Confronting the educational polycrisis

Seven crises, one system – and a path forward

Every day, the 85 million-or-so teachers of planet earth show up and do remarkable things – often under immense pressure, without enough support, and with little recognition of just how complex and demanding the job has become.

This post is written in that spirit: not to criticise anyone working in education, but to name – as clearly and compassionately as possible – the systemic pressures that have been building around us for years. The problems we face are not the fault of any single individual or organisation. They are often the by-product of good intentions. And yet, alongside children and young people and their parents and carers, it’s educators who are most exposed to these pressures – who confront them every day, and try to make it all work regardless.

Naming the polycrisis

The word polycrisis was coined in 1993 by the complexity theorist Edgar Morin, to describe a situation in which multiple crises converge, interact and become entangled, making them incredibly difficult to resolve.

While the term ‘polycrisis’ is often applied globally (e.g. to describe the interplay between the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate breakdown and the cost-of-living crisis), I believe this term can also be usefully applied to education.

What we are facing in schools today is not a single, isolated problem – it’s a tangle of persistent, interacting challenges, many of which have been allowed to smoulder for years.

In this post, I will:

• Lay out the scale and shape of what I term the educational polycrisis - the set of interacting and overlapping crises currently unfolding within the world of education.

• Offer solidarity with everyone working in education, who meet these issues head-on every day.

• Outline some principles that I think may be helpful in guiding us out of our predicament.

Perhaps some readers will find it somewhat alarmist or hyperbolic to speak of an educational polycrisis. So let me first explain why this is an appropriate term to use.

It's actually a very straightforward argument:

1. We have multiple crises on our hands.

2. They interact and have become entangled.

3. This makes them difficult to resolve - but resolve them we must.

A crisis can be serious and sudden. Examples include the financial crisis of 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic, or a humanitarian crisis arising from a natural disaster.

But a crisis can also be slow and creeping, where a bad situation gradually gets worse, until it reaches the point where it’s clear that a change of course is necessary. Examples here include things like the climate crisis, the housing crisis, antibiotic resistance, or the fact that life expectancy has started going down for the first time in decades.

The crises listed below, which together form an educational polycrisis, fall into this latter category - slow-burn problems that have reached the point where it is now clear that radical change is required.

Let's briefly look at seven examples. For each, I will describe the crisis and provide some supporting data. The sources cited here relate mainly to the English education system, but many of these issues are ‘live’ in other countries also.

1. The attendance crisis

In recent years, the proportion of children and young people who are regularly staying away from school has risen at an alarming rate, for a range of complex reasons. In the UK, there are now over 2 million persistent absentees from school - more than 20% of the school population.

To qualify as a persistent absentee, you must miss more than 10% of school days each year. 10% may not sound like much, but it's 4 weeks. 20 days. It's a lot.

Of these, more than 170,000 pupils are “severely absent”, missing at least half of the school year. This currently stands at 2.3%, up from 2.0% the previous year and significantly higher than the 0.8% recorded in 2018/19.

It’s clear that the pandemic had a huge impact on school attendance. But absenteeism was on the rise long before the pandemic, and it’s also clear that there are deeper issues at play.

2. The mental health crisis

In recent years, rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people have increased at an alarming rate. According to the NHS Digital 2023 report, 1 in 5 children and young people aged 8 to 25 has a probable mental health disorder - up from 1 in 9 before the pandemic. Mental health support services are overwhelmed. In 2023/24, 78,577 young people were waiting over a year for mental health treatment from the NHS, with 44% waiting over two years.

It’s not just young people – the mental health of teachers and school leaders is not in good shape. A 2022 wellbeing survey revealed that 78% of education staff experienced mental ill health due to their work, with 87% of senior leaders affected.

3. The behaviour crisis

According to the most recent DfE National Behaviour Survey, 76% of teachers reported that misbehaviour stopped or interrupted teaching in at least some lessons during the previous week - up from 64% in June 2022.

In a 2023 NASUWT survey of teachers and school leaders, 90% of respondents reported having experienced verbal abuse or violence - 37% in the previous 12 months alone. 14% of teachers reported being hit or punched, 11% kicked, and 39% shoved or barged.

