If I could influence the education system, this is what I would do

The system we still pretend works#

If I could influence the education system, I would stop pretending memorising is the point.

That model made sense when the scarce resource was information. It does not make sense now. Any student can put a question through an AI agent and get a usable answer in seconds. The exam hall still asks them to prove they can hold that answer in their head under silence, as if recall were the adult skill.

It is not.

Adult life rewards judgement, curiosity, emotional regulation, money sense, and the ability to build something useful. School still rewards sitting still and handing back last week's notes on one day in June.

I am not saying literacy, numeracy, or science stop mattering. I am saying we are still training kids for a world that no longer exists, and leaving the world that does exist mostly untaught. That failure hits neurodivergent kids hard, and it fails a lot of neurotypical kids too. Different brains. Same gap.

How the mind actually works#

I would put a proper mind-and-body curriculum in early, for everyone.

Not a wellness poster. Not a once-a-year assembly about "looking after your mental health". Actual teaching on how the mind works.

We are not as in control as we think we are. Emotions can dictate the next move before cortex gets a vote. Feelings can distort what looks true, what looks fair, and what looks urgent. Then we invent a story afterwards and call it reasoning.

Acute stress knocks prefrontal control offline. Working memory drops. You get shorter, more reactive, more amygdala. That is biology, not a character flaw arriving on schedule. Kids leave school knowing the water cycle and not knowing that a flooded nervous system cannot solve a problem cleanly. Then they spend adult life blaming themselves for chemistry they were never taught to recognise.

I have written about why feeling more is not emotional intelligence. Volume is not skill. The skill is naming the feeling, holding it, and still choosing. School almost never teaches that. It teaches compliance under pressure and then acts surprised when adults cannot regulate under pressure either.

This is for neurodivergent and neurotypical minds alike. Some kids need different sensory loads, different pacing, different routes into meaning. All of them need a map of the machine they are driving.

Hormones are not a footnote#

"It's just brain chemistry" is what people get told when nobody wants to explain the mechanism.

That phrase is half true and almost useless. Yes, chemistry. Which chemistry? Cortisol? Thyroid? Sex steroids? Sleep debt wearing a personality mask? Some people go through life fine because the hormonal side of the house is fine. Others do not, will not know why, and will be handed a label or a prescription while the body that is driving the mood never gets measured.

Hormones have a massive influence on how reality lands. Same email. Same classroom. Same relationship. One week you can take the hit and still choose. Another week the same sentence is an attack and the day is already lost. Objective reality did not move. The filter did.

I lived a version of that for years with depression that had a hormonal contributor nobody looked for. Teach kids that the body reports on the body. Teach them that mood is not only a story. Teach them enough that "brain chemistry" becomes a starting point for questions, not a full stop that ends the conversation.

None of that is medical advice. It is literacy. We teach nutrition badly and hormones almost not at all. Then we moralise the symptoms.

Physical exercise is not optional PE#

I would teach physical exercise as a non-negotiable part of how a human runs, not as a timetable filler you can skip for revision.

Movement is one of the few interventions that reliably hits mood, sleep, attention, stress chemistry, and long-term health in the same swing. Regular activity is linked with lower rates of depression and anxiety, better sleep, and a nervous system that recovers instead of staying stuck on high alert. That is not a gym-bro slogan. That is the body doing maintenance on the same machine we ask to sit still for six hours and then wonder why it cannot regulate.

School often treats PE as the soft subject, the wet-weather cancellation, the thing that disappears when exams get close. Then adults inherit a body they never learned to use, a phone that outcompetes a walk, and a mental health conversation that starts with pills before it starts with legs and lungs.

Teach kids why exercise matters, not only how to pass a beep test. Strength. Cardio. Mobility. Getting outside. Building a habit that survives when nobody is marking it. For some brains, especially neurodivergent ones, movement is not enrichment. It is regulation. Cut it out of the day and you make everything else harder.

If the mind-and-body curriculum is serious, physical exercise sits next to hormones and sleep, not opposite them on the report card.

Curiosity by design#

I would redesign learning around curiosity instead of compliance.

Questioning things is how consciousness expands. It is how a fact becomes understanding, and how understanding becomes something you can use when the situation shifts. "Because I said so" gets obedience. It does not get a mind that can think.

Curiosity is not a personality flourish. It is a learning state. When people are curious, memory improves for the thing they were hungry to know, and sometimes for the material around it. The brain prepares to encode. School often treats that hunger as disruption: stop asking why, we have to get through the scheme of work.

