Last week, ministers took to social media for Thank a Teacher Day, praising the profession for inspiring the next generation. Meanwhile, the Labour government is making it harder for teachers to do just that. Its proposed GCSE reform — fewer exams, more “creativity” — follows the Curriculum and Assessment Review published in March, and comes as no surprise. It’s an old trick, long favoured by ideologues and pedagogical activists: dismantle academic standards under the guise of compassion. As usual, behind the soft, managerial language lies a hard ideology: that assessment is oppressive, judgement harmful, and that the highest form of care is to expect less from children.
Allergic to judgement, the system’s ongoing rejection of assessment is rebranded as a move toward inclusivity and mental wellbeing. This does a disservice to children while also revealing a deeper crisis that directly questions the quality and integrity of public administration itself. This is how standards are dismantled: not by decree, but by diffusion.
We recognise too well the latent tyranny hidden in the word-play that dresses up mild benevolence as moral virtue. Over the last few years, it has reshaped British schooling. The proposed changes to GCSEs are simply the confirmation of this decline. Caught in a deadlock of its own making, education policy has steadily removed difficulty from the classroom while clinging rhetorically to the vocabulary of excellence. The result is a system that celebrates “success” but cannot explain what it means. A system where knowledge has been replaced by “skills”, exams by “reflection”, and rigour by performance management theatre.
Assessing is not a punishment, but a clarification which can be vitally necessary
A significant number of influential teachers, school leaders and policymakers now treat any form of hard feedback as a kind of intolerable cruelty. Being told what you got wrong — and why — is an essential part of learning, which makes its rebranding as a source of potential trauma all the more alarming. Assessment has simply become less tolerable for the people who are tasked with doing it. But when the mental health, including that of responsible adults, becomes the trump card, accountability collapses. Children are left with schools that serve the comfort of staff before the needs of pupils.
This oversensitivity is primarily that of adults, and the real outrage should be that it is used to trump children’s progress. The potential lowering of GCSE standards only mirrors the recent changes brought to Ofsted inspections, which many in the teaching world fear not for its process but for its consequences. Headteachers worry less about the conversation with inspectors than about the imagined fallout — job loss, public embarrassment, the dread of being found out. Much of this fear is unfounded. But it still drives behaviour: evasiveness, grade inflation, curricular shallowness, and the relentless pressure to be seen to be “inclusive”, even when that means sacrificing substance.
The Antigone Journal has made public comparisons between past and present exam papers: the differences are not subtle. Essay questions have become multiple-choice, extended arguments reduced to scaffolded templates. We’ve seen the same logic at work in the recent decision to scrap support for Latin in state schools: rather than uphold cultural ambition, the state chose to eliminate it altogether — better, it seems, to remove the aspiration than to risk confronting the charge of elitism. Pupils today are not failing because the material is hard. They are succeeding in a system designed to make failure almost impossible and, therefore, learning optional.
Meanwhile, the same politicians who preach “preparation for the workforce” support reforms that insulate children from challenge. This pedagogical incoherence hides a cowardice. The world of work — like life itself — does not defer to fleeting feelings. It rewards competence, resilience, and the ability to withstand judgment. To train children to expect perpetual reassurance doesn’t prepare them in the slightest for adulthood.
This aversion to standards extends well beyond schools. It runs through the Department for Education, where officials have gutted inspection budgets and narrowed the scope of evaluation. All secondary inspections are now carried out on the total budget of a single school. One inspector may be responsible for up to a hundred schools — a figure wildly out of step with European norms. The result is rushed visits, minimal feedback, and reports so short they offer little to parents or teachers. Yet Labour’s first move was to shrink this assessment even further, by modifying Ofsted’s remit to place greater emphasis on “collaboration” and “support”, and by signalling its intention to phase out high-stakes judgments like “Inadequate” or “Requires Improvement”.
What is being preserved here is political convenience. Serious inspection, which is time-intensive and informed by subject expertise, is difficult. It exposes failure, challenges groupthink, and can’t be managed by communications officers. It also happens to be what children, parents, and good teachers actually want. The only constituency that fears scrutiny is the one that suspects it would not survive it.
That fear has crept through the British institutions for too long. Unions have lobbied for years to neuter Ofsted, to remove language that labels poor performance, to elevate subjective experience above common benchmarks. At the same time, academisation has blurred lines of responsibility: schools are held accountable for decisions made by trusts, while heads are punished for outcomes they can’t control. The result is a culture of confusion where no one is truly in charge, but everyone is afraid of being blamed. It is the same productivity crisis at the heart of British stagnation: a refusal to judge, to decide, to take ownership of consequences.
In this vacuum, mental health rhetoric becomes a catch-all shield. Few shifts have been more damaging. Discomfort is conflated with trauma; criticism with abuse. “No one should ever be upset” has become an operating principle. But teaching is not therapy. And schools are not there to protect children from curriculum difficulties — they are there to equip them to face it.
Assessing is not a punishment, but a clarification which, in many cases, can be vitally necessary. It is what allows a child to know whether they are learning, and why it matters. It is also what allows a society to tell the difference between flourishing and decline. We are simply losing that ability. Not because our pupils are less capable, but because our institutions are less honest.
