A Response to Daisy Christodoulou's Substack

I read the latest substack by Daisy Christodoulou, 'Why are we making these mistakes again' (Oct 25 2026) with interest. https://substack.com/@daisychristodoulou/p-221537104 . It

has been greeted, in some quarters, with cries of approval and gushing comments about her brilliance. I usually read what she writes and always hope for something genuinely illuminating, especially given these kinds of reactions.

So, here are my thoughts on this latest post.

The Return of Skills Checklists?

First, just one area of agreement. I agree with her on the risks associated with decontextualised skills statements, grids and checklists and the damage of attainment targets & APP grids in previous times. That's definitely something to watch out for and guard against in the new Labour government’s initiatives, and as I regularly point out, it's a concern for Oracy now too. Oracy will be distorted and damaged by itemising individual small components and assessing these, as if an accumulation of small parts necessarily adds up to the whole. There’s a risk of missing the big picture and being swamped by bureaucratic box-ticking that ends up causing damage rather than being helpful.

It’s good to find one thing to agree on.  In most other respects, however, I find her arguments deeply unconvincing and based on the flimsiest of evidence. Her work was a huge influence on Gove and Gibb and her allegiance to their reforms, and her predisposition to critique everything Labour is considering introducing, along with every plan no matter how early in its development, is very clear. She sets up straw men and knocks them down, without showing much curiosity about the detail of what is actually under consideration or actually being proposed and whether she’s critiquing something real or fabricated.

Poor Understanding of Vocational Education

Her comments on vocational education are particularly partial and sparsely evidenced. She only focuses her argument on a few years of her own time in the classroom (which it has to be said was very brief) and what she personally saw of vocational education. She omits to even mention (perhaps because she knows nothing about it) the whole era of TVEI and CPVE, the Tomlinson Report & the fact that high quality BTEC qualifications have, for very long periods, allowed students to progress on to degree level study.

She seems to have a  crude understanding of what vocational ‘education’ is and fails to recognise the absolutely vital distinction between education and training. GCSEs in vocational subjects are not ‘training’ for work. The Knowledge is a very poor example in this respect.  It is ‘training’ for a specific job, as a taxi driver. It’s not education. It’s tough, and it’s impressive for those who succeed, involving a massive amount of memorisation of roads and routes. But it is very limited. It’s fundamentally a test of memory in a very specific area, not a broad education. Good vocational and pre-vocational education should (and can) open up a range of occupations and many areas of potential further study. It is not training. It is not wholly ‘unacademic’ either, just academic in a different way. It is knowledge applied to a real-world context. The knowledge that is being applied may be just as rigorous and demanding as that in traditional school subjects, for instance requiring students to be literate, numerate, have substantial content and procedural knowledge.

When I taught on CPVE and BTEC National courses in 1980s and early 1990s, and as a member of SLT, took responsibility for them in my college, I saw how much intellectual demand could form part of vocational courses, even at Level 2. Students were reading and thinking and acquiring ‘knowledge’, but applied to a broad vocational area, for instance reading legal documents on health and safety to learn about the law in courses on child development and social care. Christodoulou’s comments show ignorance and lack of detailed knowledge of these qualifications, or experience of teaching them and do not show understanding of what high quality vocational education has to offer.

NEETs and Why England Has So Many

Her related discussion of NEETs only considers entry into jobs, not training. She makes a reasonable set of points about structural, economic issues making it difficult for young people to enter the job market. But she fails to consider at all why they are not going into training either. The one third of students who do not get threshold qualifications to progress on from Level 2 (GCSE level) qualifications, to Level 3 qualifications (A Levels and equivalent) is key to this. The Gove-era reforms to GCSE have to a very large extent produced a situation where many students simply fall at this hurdle, and lose motivation to continue, or do continue and fail again. While you can boast all you like about higher standards in GCSE and PISA results (themselves open to serious question, as statisticians and the OECD itself acknowledge), a GCSE system based on exams-only that allows one third to be held back from progression has to be regarded as being in serious need of reform

In relation to NEETs, Christodolou’s blog does not look at any evidence that doesn’t match her preconceptions and assertions. So, for instance, she doesn’t question why it is that the Netherlands has the lowest rates of NEETs in the EU and OECD countries and then consider whether this might have anything to do with the fact that it has a very strong system of vocational education. It seems likely, surely, that there is some correlation.

The Impact of the Gove Reforms on A Level English Numbers

When she considers the plummeting numbers going on from GCSE to A Level English Literature in England, she dismisses the fact that it could have anything to do with the current Gove-reformed English GCSEs, saying that the figures were similar in Wales. That is, of course, of interest. But she doesn’t look at Scotland, where the figures going on to Highers in English Literature have not only held steady but actually grown over the past decade. Figures for Northern Ireland have also remained stable. Other jurisdictions in the United Kingdom are not suffering in the same way as England. There must be reasons for this and it’s worth interrogating these. She also entirely disregards the evidence from a number of surveys of English teachers and students, who have argued consistently that the current GCSE English courses have had a significant effect on numbers choosing to go on to do English Literature A Level.