I struggle to learn without the why. Steps without meaning bounce off. Once purpose shows up, the how sticks. That is not laziness. That is a meaning-first brain being asked to perform rote as if rote were the destination.

So build curiosity by design. Open with the problem. Let kids pull threads. Grade the quality of the question as seriously as the answer. In an AI world, the scarce skill is not storing information. It is knowing what to ask, what to trust, and what to do with the answer.

Finance, selling, and the cost of having less#

I would teach how the economy actually works, not as a cartoon of "save your pocket money".

Money is not a side topic. Having less of it drives stress, anxiety, and bad mental health. That is not soft opinion. Debt and financial strain track with worse mental health outcomes, and anyone who has watched a bank balance dictate their sleep already knows the mechanism from the inside. You cannot teach wellbeing while treating cashflow as optional trivia.

Kids should leave school knowing:

• how wages, tax, National Insurance, and a payslip fit together
• what debt costs, and how compound interest works against you
• how inflation quietly moves the goalposts
• how businesses make money, and why value has to be created before it can be shared
• how to sell something honest: an idea, a skill, a product, themselves in an interview

Teach kids to sell. Not as manipulation. As communication under constraint. If you cannot explain why something is worth paying for, you are at the mercy of whoever can. That is true whether you end up employed, self-employed, or building something of your own.

In England, financial education is still thin in practice. Teachers know it. Parents know it. The curriculum keeps treating it like a garnish on maths and citizenship. It should be a core adult skill, taught with the same seriousness as literacy.

Looking after a household#

A household is a small operations problem.

Cooking. Cleaning. Laundry. Bills. Food shopping without wasting half of it. Basic repairs. Sharing space without turning every chore into a fight. Knowing what a tenancy, a deposit, and a direct debit actually mean.

None of that is glamorous. All of it decides whether your life feels stable. School can spend years on exam technique and still send people into flats they cannot run. I would make household competence ordinary and early: cook a week of food on a budget, read a mock tenancy, plan a month of outgoings, fix a simple thing with tools instead of buying a replacement.

Independence is not a vibe. It is a set of boring skills practised until they are boring.

Family, the table, and companionship#

I would teach the importance of family as a practice, not as a slogan on a fridge magnet.

Sit together. Talk about your day. Ask what actually happened, not only what grade came back. That sounds small until you notice how many households now eat in shifts, scroll at the same table, or never get a shared debrief at all.

Companionship is built in ordinary repetition. Someone hears that you were anxious before a lesson. Someone laughs at the stupid thing that happened at break. Someone notices you went quiet. That is not therapy. That is being known. Kids who never practise that often grow into adults who only know how to perform a day, not how to share one, and then wonder why they feel alone in a full house.

School cannot replace a family. It can stop pretending relationships are automatic. Teach that checking in matters. That listening is a skill. That a shared meal with phones down is not nostalgia, it is social hygiene. Neurodivergent kids may need different routes into that conversation. The need for companionship does not go away because talking is harder.

A society that trains individuals to compete all day and never teaches them how to come home and reconnect should not be surprised when people are high-achieving and lonely.

Reading yourself into other worlds#

I would protect reading as immersion, not only as a comprehension paper.

Fantasy. History. Novels. Biography. Stories that put you inside another century, another mind, another set of stakes. That is how imagination stretches. That is how empathy gets reps without a worksheet titled empathy. That is how curiosity finds fuel when the algorithm only wants to feed you more of what you already like.

A feed gives you fragments. A book asks you to stay. You follow a plot, hold characters in working memory, tolerate ambiguity, and live inside a world long enough for it to change how you see this one. History does the same with receipts: other people already tried versions of our arguments, and the past is not as simple as a meme.

In an AI world, summaries are cheap. Immersion is not. Teach kids to read deeply on purpose. Let them get lost in a novel. Let them care about a made-up kingdom or a real empire. Grade less of the extract quiz and more of the habit of finishing something that asks for attention.

If you only train people to skim answers, you get adults who can retrieve information and still have no inner landscape. Reading builds that landscape. Fantasy, history, and novels are not soft extras. They are how a mind practises being larger than its timeline.

Live in the analog world on purpose#

I would teach kids to step away from the internet, not as a punishment, as a skill.

The always-on feed is not neutral. It fragments attention, keeps the nervous system half-alarmed, and floods you with other people's urgency until your own day feels thin. Comparison becomes ambient. Outrage becomes a product. Sleep gets bargained away one more scroll at a time. Then we call the residue anxiety, loneliness, or "not coping", and barely mention the device that delivered most of it.

