FtEC is a group of students who want to see major positive change to, in our opinion, one of the most impactful parts of life: Education. This document lays out in an itemised list the problems we have with the current public education system and what we suggest can be changed to make it create better, more independent and more intelligent citizens of this great nation.
We would like to say, we are no experts at this, we just have lived experiences that make us want to change the system. If you disagree or can think of improvements to our proposal, please, don't hesitate to send us an email or DM. We try to reply to the more serious ones with either why we did not implement your idea, or why your idea works and how/where we are going to add it.
The main issue.
The main problem we have with the current state education system is its overwhelming focus on memorisation. We think knowledge is an important factor in a successful student but not the entire goal of school. As students ourselves we have discussed with teachers, parents and employers to come up with the skills we think students should leave school confident in. Knowledge is still a big part of that, however with the emergence of new technologies we think the education system should focus on skills for the future, not the past.
The current system is like this we think, mostly, due to the time-period in which it was designed. Post industrial revolution Britain was moving in the direction of a more equal and civilised society by today's standards. The first step of which was providing every student with the skills needed for employment at the time. So the subjects of English and Maths were held in such high regard, if you could read, write and count you would have gotten a better paid job. This focus has carried on till today, when still the necessity to read is important, but it doesn't exactly set someone apart. We believe that because the goalposts of employment have shifted so far from when the system was designed, it needs to be redesigned from the ground up to accommodate for living a successful life in today’s world.
Don’t just take our word for it, the Office of National Statistics, along with many other official bodies say: just under 1 million young people are without employment, training or education. Over 1 in 6 pupils are absent from school which is almost double what it was before Covid. The disadvantage gap is huge and GCSE results have plateaued since 2023 despite the educational changes and studies. The following is our, admittedly radical, solution:
What to do about it, Andy.
Our thinking towards our system is: The bread and butter of any system is incentives. In capitalism the incentive to contribute is money. In school, the incentive to work is grades. While we would love to stop representing a human person with ten numbers, we concede that grades are still needed if our proposals are to be taken seriously enough to happen. They remain an easy way to compare students and schools, regrettably. With this incentive we need a way to fairly establish grades for each student. In order to do this we need to decide something, what should grades reflect?
We think instead of memorization as the entire goal, we should reward many skills, such as knowledge, understanding, critical thinking, communication, creativity, collaboration, practical application, independence and work ethic/persistence. At the end of exam season a student achieves grades in each of the listed categories for each subject.
As you may have seen, we are not the only people to have this opinion. The Guardian published an article demonstrating how 74% of the over 1000 teachers interviewed thought there was too much emphasis on passing exams, and 73% said there wasn’t enough focus on preparing students for employment or teaching “soft skills” like the ones above. We think this shows that even a survey of over 1,000 teachers comes to a similar conclusion: schools need to develop skills in collaboration, communication and creativity alongside formal qualifications. We strongly recommend giving it a read.
Now we are faced with the biggest problem so far, how do we assess these inherently subjective skills in a fair and consistent way? Let’s look at the current system for inspiration. At the moment the education system assesses students’ capacity of memorisation and some critical thinking. We are writing this during an English lesson so we shall take English as an example. In the nationwide compulsory English language exam, the exams ask students to read extracts from existing literature to answer questions about them, these range from objective questions like how is X character feeling in this line, where they must simply read a quote, to essay questions. As you may be able to guess, the established system also marks subjective material objectively. Their criteria seem to focus on students’ ability to closely analyse a piece of text, identify literary devices and recognise different categories of words etc. As a result of this being rewarded, schools teach students explicitly how to know and recognise the literary devices used and categories of words, which we think is a pretty useless skill.
What we've learned is that we can make fair and unbiased guidelines for subjective skills which schools will optimise for.
We think our assessment approach is now clear: we need to assess something that is healthy for schools to optimise for. Which is why we always come back to the categories on a by-subject basis. The examinations are the most difficult part. We think, to minimise inconsistency and make the assessments as fair as possible, we should adopt a three-fold system of assessment. That being a combination of end of year exams, similar to the existing ones, possible continuous assessments where the teacher uses evidence based methods to evaluate categories like work ethic, independence and collaboration. And finally active continuous assessment, like project and presentation work to evaluate student’s skill in creativity, communication and understanding. But crucially, while each of these assessment methods should have categories they focus on, each one assesses all categories to make the most fair system possible.
