability, and has important levers it can pull to boost supply. The key choice that occupied our experts was what would be more effective at both increasing recruitment and fixing the ‘leaky bucket’: increasing pay or investing in improving other factors such as workload and job flexibility?

Paying teachers considerably more was ranked highly by our experts as one of the simplest and potentially most impactful levers on teacher supply. There would be a choice about whether to pursue smaller pay increases across the board or larger pay increases in shortage areas. For example, increasing targeted bursary schemes for subjects with acute shortages, such as physics and computing, are effective in attracting more people onto teacher training programmes and could be expanded. Or with a national surplus in primary, and falling demand due to the demographic changes outlined above, another option could be to focus on differentiated pay by phase. This would be significantly cheaper for a future government to deliver, but risks alienating a large proportion of the profession. One expert suggested that a more radical idea could be to have a higher, flat rate for all teachers regardless of experience, with additional pay only for additional responsibilities. But many felt that significant pay rises of any kind would be deemed unaffordable by the next government. 

A far less budget-busting (but no less complex) option is reducing workload and ‘stressload’ pressures. Answers here range from accountability reform and changes to Ofsted’s role in the system, to the government being more directive about expectations around teachers’ access to high-quality curricula and evidence-based approaches to marking and data collection. Flexible working was cited by some experts as an area where the teaching profession lagged behind others, so could be ripe for more radical reform. While the pandemic has changed the way most jobs operate, teaching has largely stayed the same. 

Looking to 2040, technology will likely play a more prominent role in education, and the government will need to choose how much it leans in, or leave it to schools and the market to decide how edtech will shape the role of teachers. In one version of the future described by an expert, pupils could learn on online platforms (already prevalent in maths), with teachers (not necessarily subject experts) supervising and providing support with the relational parts of school that technology cannot replace. In their view, this could improve outcomes and provide a solution to the current challenge of teacher recruitment. However, there was shared concern from our experts that this would diminish rather than enhance the role of teachers as professionals, and it was dismissed by many as AI solutionism. 

It will be important for the state sector to keep pace with technological innovations so that the use of new, effective tools in private schools or in the home don’t ultimately exacerbate the disadvantage gap. Our experts were clear that the government does have a role in steering technology companies towards solving stubborn problems that schools face, such as writing lesson plans and marking homework. But governments around the world have a poor track record when it comes to making bets with technology in classrooms, so any future UK government must tread carefully and draw on evidence of what works. 

Is the key challenge inside or outside the school gates? 

Poverty can affect children's early cognitive and socio-emotional development, educational outcomes and ultimately employment prospects. Currently, almost four  million children are living in poverty across the UK, and over a million of them are babies and children under five. This leads to important questions around where the government should intervene for greatest impact. One of our experts asked the kind of question that a future government has to consider: “If you had an extra billion pounds, where would you invest it: inside or outside of the classroom?” While no-one thinks that extra billions will be readily forthcoming, it was a useful framing exercise. 

Recent governments have regarded the education system as the primary means of boosting social mobility. Additional funding aimed at improving outcomes has typically been spent on increasing the supply of quality teachers and on pupils with additional needs and disadvantages.

Many of our experts proposed changes to the Pupil Premium to tackle disadvantage: for example, by uprating both Pupil Premium funding and its eligibility threshold in line with inflation (currently Pupil Premium only applies when household income is below £7,400); or increasing the Early Years Pupil Premium to primary rates, given the importance of quality early education to improving school readiness. Our experts were clear that Pupil Premium needed to be used strategically, based on evidence of what works to improve attainment, and that further measures should be taken to ensure schools are spending this money on disadvantaged pupils, and not on plugging the gaps elsewhere in their budgets. 

We know that the funding choices schools make can have a huge impact on outcomes. There are many examples of high performing state schools supporting disadvantaged pupils to achieve good educational outcomes, often through, for example, investing in proven curriculum programmes, evidence-based interventions (such as tutoring), and high-quality teacher professional development. But huge disparities in outcomes continue to exist across the country, and the disadvantage gap remains stubbornly entrenched at a national level. 

So when talking about the long-term, while our hypothetical extra billion pounds could be spent on funding schools to adopt proven classroom interventions, many of our survey respondents and roundtable experts chose to draw attention to interventions that occur outside of the school gates. Existing evidence points towards two other areas as the best places to use this extra billion: supporting parents and raising incomes for poorer families. 

