More than sixty years ago, a remarkable television experiment began with a deceptively simple proposition:
Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.
The Up series followed fourteen British children from the age of seven into later life. What began as an exploration of class became something much larger: a longitudinal portrait of opportunity, education, personality, luck, resilience and the extraordinary unpredictability of human lives.
The series has stayed with me because education has been one of the continuities of my own life.
I have experienced it as pupil, student, teacher, educator and coach. I have studied geography, history, education and communications; completed a Certificate in Education and later a Master’s in Education; taught and trained others; worked in communications and public life; and, well beyond the point at which formal education was supposedly finished, continued acquiring new skills, qualifications and ways of thinking.
I am still learning now.
That experience has made me increasingly suspicious of an education system organised around a remarkably short period of human life.
We invest enormously in people between roughly five and twenty-one and then behave as though the educational part of their existence is substantially complete.
It isn’t.
And if we were designing an education system for the next fifty years rather than inheriting one from the last fifty, I think we would start from a very different premise.
Seven should be a beginning, not a prediction
The genius of Up was also its provocation. At seven years old, differences in vocabulary, confidence, expectation, family circumstances and social capital were already startlingly visible.
Some children appeared to possess maps of their futures. Others barely had maps of the world beyond their immediate surroundings.
Those differences matter.
Early language, reading, conversation, play and encouragement create foundations upon which almost everything else is constructed. A child who arrives at school already comfortable with books, questions and adult conversation has advantages that can compound for years.
So any serious long-term education policy has to begin early.
I would put substantial resources into speech, language and early literacy, particularly where disadvantage is greatest. Not because seven-year-olds are already destined for particular futures, but precisely because they are not.
The purpose of early intervention should be to widen possibility.
The old proposition should be turned on its head.
Show me the seven-year-old and I should not be able to predict the adult. I’d also argue that seven is already too late. Children learn from the moment they are born.
Education needs safety nets
There is another weakness in the way we organise education: too many transitions remain unnecessarily brittle.
Move school. Choose GCSEs. Choose A levels. Leave home. Start university. Pick the right course. Complete it on schedule.
Success is too often conceived as an uninterrupted straight line.
Life rarely behaves like that.
People become ill. Families encounter crises. Mental health falters. The wrong subject is chosen. Money runs out. Someone discovers at nineteen that the decision they made at seventeen was wrong.
Yet our systems can convert a temporary difficulty into a permanent educational penalty.
Higher education in particular should become far more modular. Completed study ought to remain completed study.
Credits should be bankable, portable and recoverable. Students who need to step away should be able to return without discovering that years of achievement have somehow evaporated.
A pause should be a pause, not a trapdoor.
As an educator and coach, I have repeatedly seen that development is uneven. Someone can plateau, lose confidence, change direction and then suddenly move forward. Progress is rarely linear.
Our education system should understand that too.
End the hierarchy between hand and mind
We also need to dispose of one of British education’s most persistent prejudices: the idea that academic education somehow represents intellectual success while technical and vocational education represents an alternative for those who could not quite manage it.
That distinction has never made much sense to me.
High-level technical work requires judgement, knowledge, precision, creativity and intelligence. So does engineering. So does construction. So does programming. So does coaching. So does design.
A master craftsperson and an academic researcher may work differently, but both are engaged in sophisticated forms of knowing.
Technical colleges, apprenticeships and employer-linked qualifications therefore need the investment, prestige and progression routes we routinely associate with universities.
Not grudging equivalence.
Actual parity.
Then comes the bigger reform: education for the other fifty years
This is where I think the argument becomes much more interesting.
Why do we still organise education as though it belongs primarily to the young?
At thirty, people change careers.
At forty, industries disappear.
At fifty, someone may discover an ability they never knew they possessed.
At sixty, a person may have another twenty productive years ahead of them.
Parents return to employment. Carers rebuild careers. Technologies transform occupations. People acquire interests that did not exist when they left school.
My own life makes it impossible for me to believe seriously in the concept of educational completion. A Certificate in Education did not finish my education. A Master’s in Education did not finish it either. Nor did subsequent professional experience. Each stage simply altered what I was capable of asking next.
Indeed, one of the great privileges of later life is discovering that education becomes less about proving yourself and more about extending yourself.
That should not be available only to people who can afford it.
I would therefore like to see something much closer to a Universal Lifelong Learning Account.
Every adult would possess an educational entitlement that could be drawn upon repeatedly across a lifetime: at thirty, forty-five, sixty or beyond.
It might fund a technical qualification, professional retraining, university modules, digital skills, teacher development or an entirely new field.
The principle would be simple.
Your country’s investment in your education should not expire on your twenty-first birthday.
A fifty-year promise
Imagine judging an education budget not simply by examination results next summer but by what it enables people to become over fifty years.
That would require a very different political timescale.
We would ask whether seven-year-olds entered school able to speak, read, question and imagine.
Whether teenagers could move between academic and technical pathways without one being regarded as second best.
Whether university students could stumble without falling permanently out of education.
Whether someone at forty-five could retrain rather than become economically stranded.
Whether someone at sixty could still acquire serious new knowledge.
Education would cease to be a conveyor belt with an exit.
It would become infrastructure.
Something available throughout a life.
My own experience of education has convinced me that one of its greatest powers is not simply that it prepares us for the world as it exists.
It allows us repeatedly to remake our relationship with that world.
That is why the most ambitious education reform would not promise simply to improve schools.
It would make a much larger promise:
Wherever you began, whatever happened along the way, the door back into learning would remain open.
At seven.
At seventeen.
At thirty-seven.
At sixty-seven.
And perhaps seven days past seventy too.
Leave a Reply