The Education Revolution Should Start with Play

I also appreciated the balance in Powell’s speech: she celebrated what is working while being very clear about what is not. She acknowledged where the system is falling short — persistent disadvantage, rising absence, the pressures around SEND, young people leaving education without clear pathways and, perhaps most troublingly, children who simply do not see the point of school.

But she also recognised what has been achieved through years of hard work by teachers, school leaders and, of course, young people themselves, reflected in the recent PISA results, where England performed significantly above the OECD average in science and maths, for example.

I share Powell’s view that we should celebrate success without allowing it to make us complacent. Strong results in some areas should not stop us asking the bigger question: is our education system genuinely preparing children for the world they are going to inhabit? For me, that is where the conversation becomes really interesting.

Powell said that our children will be doing jobs that her generation “could not have conceived of”. This is so true. And the ramifications of that for education mean that we cannot simply design the curriculum around preparing them for particular jobs. My own daughter is currently trying to decide what she might do after A-levels.

Like thousands of young people her age, she is being asked to make choices about qualifications and careers at precisely the moment when AI is transforming our understanding of what many of those careers might look like.

There is a very real possibility that she could begin a degree today and enter a profession four or five years from now that has been radically changed by the time she is qualified. Daniel Susskind made this point brilliantly recently in The Guardian, writing about AI and his own children. He argues that searching for supposedly “future-proof” skills is increasingly futile.

He gives the example of coding: once championed as exactly the kind of skill young people would need for the future, significant time and resources were invested in embedding it within education. Yet almost as soon as we had done so, coding itself began to be transformed by AI. It is a striking example of the risk of trying to predict the specific skills children will need decades from now: we can invest considerable time, money and curriculum space preparing them for a future that has already changed, rendering much of that investment obsolete before they have even left school. (The Guardian⁠)

So, for me, the question education reform needs to answer is not which subjects will lead our children to future jobs, but how do we prepare them to flourish in a future we know surprisingly little about? I don’t think the answer is simply more knowledge, or simply more skills. It is preparing them to know how to think, to encounter something unfamiliar and work out what to do with it, to ask a good question rather than simply recall the correct answer, to distinguish between evidence and assertion, and to communicate an idea, listen to somebody else’s perspective, change their mind, collaborate, experiment, fail, adapt and try again.

In other words, we need to develop critical thinkers and creative problem-solvers – skills that, in an age of AI, are not “soft” but increasingly fundamental. Powell herself makes the crucial point that the human ability to understand and interpret the world becomes more important in an age of AI, not less, which is why I was particularly pleased to see critical literacy explicitly mentioned in her statement.

Literacy cannot simply mean decoding words accurately or reproducing information in an examination, it is also about interpretation: understanding what somebody is telling you, considering why they are telling you it, recognising another perspective, interrogating information and making meaning from it.

Even PISA’s definition of reading literacy goes well beyond decoding, and includes the capacity to understand, use, evaluate and reflect on texts in order to participate in society.

In a world in which AI can produce a perfectly plausible answer in seconds, knowing how to interrogate that answer matters enormously – and this is where the arts belong.  We shouldn’t be choosing between literacy and creativity, or between academic rigour and the arts – that is a false choice. Drama is critical thinking in action. If you give children a character and ask them why they behaved as they did, or give them a story and ask what the author isn’t telling us, you are already encouraging them to look beneath the surface of a text. And if you then ask them to put that story on stage, suddenly they have hundreds of problems to solve: whose perspective are we seeing the story from, what might have happened between two pages, how do we communicate something the author captures in a single sentence, and what does each character want? They have to consider how somebody else in the story might experience the same events and, crucially, work out how to show an idea rather than simply say it.

Puppetry adds another layer again. A puppet is an object that children have to imagine life into it – they have to understand cause and effect, movement, focus, intention and communication, and they have to collaborate physically with other people.

They can make something, test it, discover that it doesn’t work, change it and try again. At Little Angel Theatre, this intersection between puppetry, literacy and drama is something we have become increasingly interested in. We don’t see creative learning as an alternative to literacy, we see it as one of the ways children can explore literacy more deeply. A story stops being something to consume and becomes something to investigate.