Family support services that provide early help is one option. Parenting, and the quality of the parent-child relationship, is one of the most important influences on children’s development, particularly in the early years. Members of our expert panel pointed to home visiting interventions, such as the Family Nurse Partnership, which has been found to have long-term positive impact on child outcomes, including improving school readiness at age 5. 

However, evidence shows early intervention is not a panacea for preventing poverty, nor can it fully reverse all of its negative impacts. Our experts therefore focused on solutions to lift families out of poverty. Increases in income reduce familial stress and help parents better prepare their children for school. Welfare policy sits outside the Department for Education’s remit, but it’s notable that the majority of our expert panel rated the removal of the two-child benefit limit as an immediate way to improve educational outcomes. Other suggestions included uplifting Universal Credit and pegging it to inflation, and reviewing the previous Labour government’s child poverty strategy and investing in its most impactful interventions. 

Another option for our billion could be to give cash directly to parents to spend as they see fit through a cash transfer scheme. This is not new in the UK; low income parents in Scotland are offered £25 a week per child, and modelling suggests it could lift 40,000 children out of poverty if every parent took up the offer. However, although there is evidence internationally that cash transfer programmes reduce poverty and improve school outcomes, there has never been a robust trial in the UK. The government could trial additional cash payments to low income families and evaluate the impact on children's outcomes to understand whether it would be an effective return on investment.  

The next government will need to choose where to strike the balance: is further investment and reform best targeted within or outside the school gates?

A new contract with parents?

Our experts agreed that the next government should focus on the support given to children with additional needs. The current system works neither for schools nor parents, and is failing to prepare children for adult life (a declared system aim). There has been a significant rise in children and young people identified with special educational needs (SEND), and a significant increase in the number of children and young people with a probable mental health condition over recent years. This has significant implications for both the welfare of our young people and the ability of the services that support them to cope. 

Despite recent plans to improve the SEND system, our experts feared that future governments might continue to overpromise and underdeliver. Further action is needed to understand what is going on under the hood to explain the spiralling demand and to manage it effectively. 

Some of our experts believed that the surge in children and young people being registered as having SEND was a “cry for help” from schools who felt a pupil’s needs or behaviour were outside of their ability to support and manage - either as a result of under-resourcing or lack of expertise or capacity. One expert reminded the group that which primary school a child attends makes more difference to their chances of being identified with SEND than anything else about them as an individual. Another said children born in August are 90% more likely to be put on the SEND register than those born in September, when in reality many of them will just be developing more slowly because they are younger. 

To address this, our experts put forward several solutions, including enhancing requirements for evidence-based SEND and mental health support training as part of initial teacher training and continuous professional development, and deploying early intervention programmes first – such as language support or mental health support – instead of putting them straight onto the SEND register. 

A more radical solution was eliminating SEND support as a categorisation altogether, instead giving schools the resources, autonomy and responsibility to support pupils with needs short of an education, health and care plan (EHCP) without labelling them as such. They proposed EHCPs would remain but with a threshold for access, met only when it was evident that provision in a mainstream setting was either not possible or was possibly only with specified extraordinary support.

A related theme was that of the breakdown in the relationship between schools and parents, particularly since the pandemic. This can be seen both in the ways that parents and schools interact on SEND issues (with parents often feeling the need to fight for additional support in a system where resources are depleted or diverted) and in the rise in persistent absence from school. The pandemic appears to have shaken parents' trust that schools are automatically the best places for their children, leading to more pupils missing school, a rise in ‘mental health days’, and more requests for SEND assessments. 

If the current trend continues and people keep having their first child at around 29 years old, those who are 13 today will become parents in the 2040s. One expert pointed out that the way our teenagers now think about their mental health is vastly different to when their parents’ generation were growing up, and this is likely to impact on what they will expect as parents too. Restoring confidence in the ability of the system to provide the right support is central to the relationship between parents and schools, and will be critical for policymakers to bear in mind as we move towards 2040. 

Skills: equity, excellence or the economy?

The skills system, across both further education (FE) and higher education (HE), faces similar challenges to early years and schools when it comes to clarity of purpose – and this has an impact on policy reform priorities. Those we spoke to were clear that if you were designing a skills system from scratch, it would not look like the current model. Decades of continual tinkering and piecemeal reform have led to a disjointed and ineffective system. So where next for skills? 