The internet destabilises us because it removes friction from everything that used to have a natural stop. News never ends. Arguments never end. Validation never ends. Threat never ends. A brain built for a village gets the weather of the whole planet, ranked by whatever keeps the eyes open. Heavy social media use tracks with worse mental health in young people, and anyone who has felt their mood swing after an hour of scrolling already knows the mechanism without a paper.

So teach analog life as deliberate practice. Walk without headphones sometimes. Cook without a second screen. Sit with boredom long enough for a thought to arrive that was not served by an algorithm. Talk face to face. Write on paper. Build something with your hands. Put the phone in another room and notice what your body does when the dopamine drip stops.

I am not arguing for Luddism. Tools are useful. AI is useful. Search is useful. The point is sovereignty. If you cannot leave the network, the network is running you. Kids should learn that online life is a place you visit with a purpose, not the default habitat of a human nervous system.

Education that digitises every minute and never teaches offline recovery is training dependency, then wondering why a generation feels destabilised.

Confirmation bias#

I would teach confirmation bias properly, not as a vocabulary word for a quiz.

Confirmation bias is the pull to favour information that fits what you already believe, and to discount what does not. It is not a rare flaw in other people. It is a default setting in humans. It feels like clarity. It is often just the mind protecting a story.

Why it matters:

• It turns politics into identity defence.
• It turns relationships into courtroom theatre where every new fact is evidence for the old case.
• It turns health into vibes, because the first explanation that soothed you gets locked in.
• It turns AI answers into gospel, because the model agreed with the prompt you already wanted.

Kids should practise the opposite muscle: ask what would change your mind, steelman the other side, update out loud when you were wrong. In a world of infinite feeds and instant answers, the danger is not only bad information. It is a brain that only lets good-feeling information in.

If school taught one cognitive hygiene habit well, I would want it to be this: your certainty is not proof. It might just be bias with confidence.

Builders, not only consumers#

I would put physical labour and making back into the centre of respect.

Too much of modern schooling quietly trains consumers: sit, absorb, click, buy, outsource. Builders are treated as plan B. That is backwards. The people who can wire, plumb, cook, grow, repair, and construct are the ones holding civilisation up when the app is down.

Teach kids to use their hands. Wood. Metal. Gardens. Simple electrics. Maintenance. Not every child becomes a tradesperson, and that is fine. Every adult should know what graft is, what a square edge feels like, and why making something beat waiting for a delivery.

AI will automate more desk work. Bodies, tools, materials, and judgement in the physical world do not vanish because a chatbot can summarise a PDF. Raising a generation that can only consume is a strategic mistake dressed up as academic seriousness.

Taxes, without the mythology#

Taxes should not be a mystery you meet for the first time on your first payslip.

Teach what tax is. Why governments collect it. What it pays for in practice: healthcare, roads, schools, defence, welfare, the boring infrastructure that makes private life possible. Teach the difference between income tax, National Insurance, VAT, and council tax. Teach that public spending has trade-offs, that "someone else should pay" is not a plan, and that receipts and responsibilities travel together.

You do not need to turn teenagers into party activists. You need them literate enough that slogans cannot own them. A citizen who does not understand tax is easy to scare and easy to sell to.

What I would actually change#

If I had the pen, the shift would look like this:

1. Stop treating memorising as the main proof of intelligence.
2. Teach the mind, emotions, hormones, and physical exercise as core knowledge, for every kind of brain.
3. Design for curiosity, and grade the quality of questions.
4. Make finance, selling, household life, and tax unavoidable.
5. Teach family conversation and companionship as practised skills, not assumed background.
6. Protect deep reading: fantasy, history, novels, the long form that builds an inner world.
7. Teach analog living and deliberate time offline, because the internet destabilises attention and mood.
8. Teach confirmation bias as a lifelong hazard, not a trivia term.
9. Restore respect for physical skill and the builder instinct.

Exams can stay in some form. Specialisms can stay. What cannot stay is the idea that school’s job is to fill a head with answers an AI can spit out faster, while leaving the human parts of adulthood to chance.

Education should prepare people for reality. Reality is emotional, hormonal, financial, biased, physical, shared around a table, stretched by books, steadied by time offline, and funded by a state through tax. Teach that, and kids leave with a map. Keep teaching yesterday’s party trick, and we will keep graduating people who can pass a paper and still not run a life.