Alongside this, suspensions in English schools have nearly doubled, with 346,000 issued in the autumn term of 2023 - up from 174,000 in autumn 2019. Over the same period, the number of children permanently excluded from school rose by almost a third, from 3,167 in 2019 to 4,168 in autumn last year.

4. Misogyny and sexual abuse

A few years ago, in the wake of the #metoo movement, a charity called Everyone's Invited created a website where people could anonymously share their experiences of misogyny, sexual abuse and rape culture in schools. To date, there have been more than 50,000 submissions to the site, the vast majority from girls and female members of staff.

The scale of this problem is staggering and of profound concern. According to Everyone’s Invited, 9 out of 10 girls have received unsolicited images and been subject to sexist name calling. In primary schools alone, three sexual assaults are reported to the police every school day.

This problem recently returned to the spotlight in the wake of the Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’, which reignited public discussion about these issues. A recent BBC poll found that in the previous week, more than a third of teachers had witnessed misogyny at school, and 40% of the teachers polled said that they feel ill-equipped to deal with such conduct.

5. The teacher recruitment crisis

In recent years, the DfE has repeatedly fallen short of its teacher recruitment goals. In 2023/24, postgraduate initial teacher training (ITT) recruitment was 38% below target, with secondary subjects particularly affected. Subjects like physics, design and technology, and modern foreign languages saw recruitment levels 83%, 73%, and 67% below their respective targets.

For the 2024/25 academic year, the DfE achieved only 62% of its postgraduate secondary recruitment target, failing to meet hiring goals in 12 out of 17 secondary school subjects. Unfilled teaching posts rose by more than a fifth in 2023/24 – double the pre-pandemic rate, and six times higher than in 2010/11.

6. The teacher retention crisis

In 2022/23, 39,971 teachers left state-funded teaching roles for reasons other than retirement, representing 8.8% of the workforce. Similar numbers were reported in the previous year .

Retention rates within the first five years of teaching have also declined. In 2023, 68% of teachers remained in the profession five years after qualifying, down from 70% in 2022 .

A 2023 survey by Teacher Tapp revealed that only 59% of teachers expected to still be teaching in three years' time, a decrease from pre-pandemic figures of 74-77% .

7. Educational inequity

For many years now, there has been a very wide and very stubborn gap in the attainment of learners from under-resourced backgrounds, compared with their peers. It’s not for want of trying - the need to close this gap has dominated discussions around school improvement over the last 30 years or so, and especially since the introduction of the Pupil Premium in 2011.

At age 5, only 52% of children eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) achieve a 'good level of development', compared with 72% of their non-FSM peers. So this gap becomes apparent in the early years, and it just gets wider as children get older. In 2022/23, just 25% of disadvantaged pupils achieved grade 5 or above in English and Maths GCSEs, compared with 52% of non-disadvantaged pupils.

At GCSE, approximately one-third of students fail to achieve a grade 4 standard pass in GCSE English and maths - a disproportionate number of whom are from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In short: our schools don’t just reproduce social and economic inequality. They exacerbate it.

The list above could include any number of additional issues - the funding crisis, the crumbling school estate, the increasing numbers of teachers required to teach outside their subject areas, the toxic nature of the schools inspectorate, the fragmentation of the school system arising from the academies policy.

But I feel the point has been made. We have an educational polycrisis on our hands. I believe it is now clear that a radical change of course is necessary. The question is: how should we approach this tangled web of interconnected issues?

Confronting the educational polycrisis

As difficult as all of this may seem, I believe that we can rapidly turn this situation around. Indeed, there is a moral imperative to do so, given how many people are suffering within the current system.

Here are 15 principles that I think will help us work together in resolving the educational polycrisis. You may not agree with all of them. Let me know in the comments!

Face reality together

1. Acknowledge that we have an educational polycrisis on our hands.

2. Agree to work together to untangle and resolve the educational polycrisis as a matter of urgency.

3. Recognise that the educational polycrisis is not the fault of any single organisation or actor. Blame and shame will get us nowhere. We’re trying to do something really difficult here. And there is much within our educational ecosystem - in schools and beyond - to be genuinely proud of, and which must be conserve.

4. Create forums where people can come together to share their experiences, hopes, concerns and ideas. This includes children and young people, parents, teachers, leaders, support staff, former teachers, homeschoolers, alternative educators - everyone.

