Thinking Different — Education Series
The UK curriculum was last fundamentally redesigned for an industrial world. New vocational pathways are welcome — but they are unlikely to succeed without a revolution that starts at the very beginning: in prep schools, pre-preps, and the earliest years of learning. This is a case for all children, not just a few.
Read the Full Case →The debate around education reform is too often framed around outliers — the most gifted, or those with formally diagnosed learning differences. But neurodiversity is not a binary. Every classroom is, by definition, a neurodiverse classroom. Every child processes information, builds meaning, and demonstrates knowledge differently.
Around 1 in 5 people in the UK are neurodivergent — including ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and others. A further significant proportion are neurotypical but still learn in radically different ways: visual versus verbal, collaborative versus solitary, practical versus abstract. None of these differences are deficits. All of them are invisible to a system built around a single template.
The question is not how we accommodate the exceptional. It is why we continue to measure all children against a narrow standard designed for none of them — and call the result education.
The Francis Review, published November 2025 after a 16-month process, was explicitly framed as "evolution not revolution." The revised curriculum will not reach classrooms until 2028. The underlying pedagogical model — fixed classrooms, subject silos, terminal exams, age-cohort progression — is not being questioned at all.
Incremental updates to content. More digital literacy. More diversity representation. A few exam reforms. All framed around the existing model, timetabled over a decade.
Structural reimagination of what school is for, who it serves, and how it proves that children are learning — starting in the earliest years.
The government is right to create genuine alternatives to A Levels. T Levels, degree apprenticeships, and BTECs are legitimate and increasingly valued routes into skilled, high-quality careers. Apprenticeship starts reached 353,500 in 2024/25, with 761,500 people in active programmes. Employer demand is growing fast.
This is progress. But here is a structural challenge at the heart of it: vocational pathways are being added on top of a primary and secondary system that was never designed to prepare students for them. The curriculum, the teaching style, the assessment philosophy — all of it still points, implicitly and explicitly, to A Levels and university as the destination of a successful child.
If vocational routes are to be genuinely equal in culture and not just in policy, the change cannot start at 16. It has to start at 4.
Two-year technical qualifications equivalent to 3 A Levels, combining classroom learning with a mandatory 315-hour industry placement. Now 22 subjects available, employer-designed curricula.
From intermediate to degree level, covering every major sector. 353,500 starts in 2024/25. Over three-quarters concentrated in Business, Health, Engineering and Digital.
Applied General qualifications including BTECs sit alongside T Levels, serving learners who need breadth and flexibility. The qualification landscape is being rationalised — but not yet simplified enough.
T Levels and apprenticeships will only deliver their potential if children arrive at 16 with the curiosity, practical intelligence, self-direction and collaborative skills to thrive in them. That means the change has to happen much, much earlier. A child who has spent eleven years in a passive, exam-focused, one-size classroom will not suddenly become a self-directed vocational learner at 16. The pipeline matters. The culture matters. The earliest experiences of school matter most of all.
The government's reforms — T Levels, apprenticeship expansion, curriculum updates — all operate at the 16-plus end of education. But the cognitive habits, the sense of self as a learner, the relationship with curiosity and risk-taking: these are formed in pre-prep and prep. By the time a child reaches secondary school, the damage is often already done.
Children in 2026 are categorically different from the children our school structures were designed for. They are always-on. They expect choice and immediacy. They have accessed more information by age 8 than previous generations did in a lifetime. They are fluent in multiple channels, comfortable with visual storytelling, and accustomed to self-directed exploration — until they arrive at school and are asked to sit still, listen, and wait.
This mismatch is not a discipline problem. It is a design problem. And the solution is not to make children conform to a system built for a different world. It is to redesign the system to meet the children who actually exist in it.
The early years — pre-prep from age 3–7, prep from 7–13 — are where the foundations of a lifelong approach to learning are set. A more interactive, project-based, curiosity-driven curriculum at this stage does not make academic excellence harder to achieve. The evidence consistently shows it makes it more likely — for all learner types.
Replace lecture-and-recall with discovery, inquiry and project-based models from the very first year. Curiosity is the foundation of all learning — it should be protected, not scheduled away.
Learning happens outdoors, in studios, workshops, and community settings. The built environment of school should reflect the diversity of how minds work — not enforce a single model of attention.
Every child should have a rich, multi-dimensional picture of what they are good at — built over years, not reducible to a single grade. Portfolios, projects and peer learning are the tools.
AI literacy, digital critical thinking and creative technology use are not subjects to be added to the timetable. They are lenses through which every subject should be taught from the start.
A curriculum that works for a neurodivergent child works better for every child. Universal design in learning is not accommodation — it is simply good teaching.
The World Economic Forum's future skills framework — creativity, lateral thinking, complex problem-solving, innovation — describes not just neurodivergent thinkers but every child whose natural intelligence falls outside the narrow band our exams are designed to measure.
Made By Dyslexia's work on dyslexic thinking is a powerful illustration of a broader truth: the cognitive styles our system treats as problems are precisely the ones that drive innovation, entrepreneurship and social progress. AI can aggregate and recall. It cannot imagine, empathise or invent. Those capabilities — distributed across the full spectrum of human minds — are what we should be building education around.
Explore Made By Dyslexia →Made By Dyslexia — Dyslexic Thinking Campaign Film
A window into the broader truth: our most undervalued thinkers are one of our most valuable future assets.
These are not utopian proposals. Each has evidence behind it. Each is being implemented somewhere in the world. None requires waiting until 2028.
Rebuild early years education around the skills the future needs — critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication — with subject knowledge as the vehicle, not the destination.
Replace the single exam as the arbiter of ability. Portfolios, project assessments, practical demonstrations and peer review — all are more accurate, more equitable and more motivating.
No real problem is solved in a single subject. Design learning around problems that cross disciplines — the way the world actually works, and the way T Levels and apprenticeships require.
Studios, workshops, outdoor classrooms, maker-spaces, digital labs. Physical space is pedagogy. A child who cannot sit still in a desk-grid is not failing — the room is failing them.
Not as an optional add-on or a single lesson. AI fluency, critical evaluation of information, and creative use of technology should be embedded across every subject from the very first year.
Stop treating neurodiverse learners as exceptions requiring individual fixes. Design the whole system for the full spectrum of minds. What works for all learner types works better for every learner.
The Reform Timeline vs The Timeline Change Demands
The new vocational pathways are right in principle. But they will underdeliver unless every child — regardless of how their mind works — arrives at 16 with the curiosity, confidence and capability they need to thrive in them. That starts in pre-prep. It starts with how we think about every child from day one.
The government's evolution is better than nothing. But better than nothing is not good enough for a generation of children who deserve a system built for their world, not their grandparents'.