Alice looked round her in great surprise. âWhy, I do believe weâve been under this tree the whole time! Everythingâs just as it was!â âOf course it is,â said the Queen, âwhat would you have it?â âWell, in our country,â said Alice, still panting a little, âyouâd generally get to somewhere elseï»żâif you ran very fast for a long time, as weâve been doing.â âA slow sort of country!â said the Queen. âNow, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!â
Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking-Glass (Illustrated): The 1871 Classic Edition with Original Illustrations (pp. 21-22).
If you have read the recent PISA report, and read some of the commentators that created and benefited from the current educational settlement in place in England, you would think that the âwarâ in our schools since 2010 is over, if we want it to be. The claim that England is now in the top 10 of countries has led to some declaring it to be a huge policy success. The problem is that these claims have had a level of sandpapering that needs examining.
PISA 2025: national report for England, Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment, Department of Education, University of Oxford and UCL Institute of Education, September 2026
The Department for Educationâs own report, produced by Oxford and UCL, is more measured. Science has improved from 2022, but not statistically significant from 2015. There are no significant differences in reading scores. Mathematics shows no significant improvement from 2022 or 2015, but the 2025 score is below 2018. What the scores suggest is that there is recovery in science scores against broadly stable reading and mathematics scores. So why the triumphal sounds of the heavenly host? Well, the standing of England improved because other countries fell. It is true that stability in scores could represent a positive effect, but what cannot be established is that the policies and actions led to the resilience. Knowledge-rich curricula, direct instruction, national reforms and what happens at an institution level are quite a few messy and variable aspects that point to a test score. The report does not isolate their effects or establish how they combine to produce Englandâs results. Presenting them as a proven explanation is wish fulfilment.
My view is that this is the educational settlement speaking at the moment when it feels unsettled. Key people within it are writing obituaries for it and the argument made about the PISA results is the Red Queenâs; if you want to get somewhere else, run twice as fast. More of the same, but harder. What is the human, economic and social cost of doing so nationally and what would count as getting somewhere else? Nothing in the DfE report establishes that more of the same, but harder, is the right prescription.
When Alice notices that everything is just as it was, the Queenâs reply could be the settlementâs: âOf course it is â what would you have it?â
Ultimately, it is not only a question of how fast we run, but the ground we are running on. This is the question being missed by the belief that a ranking or public declaration could close it.
âThese do not âemergeâ: they have to be constructed. Political and ideological work is required to disarticulate old formations, and to rework their elements into new configurations.â
Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Right Show, 1979
We are in the end times of a particular settlement in English education. Three pieces from Claire Stoneman, Alex Quigley and Mark Enser all suggest that whatever was built after 2010 is in trouble. Stoneman wrote about the increasing amount of âchatterâ from people who write fluently but may not have the lived experience to support it. Quigley wrote of the knowledge-rich era ending, arguing that the resources built to support the lofty ideals could not map neatly onto the messy reality of classrooms, and that what was meant by âknowledge- richâ was never really settled. Enser, a former national lead in Ofstedâs curriculum unit, suggests that the patient was never really alive: the National Curriculum was only ever binding on maintained schools and the majority of secondary pupils attend academies, which are not covered.
None of them say that the knowledge-rich era was wrong. What they agree on is that it has ceased to work, and that the resources were never there to disseminate it properly. My argument is slightly different in that the articulation of what was knowledge-rich no longer has the purchase it had before. Hall describes an articulation as a link between elements that have no fixed or necessary connection and which can be composed from very different discourses. Knowledge-rich laid claim to several at once: cognitive science, âpowerful knowledgeâ, curriculum design, Rosenshine, workload reduction and, from 2019, Ofsted. These came together into a single chain that appeared to be one position, obscuring the individual links, and questioning any one of them sounded like an attack on the whole. But each of the writers is now pulling a link away from the others. Stoneman separates prestige from expertise. Quigley separates the practices from the name. Enser separates the idea from its implementation. None of them is refuting anything, because there was never a single position to refute; what they see as an era ending is a disarticulation; the chain is coming apart at the link.
And we have to accept that the people who built the chain won and the settlement that exists now is of their making. In 2019, Ofsted made curriculum the object of inspection and adopted a definition of learning as an alteration in long-term memory. The Curriculum and Assessment Review recommends that the ânewâ incoming curriculum retain the knowledge-rich approach. Nothing about that looks like an ending.
So why do they see it as an ending? The medium that allowed the common sense of a knowledge-rich education to circulate has diminished. According to Teacher Tapp, around 70% of teachers used Twitter/X for work in 2019. In 2026 it is 10%. Reading and commenting on blogs has also decreased. One of the things that kept the knowledge-rich articulation welded together was the ability to restate the key ideas in a shared space. There is now digital enclosure, as Stoneman notes, where access to thinking now costs a coffee a month for each writer, and the democratisation of education knowledge is, in her words, no longer âA Thingâ. A common sense needs a commons.
In 2021, the British Educational Research Journal published Steven Watsonâs New Right 2.0: Teacher populism on social media in England and James Craskeâs Logics, rhetoric and âthe blobâ: populist logic in the Conservative reforms to English schooling in the same issue. Watson argues that Twitter facilitated teacher populism by setting the ordinary teacher against a liberal educational elite consisting of academics, local education authorities and teaching unions. Craske argues that politicians constructed a frontier between âthe peopleâ, who were teachers and parents, and an illegitimate âeliteâ, the educational establishment, and that social media helped to share and embed these ideas. Neither paper appears in any of the three pieces and that is no surprise; they are part of the âeliteâ and do not form a link in the knowledge-rich chain.
And this is what is really interesting. The settlement was partly constituted and spread through social media. It then became embedded in the framework of inspection, but did not provide the robust training programme for teachers across the country and the absence was a consequence of the politics in place at the time. England had a national delivery structure, the National Strategies, and it was wound down in 2011, the same year the curriculum review began. Conferences were great, but a conference cannot build absorptive capacity, that is the ability of an organisation to take in new knowledge and put it to work, and nothing that replaced the National Strategies was designed to address this problem.
There is another account of what happened in those classrooms, and it sits outside the disciplinary knowledge all three writers cleave to. Hallâs encoding/decoding model offers another way of understanding what happened. He suggested that a message is encoded at one site and read at another, and that the receiverâs position produces a dominant, negotiated or oppositional response. Nothing is corrupted in transit nor did teachers degrade copies of pristine and perfect curricula. They were reading the message from inside their own conditions, with no subject-specific or institution-specific training, and a government strategy that changed emphasis with every new secretary of state. Their response was rational, not the result of some biological âlethal mutationâ.
This did not mean that there was no delivery at all over the last decade. Phonics worked and sequencing was incredibly useful as a curriculum concept; that is what settlements do. They hold because they answer something real. The problem is now that the settlement has fewer answers to the problems schools are being asked to solve. For those who benefitted from the settlement professionally, disarticulation can feel like decline.
So, the question is not what will replace it because the knowledge-rich approach will continue under the current government, but what machinery or medium will be used to define terms this time, who will have the authority and resources to interpret them, and how will those interpretations reach actual classrooms. That is the political and ideological work at hand.