“But how can you assess 9 skill categories per subject effectively without having 90 assessments” said the people who work in education in the room. Well, just as the current exams test knowledge with very minor understanding, one assessment can measure multiple skills. Especially Non-Examined assessments (NEAs) which start off by giving good insights into a students’ creativity, and work ethic, continue to see how well they think critically, collaborate and understand other’s ideas. Moving into the final part of an NEA a students’ practical application, newfound knowledge and communication. There you have one assessment that gives an insight into each of our 9 skills.
We want to explicitly bring your attention to another great benefit of having a student profile with fair scores in different skills for universities and employers. It allows different organisations to decide which skills they are looking for and prioritising, giving students a clear reward and goal for developing different skills, and organisations an easy method of comparison.
Teaching methods
We will be taking heavy inspiration from the work of Waldorf Steiner for this section. These are great ideas, please look them up.
We think above all the biggest mishap with state schools at the moment is the way they teach. It is heavily dependent on the teacher and their skill set, meaning that which teacher a student is assigned can have a significant effect on their academic achievement. We want to change that, which would both make assessments more fair and reduce the disadvantage gap. The way we can accomplish making grades less dependent on teachers is by moving from a knowledge based teaching ideology to an understanding based one. Currently not all but many teachers attempt to imbue their students with knowledge before understanding. Which takes both teacher and student a lot more time and effort than building understanding of knowledge. This is very wordy so I’ll give an example.
Currently in the English literature GCSE the students must learn quotes, understand the plot and write about a Shakespeare play. The way this is taught is largely something like: Read the play. Discuss the play. Memorise the teachers’ analysis of the play. Write the teacher's analysis about the play. In our experience, we think the best way is to allow each student to deeply understand the play, and one of the best ways to understand something is to teach it. In this context teaching it would mean doing it, and doing it means putting on a production of that play. So instead of revising and writing. The students read, practice, learn lines, and perform. I am one of a lucky few who has had the experience of both performing a Shakespeare play, and learning a Shakespeare play by the Edexcel exam board’s standard. And I can recite many lines, explain the whole plot and most importantly understand what the complex Shakespearean language is trying to convey in Twelfth Night. And I can remember the names of the main characters and some scenes from Romeo and Juliet. Now let’s play a guessing game. Which one did I perform? It was Twelfth Night. And which one did I ‘learn about’ by Edexcel’s standards? It was Romeo and Juliet. But here’s the real kicker. As a group we spent less time performing Twelfth Night than was spent on Romeo and Juliet.
To summarise: with the same class size, we spent less time, less school resources and had much more enjoyment by performing a play, instead of reading it. This is the better way of teaching. Why aren’t we using it?
AI
It’s time to talk about the big, water devouring, planet killing, potentially civilisation ending elephant in the room. AI. It’s bigger, it's better and it’s more intelligent every passing day. And everyone is using it, from my nan to my classmates to my teachers. So how does it impact our assessments?
We think the AI revolution supports our proposal hugely, as while the current system keeps rewarding written work the student isn't even gaining many skills from which employers can use at to produce better and faster. We need to change the target. Assessing skills like critical thinking, communication and knowledge along with all 9 in our list help a student in an AI future rather than hindering them with inapplicable exam technique and pure information. Assessments based on activities that AI can't do for you like communication and presentations/public speaking will become more and more relevant. In this country we have a unique opportunity to be ahead of the curve of AI in learning as this technology, whether we like it or not, is here to stay, like the computer and printing press before it. AI will impact every element of our lives, so would you rather be catching up, or pushing ahead?
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: We think AI’s implications on humanity’s survival are significantly more important to get right than this proposal. If you like our survival too, advocate for AI safety. Support Control AI.
Why not?
Good question.
We think it should happen.
Do you?
We think the best way forward is to gather support. If you would like to join FtEC as a supporter or member, or discuss this proposal with us, we would love to have you! Please email hello@ftec.org.uk or see our website at ftec.org.uk. If you don’t quite have that much time or motivation on your hands, that’s fine. We would still really appreciate 5 minutes of your time to say literally anything. If you're a student, teacher, human person or AI, please just say anything! Good things, bad things, silly things. Just things. Email above.