The Campaigner Gina Miller

THE FOUNDER OF TRUE AND FAIR ARGUES THAT WE NEED A FOURTH SCHOOL TERM DEVOTED TO NON-ACADEMIC ASPECTS OF EDUCATION

Before Covid-19, education was being neglected but I think the pandemic has really shone a light on our underfunded education system. It’s a hard truth, but we haven’t really thought enough about how we’re going to educate our kids in the future.

The biggest conversation now is about catch up – but it’s about catching up to back to where we before. What we’re not doing is thinking of this as an opportunity to really rethink. We need not just to modernise education, but to rethink the curriculum, rethink our schools architecture, and look again at teacher training. What’s needed is a commission to look at the entire system. If I look at where we are now as a country, we’re a long way away from where we were when I was growing up in Guyana. In those days, British education was the gold standard everywhere in the Commonwealth. I was brought up by English nuns in a convent in British Guyana and we all understood that education is the most precious thing you could give your children. That was because whatever happened in life, they would have the skills, resilience, heart and brain to deal with what came next.

My fear is we’ve lost that thinking about education as being about building mental and physical agility and resilience. Instead we’ve become obsessed with assessment.

And of course this series of missteps has had ramifications. If you look at us now on the global index, we’re nowhere near the top – we’re actually in the bottom, and our reading skills have dropped dramatically. This is especially