But why wait until age 14? This is where I would push the Government’s thinking further. Much of the detail announced so far focuses on pathways from 14 onwards. This is understandable in many ways as the problems facing teenagers who have disengaged from education are urgent, and creating different routes through education could be transformative for many of them. But if this really is going to be an education revolution, I would like us to start much, much earlier.

Powell does talk about early intervention and early years, saying that education should support children “from their first days of life” and she later acknowledges the importance of transforming outcomes through early years and early intervention. But it comes towards the end of the argument, and I would argue that it should be where the argument begins.

If a 14-year-old has concluded that learning isn’t for them, our first question shouldn’t only be what different qualification can we offer them at 14, we should also ask what happened during the preceding decade? When did their curiosity disappear?When did learning become something that was done to them rather than something they actively participated in? When did being wrong become something to fear? And when did imagination become an optional extra?

If we want teenagers who can think independently, solve problems and adapt to change, we need to nurture those capacities when children are three, four, five and six.

Which brings me, inevitably, to play. Play is where this starts. I have written before about the serious work of play and my frustration that play is sometimes treated as the opposite of serious learning. It isn’t. Play is one of the earliest ways children practise exactly the abilities we now say the future workforce will desperately need: problem-solving, communication, collaboration, creativity, adaptability and resilience. And, as it happens, I am writing this just as I am about to open a new Little Angel Theatre show for two-to-five-year-olds that centres on exactly this idea.

In Pip and Posy Live on Stage, a handful of crates and cushions become a fort, a jungle, a swamp and a troll bridge; the characters fly through the sky in an imaginary balloon, make a treasure map, create pictures from leaf rubbings and play Bug Bingo, searching for and learning about the tiny creatures around them. None of this is presented as “learning”, but learning is happening constantly. When Pip and Posy disagree about how their fort should look, they have to communicate, negotiate and find a way forward together.

Transforming everyday objects into new worlds develops symbolic and imaginative thought; making and following a treasure map draws on spatial thinking and sequencing; leaf rubbings encourage observation and experimentation; and Bug Bingo turns curiosity about the natural world into knowledge. This is what children do through play all the time: they form hypotheses, test ideas, negotiate with others, imagine possibilities, encounter problems, adjust their approach and try again. As I wrote previously, “Play builds flexibility, empathy, invention, and resilience.” And crucially, these things are not being learnt separately, in neatly labelled lessons. They are happening simultaneously, naturally and with purpose because, as far as the child is concerned, they are simply playing.

Making work for children this young is a useful reminder that education does not suddenly begin when somebody hands you a worksheet. Long before children sit formal examinations, they are learning how to learn. They are learning whether questions are welcomed, whether experimentation is safe, whether there can be several possible answers, whether their ideas have value, and whether getting something wrong means failure or simply means having another go.

These are not just important lessons for childhood; they are the foundations of the adaptability, curiosity, resilience and confidence children will need to navigate a future we cannot yet predict.

So, I welcome Lucy Powell’s ambition, and particularly an Education Secretary talking seriously about drama, creating more space for creative subjects and recognising the importance of critical literacy, practical learning, speaking, presenting and other human skills alongside academic knowledge.

Above all, I welcome the idea that education should capture the imagination of every child. But if we genuinely want to move from an “exam factory” to a “talent factory”, we cannot wait until children are 14 to discover their talents, nor should we spend the next decade trying to predict which particular technical skills might protect today’s children from tomorrow’s technology.

We will almost certainly get some of those predictions wrong. What we can do is give children strong foundations in literacy and numeracy, alongside the confidence and curiosity to question, communicate, imagine, collaborate and solve problems. Let’s give them knowledge, but also teach them what to do when the knowledge they have isn’t enough. And let’s make space for stories, drama, art, music, making and play, not because they are a pleasant break from the “serious” business of education, but because they are part of it.

What is certain is that the future is uncertain, and our children’s capacity to think their way through it may be the most important education we can give them. That education needs to start long before 14, and it needs to start with play.