The Ebacc - No Recognition of its Dire Impact on Some Subjects

Her comments on Ebacc and its effects are very partial. She is right about the risks to MFL of taking them out of the Ebacc. These do, of course, need to be considered and should be carefully watched for potential adverse impacts. Any subject that was once in the Ebacc and is no longer will now be competing with other non-Ebacc subjects.  But her evidence of this being a certain disaster is based entirely on a single survey on TeacherTapp suggesting some concerns about a future reduction in numbers. The survey was an opinion about the future, not evidence of actual impact. Schools will need to think hard about how to support MFL, particularly in creating option blocks that support its study.

Meanwhile, she entirely ignores the negative impact the Ebacc has actually, definitively, had on many other subjects, especially Creative and Arts subjects. A Sutton Trust report identifies the disastrous damage to Arts education in the state sector, attributing it mainly to Ebacc. https://www.ism.org/news/elitist-britain-report-finds-ebacc-damages-diversity/

The Cultural and Learning Alliance has strongly welcomed the scrapping of the Ebacc for the same reasons.

They say, ‘We are delighted to see this as the foundational policy change. CLA has long been calling for the EBacc to be scrapped, and our annual Report Cards reveal its damaging impact in eroding Arts subjects in schools since 2010.

Entries for GCSE Music have fallen by 27% since the introduction of the Ebacc in 2010 and this has had a knock-on effect into A Level. (And by the way, with two children who studied GCSE Music and A Level, one of whom went on to do a Music degree, I can assure you that Music is an academic subject. There is plenty of academic challenge and it should not be regarded as ‘dumbing down’ to wish to see subjects like Music counting towards measures of high school attainment and standards. Design & Technology GCSE entries have also fallen by nearly 1/3 since 2009. Supporting such subjects is not ‘bringing back stupid’.

Cherry-picking MFL as being a potential loser from the removal of Ebacc without acknowledging the effect it has actually had on Arts and Design subjects is unhelpful.

Can You Assess Talk? – A Shallow View of What Oracy Is 

Her comments on Oracy seem to erroneously only equate it with the Speaking and Listening assessment that once formed a full, graded part of GCSE English Language. (It’s still there but not part of the grade). Again, she bases her whole argument on a very limited period when she herself was a teacher and when accountability measures had already distorted all forms of teacher assessment, including spoken assessment. Many of these forms of assessment were previously a much more reliable and trusted part of external end-point assessments at 16. Trust in teachers’ professional judgement was dramatically eroded when schools’ League Tables were introduced and teachers and school leaders started to fear being judged solely on the basis of exam results.

Equating Oracy entirely with a spoken assessment and making huge assumptions about what the government intends to introduce (which none of us yet know), is looking through the very narrowest of lenses at a very broad range of ideas about how students learn through talk. It may be that talk isn’t actually assessed per se, but is still recognised to be a key part of learning. There is legitimate debate about whether it should be assessed at all. Personally, I’m not sure it should. I’ve argued strongly for assessment of other things through talk (by different forms of viva exam) e.g. an optional or compulsory spoken assessment of an unseen poem in GCSE English Lit, or a spoken assessment on one set text. Other jurisdictions, and other phases in education do this, and it used to be possible in past iterations of school exams in England. It need not even be compulsory. At GCSE, it could allow students to play to their strengths, allowing them to choose to do it, or go for a traditional written component instead. I (and many others) including the Oracy Education Commission, have argued strongly that Oracy is much more than learning ‘how to’ talk, and being assessed on that. Learning through Talk and Leaning about Talk are also key components of Oracy.

Default Criticism of Labour Education Plans – Even Things Not Yet Decided or Known

As in other parts of this blog, Christodoulou’s overall starting-point seems to be to paint a picture of what has happened that fits her narrative, and then describe with seeming certainty exactly what is going to happen based on assumptions that are not necessarily true. This leads her to talk about everything being reversed – what the Conservatives did being abandoned in favour of a return to the past.  She can’t even conceive of the possibility that some things will be new, or might build on a past that she herself has never experienced or shown curiosity about, well before recent Conservative or Labour governments. Talk of going into reverse, of ‘bringing back stupid’ suggests the kind of binary thinking that has been so utterly dispiriting and damaging over the past decade. Why not have a more open mind, wait to see the detail (or even offer constructive suggestions on the detail) rather than treating change and reform as part of a battleground which trads or conservatives won and then supposedly performed miracles (with no downsides, and all gain) while Labour and ‘progressives’ are now intent on knocking everything down. Why not look at all the evidence, rather than cherry-picking? Why not focus on periods and experiences in education that go beyond the very short time when she herself was in the classroom, became disillusioned with what she saw and decided to become a zealous ‘fighter’ in a very starkly oppositional war.