Equity

Some of our experts were very focused on the question of equity. FE offers a final window of opportunity for the education system to close the attainment gap, which we know widens as pupils move through school. It has the potential to be particularly beneficial for the lowest attainers; the two fifths of young people in England who miss the benchmark of grade 4 (formerly C) in each of English and maths GCSE. However, FE colleges and sixth forms have seen a long-term decline in spending per student relative to schools, teachers are paid on average £7,000 a year less than in schools, and there is no additional support for disadvantaged students. 

Our experts suggested that equity would be better achieved by improving the quality of alternatives to HE. One expert described the current system as “a tale of two halves”; those wishing to go to university have a range of high quality options and are more likely to have strong support networks and access to funding, including maintenance funding. The same is not true for those who want to go into rewarding technical careers, who are often from less affluent backgrounds. And the system especially underserves the lowest attainers; progressing to post-16 education has been found to be more challenging for this group because there is a lack of clear pathways, apprenticeships are often inaccessible to them as they require English and maths GCSE at grade 4 or above, and there is a postcode lottery of post-16 provision, which means opportunities for this group vary significantly across the country. 

Although targeted efforts to widen participation in HE over the past couple of decades has been something of a success for equity – with a record number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university – a growing number of HE students would achieve higher starting salaries if they had completed a higher technical qualification. Commentators have therefore increasingly argued that the focus on undergraduate degrees at the expense of higher level technical study is bad for social mobility and poor value for money for the taxpayer. 

Recent governments have sought to rectify the imbalance within post-16 education routes by talking up the ‘parity of esteem’ between technical and academic qualifications. But qualification reform and relatively small funding boosts appear piecemeal and lack a connection to a wider skills strategy. Future governments have an increasingly pressing choice to make: continue with the status quo by relying on qualification reform, and keeping the FE sector ticking along with limited funding levels. Or, alternatively, target policy focus and resources at improving the quality of FE provision by rebalancing funding in favour of further and adult education, prioritising the funding of post-16 technical qualifications that represent sound investments in private and public money.

Our experts also thought the FE system was inequitable between age groups. Since the early 2000s, public spending on adult education has dropped by nearly a third, and employer spending on training has decreased by 27% per trainee since 2011. Adults who did not gain qualifications earlier in life are now finding it increasingly difficult to find opportunities to reskill or upskill, and around nine million working-age adults have low basic skills in literacy or numeracy. Our experts thought the government needed to be clearer about their priorities and design a strategy from there; do they want programmes to raise basic skills, help workers to retrain, or support adults in later life to continue education? The Lifelong Learning Entitlement is a step in the right direction, but there are concerns over the impact of minimum eligibility criteria on accessibility.

Economy

There was also a focus on the role the skills system plays in our economy between now and 2040, mirroring the sentiments of those we talked to for the UK 2040 Options work on economic growth. FE is frequently heralded as the engine of the economy, with a central role in providing the technical skills that underpin critical industries. But this grand rhetoric doesn’t meet the reality of people unable to find well-paid jobs and employers seeking a workforce with the skills they need. New research shows that British workers have experienced the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, and 1 in 20 UK employers report a vacancy due to skills shortages, with expertise in advanced digital skills in particularly short supply. Our experts felt that this cannot be solved through the current system of leaving it to the market, and one illustrated this point with the example of employers using apprenticeship funding to pay for executive staff training instead of the young people who need it. 

Some of our experts felt that an industrial strategy is needed that recognises the critical link between the local demand and supply of skills, as those studying at FE are more likely to attend a local institution and go on to work at a local employer than those attending university. It would allow us to understand the pathways to good jobs; what someone needs to learn for that job; what qualifications are required; where they can gain them and so on. Designing a strategy in this way would create a system that can be more responsive to local needs. Another expert suggested a social partnership approach between local and national government, employers, education institutions and students, which would balance the interests of all. 

Excellence 

The third area that the skills system could prioritise is excellence, with suggestions from our experts that the government needs to focus less on structures and more on a new standards agenda in skills. As with early years and schools, high-quality teaching is fundamental to good student outcomes in FE. As one of our workshop attendees put it: “sending a young person off to learn something of poor quality is worse than them doing nothing”. That means a concerted effort will be needed to root the skills system in evidence-based teaching and curriculum practices. Some experts advocated replicating the Early Career Framework reforms for staff in colleges. Others noted that it was harder for the government to improve quality in FE colleges because there is a complex accountability system in skills, compared to the relatively simple (if contested) system in schools.

