12th June 2026
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
MAKING SCHOOL UNMISSABLE Some weeks I sit down to write Headlines and the words come slowly. Not this week. This week there is much to talk about, and all of it points in the same direction. Let me start in Belgium. A group of our young people spent last week walking the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme. It is a trip we treasure, but this year it gave us something none of us could have planned. Quite by chance, our learners came upon the rehearsal for a military burial — and were given the privilege of standing and watching as preparations were made to lay six soldiers of the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment to rest at Tyne Cot, one hundred and two years after they fell together. One of those men, Private Horace Cook, was from Essex. A local man. Almost a neighbour. I have spoken to staff and learners who were there, and the same phrase keeps coming back to me: they will never forget it. There was no worksheet that morning. No exam question, no mark scheme, no revision guide. And yet I would wager that those learners learned more about service, sacrifice, history and their own place in it than a term of lessons could ever teach. They stood in a quiet corner of a foreign field and something settled in them for life. That is enrichment. It cannot be examined or downloaded. And I believe every single one of our children deserves it. Which brings me to the bigger story, and the reason this week feels like a turning point. Regular readers will know I talk often about our five capitals — moral, social, cultural, knowledge and professional. They are not a slogan. They are my honest answer to the question, “what is a worldclass education actually for?” My answer has never
been “exams alone”. A great education is, in equal measure, about personal development, fulfilment and happiness — about the cultural and social capital that opens doors and shapes a life. Last week I read a newly published book called “making school unmissable”. The idea is simple, and the evidence behind it is strong: children attend, thrive and flourish when school is somewhere they genuinely want to be. Not somewhere they are merely required to be. So I have been asking myself an honest question about every single day here — would a child be sorry to miss this? And where the answer isn’t yet a confident “yes”, we must set about changing it. Part of that is a deliberate commitment to adventure — to making sure there is always something on our horizon worth turning up for. A trip, a performance, a competition, a project, a moment like Tyne Cot. And I am pleased to tell you this is not just our instinct; it is now the national direction too. The Government has confirmed that enrichment — sport, the arts, the outdoors, civic life and life skills — is to become an entitlement for every child in every school. We are not scrambling to catch up with that. We are, I’m proud to say, already ahead of it. But I won’t pretend to you that ambition is enough on its own. There is one barrier, and it is the same one every year: money. The truth is that school budgets simply do not stretch to the universal offer I dream of — one where these life-changing experiences belong to every child, regardless of what their family can afford. When a trip depends on what’s in a parent’s pocket, enrichment quietly becomes another way the world divides the lucky from the rest. I have watched that dream drift further out of reach for eight years as Covid and the cost of living has impacted us all. I don’t want to watch it drift any longer.