5. Understand that the educational polycrisis is not going to be resolved in a top-down way by heroic leaders - that we need representative approaches to decision-making where everyone feels included, seen, heard, valued, and represented.

Redefine the purpose of education

6. Recognise the urgent need to do no harm - to prioritise human flourishing alongside, and within, the teaching of a “knowledge-rich curriculum”.

7. Acknowledge that there is more to human development than cognition and the learning of subject knowledge. Alongside learning to know and learning to do, there is learning to be - and that's perhaps the most important kind of learning that there is.

8. Recognise that school is not a preparation for life. School is life.

9. Understand that we need to introduce a greater degree of flexibility into the system. One-size-fits-all leaves the majority wearing ill-fitting clothes.

Create space for connection and growth

10. Carve out time and space within the school day for open-ended forms of human connection. Planning and assessment can be helpful. But not everything must be planned and assessed in order to have value. Create opportunities for play, for checking in with one another, for listening to music together, for connecting to nature, for discussing current events, emerging issues, TV shows, technology use, random questions, big ideas.

11. Recognise the insights of self-determination theory - that in order to flourish, human beings require three things: competence (the sense of being good at something), autonomy (a feeling of control and choice), and relatedness (meaningful connection to others, and to the wider world). Let’s work out together what this looks like in practice.

12. Value and protect the professional autonomy of educators. Teachers are not delivery mechanisms. They are highly skilled professionals with deep knowledge of their students, their subjects, and their context. When teachers are trusted as designers of learning – not just implementers of someone else’s plan – they’re more engaged, more invested, and more likely to innovate in ways that benefit their learners.

13. Give ourselves - and one another - the permission to take risks and try things that may not work at first - or even at all. Feedback is helpful. Judgment is not.

Keep an eye on the big picture

14. Remember that we’re all related, we’re all flawed, and we’re all connected. Everything looks super-fragmented, and we’re all a bit disconnected from nature, and from one another. But really we’re all part of one big kahuna burger.

15. Approach this work in a spirit of compassionate curiosity. We're trying to do something really difficult here. Let's give ourselves a break and perhaps even have a little fun together in this brief window of weirdness that we call life. We are all hurtling through an infinite void of time and space for a few fleeting years. Let's enjoy the cosmic joke and relax a little.

Alongside these general principles, I have two concrete proposals for things that every school could do tomorrow, which I believe would drastically reduce the scale of the educational polycrisis and make it all seem much more manageable.

I’ll share these in my next post.

Two bits of other news…

1. Ife Obasa has written a book!

Young people need to be at the table – but too often, they’re not even invited. This week, former #repod guest Ife Obasa published an ebook, 8 Tips for Navigating Influential Spaces as a Young Person, which promises to change that.

8 Tips for Navigating Influential Spaces as a Young Person is a practical, encouraging guide for any young person with something to say but no platform to say it. Whether you’re a parent, teacher, or mentor, this book could be the key to helping young people be seen, heard, and taken seriously.

And by the way, if you haven’t caught up with my conversation with Ife (on representation, work experience… and God!), you can do so here!

2. An invitation to rock musical adventure!

A rare bit of personal news – for those of you in the South-East of England, or passing through over the next few weeks…

As a side-hustle – one that barely breaks even but is ridiculously fun – I write and perform rock musicals.

Starting this Sunday, 4th May, my band will be doing eight performances of a new show called The Angel of Death Will See You Now... It’s our third production in ten years, and I genuinely think we’re getting the hang of it…

I’m incredibly proud of this one, and I’m curious to hear what people will make of it. As you might expect, there’s an educational flavour – I play a hapless educator called James (imagine that!) who gets mugged and left for dead in the street. He wakes up in Death’s waiting room, where he’s forced to justify his existence to… well, the Angel of Death.

It’s more uplifting than it sounds – I promise!

The show features our 6-piece band and a 10-strong all-female choir (the Sisters of Mercy), and it's got a bit of everything. Expect to quiz, laugh, and rock out as though your life depends on it - because it very well might!

Here’s the flyer:

Here’s a 10-minute preview we performed at a ‘Pick of the Fringe’ event yesterday evening:

And here’s where you can find out more in case you’re in the area and fancy a little light relief sometime in the next month!

OK, that’s quite enough of that silly nonsense.

Normal service will resume next time :)