One area that needs urgent attention is the quality of apprenticeships. Apprenticeships should provide young people with the opportunity to ‘earn and learn’, and to secure highly skilled jobs. Yet almost half of all apprentices are now dropping out of their course, and 70% (equivalent to 115,000 apprentices every year) of those report problems with the quality of their training.

On the topic of excellence, our leading universities have been highlighted in both this work and our work on economic growth as a ‘jewel in the crown’ that needs to be supported to amplify their impact. One suggestion is that the Oxford-Cambridge Arc should be expanded, and another commonly called for is increased investment in research and development. HE funding was seen as a critical barrier to excellence, however, and any future government will need to decide whether to let the creaking system trudge along, with international students continuing to balance the books, or to grasp the nettle and establish a new settlement for 2040.

Conclusion

A good education system can tackle inequality, break the cycle of disadvantage, boost the economy, and create the foundations for happy and healthy lives. Arguably, it most neatly captures the guiding principle of the UK 2040 Options project: to improve outcomes for children who are born today and will be becoming adults in the 2040s.

This work has highlighted some of the pressing challenges already facing the sector, and some more on the horizon. Every stage of the education system plays a role in improving life chances, and the government must think about changes holistically to ensure reforms to one area don’t inadvertently damage others. 

But there is hope: our work has shown that answers to these complex challenges do exist. And if the government gets it right, those children born today will have a better future in the 2040s. In the next phase of the UK 2040 Options project, we will be tackling some of these choices and debates, and considering policy options in more depth. 

Results from Delphi exercise

Top issues in order of perceived importance

These were the issues identified that need addressing in order to improve educational outcomes in the UK.

1. Child poverty
2. Further education and skills system is underfunded
3. The disadvantage gap is too wide
4. Support system for vulnerable children and young people isn't working
5. Poor pupil attendance/persistent absence
6. High levels of poor mental health and wellbeing and low capacity/funding for the support services
7. Variable quality and/or insufficient provision for children and young people with SEND
8. Post-16 offer is poor
9. Teaching quality needs improving
10. SEND system is underfunded

Top interventions in order of perceived importance

These were the potential interventions identified by participants that would improve educational outcomes in the UK.

1. Introduce a cross-government strategy to reduce child and family poverty
2. Fund 16-19 education at the same level as 11-16
3. Make teaching more attractive by considering flexible working, workload reduction and/or capped hours
4. Rebuild capacity in children's services
5. Pay teachers more
6. Increase planning, preparation and assessment time for every teacher
7. Invest in high-quality language interventions (e.g. NELI) in the early years
8. Require social media companies to enforce age restrictions on social media
9. Invest more in the development and evaluation of better teacher and leadership development programmes
10. Devise and implement a public health strategy for adolescent mental health

Roundtable participants

We sincerely thank our chairs and workshop participants for their time and contributions. Please note that not all participants will have agreed with all the discussion points above.

Workshop on pre-16 education

• Chair: Professor Becky Francis CBE (Education Endowment Foundation)
• Professor Anna Vignoles CBE (The Leverhulme Trust)
• Baz Ramaiah (Centre for Education and Youth)
• Carole Willis (National Foundation for Educational Research)
• Professor David Halpern CBE (The Behavioural Insights Team)
• Donna Molloy OBE (Foundations – What Works Centre for Children & Families)
• Sir Ian Bauckham CBE (Ofqual)
• Juliet Chua CB (Department for Education)
• Laura McInerney (Teacher Tapp)
• Leora Cruddas CBE (Confederation of School Trusts)
• Loic Menzies (University of Cambridge)
• Lucy Heller (Ark)
• Professor Lynn Ang (UCL)
• Natalie Perera (Education Policy Institute)
• Neil Leitch (Early Years Alliance)
• Dr Sara Bonetti (National Day Nurseries Association)
• Professor Tim Leunig (Public First)
• Tony McArdle OBE 

Workshop on post-16 education

• Chair: Mary Curnock Cook OBE
• Professor David Halpern CBE (The Behavioural Insights Team)
• David Hughes CBE (Association of Colleges)
• Dipa Ganguli OBE (Working Men’s College)
• Jude Hillary (National Foundation for Educational Research)
• Nick Hillman (HEPI)
• Olly Newton (Edge Foundation)
• Sam Tuckett (Education Policy Institute)
• Yilan Huang (Department for Education)