The speed and cost with which change takes place in our education system is woeful based on two specific and current examples. The introduction of T-Level courses which are the vocational and technical equivalent of A levels had been discussed for several years when Nick Boles announced them in 2016 and then Philip Hammond published them in the 2017 budget and committed to spend £500m per year on them. Yet they are not due to begin for at least another 2 years with the full implementation due to come to fruition by 2024 so 8 years after the decision to go ahead and nearly 15 years after the discussions took place to replace changes introduced by the previous Labour Government that in 2008 introduced the 14-19 Diplomas which they introduced in a white paper in 2005 which would have been based on earlier discussions. All of these are intended to cover the same territory and yet there has been nearly 20 years go by without any real change, but no doubt huge expenditure.

A much less complex change was the decision to introduce the Apprenticeship Levy which called on a tax for companies with a wage bill of over £3m that could then be matched with funds from the Government and then dispersed to all businesses to enable additional apprenticeships to developed across the nation. Although the implementation for small businesses was due to occur in May 2017, a year later and still no news for SMEs.

Bearing in mind these are two very minor changes to the existing provision, the idea of a really radical change seems impossible to imagine. Yet as this news report makes clear, a leading neuroscientist believes that the way our education system demands that teenagers get onto the examination ladder in the form of GCSEs is damaging to many of those involved. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore claims Teenagers are being damaged by the British school system because of early start times and exams at 16 when their brains are going through enormous change. The risk of making a major change such as re-phasing school days and dropping out exams that have existed under several different guises since 1951 seems almost impossible to imagine in a nation that is instinctively conservative on many levels. Yet if Sarah-Jayne is right then how many decades would it take for the nation to adopt her concerns?