Kristina Murkett

Since 2014, Oxford University Press has been tracking the Children’s Word of the Year, and the results reveal interesting truths about the emotional landscape young people are growing up in. Children do not choose toys, trends, celebratory events like the Olympics, or, well, anything remotely childish. Instead, they choose weighty words associated with current affairs and adult concerns: refugee, Trump, plastic, Brexit, coronavirus, anxiety, queen, climate change, kindness and peace. Many of the runner-up words – AI, war, conflict, chaos, challenging – also hardly encapsulate childlike wonder and joy. Children and young people are indeed unhappier than ever.

England’s biggest school leaders’ union, The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has called for a halt to graded Ofsted inspections, saying they “pose a real and present danger to the well-being and mental health of school leaders and teachers, and possibly even a risk to life.” The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has called for a halt to graded Ofsted inspections It is true that Ofsted inspections are unnecessarily stressful, and there is lots to criticise.

In recent years, it seems we have become stuck in a state of permacrisis. Headlines are dominated by the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis, the climate crisis, the mental health crisis, the small boats crisis, the housing crisis, the student loan crisis, the social care crisis, the maternity care crisis and so on. It’s easy to feel ‘crisis fatigue’: a sense of exhaustion, burnout and apathy from all this prolonged adversity. After all, in the last decade, we have endured Brexit; Covid; wars in Ukraine, Palestine and Iran; seven different prime ministers; skyrocketing interest rates; record levels of debt; record illegal immigration; and now record numbers of disillusioned young people not in education, training or employment.

It seems that good intentions do not just pave the road to hell, but the path to foolishness. The SNP has announced that, from August 2027, every child starting P1 in Scotland (the equivalent of Reception in England Wales) will be given a free school backpack, which will contain essentials such as a pencil case, water bottle and a notebook. This may seem like a generous gesture, but the SNP have been rather reluctant to disclose how much this ‘small’ gift will actually cost (the bags are still apparently in the ‘pre-contract stage’ and a ‘budget will be confirmed once procurement is complete’, although we do know that the materials used to make the rucksacks will be sourced from overseas).

Today is A-level results day – and yet another reminder of how bizarre and backwards our education system still is in so many respects. There are many reasons why England and Wales are international outliers when it comes to education, but one of our strangest anachronisms is that we don’t follow a post-qualifications admissions system. In every other developed nation in the world, university places are awarded to students on the basis of the grades they actually achieve in their exams, rather than what their teachers predict they will achieve.

My 22-month-old son has just started enjoying imaginative play, and it’s a wonder to behold. There is little better than watching him feed his toy monkey a syringe of fake Calpol to make him feel ‘better’, or ‘discovering’ an imaginary bear or dragon when we are walking in the woods, or playing ‘cafe’ in his toy kitchen (even if the service is terrible). Yet imaginative play – whether that’s building a den, exploring outdoors or making up new games and words – increasingly seems to be a thing of the past. New research suggests that four- to nine-year-olds are more likely to ask for a screen than use their imagination.

'We’ll value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.' These are stirring words from newly incumbent prime minister Andy Burnham, who has announced plans for children as young as 14 to study technical subjects alongside core academic GCSEs such as English, Maths and Science. The idea is that these more vocational subjects would give children a clearer pathway into work and be linked to jobs available in the local area. After 16, they can study practical qualifications while gaining work experience and building connections with local employers. Burnham is right that promoting a greater range of subjects at GCSE would help boost engagement and stop students from skipping school.

Another year, another educational inquiry, another round of soul-searching about the underachievement of white working-class pupils. This time, senior education figures have concluded that high-performing schools should be compelled to take more white working-class pupils, citing the fact that some grammar schools have only three per cent of children on free school meals compared to about 26 per cent across England. White working-class pupils underachieve in spite of other groups’ progress, not because of it It is true that middle-class families and ethnic minorities are disproportionately over-represented in grammar schools. One school in north London, which had nearly 3,000 applicants for its 104 places, took only one white British child in 2024-2025.

In 2023, I wrote an article about the epidemic of bad behaviour plaguing British schools, blaming screen-obsessed kids and tuned-out parents for the rise in persistent low-level disruption since the pandemic. At the time, almost half of pupils said that they felt unsafe each week because of poor behaviour: a worrying but unsurprising statistic given the rise in permissive parenting styles means that behavioural boundaries are never properly established. Too many children never learn to properly respect teachers because their will always overrides the authority of the adults (or, dare I say it, adult) at home. Three years on, and little seems to have changed; in fact, things have worsened.

As a parent of an 18-month-old, the glorious weather last weekend could mean only one thing: a tour of the various playgrounds on offer in Oxford. Amidst the joyful scenes of children digging in sandpits, rocketing down slides and queueing to buy ice creams, there was one particularly depressing image that summed up this strange, screen-obsessed world we live in. On the swings was a child, around 3 or 4-years-old, silently swaying back and forth, eyes glued to an iPad mere inches from his face. He was completely oblivious to the fun, laughter and play going on around him, and his mum? She was on her phone too, of course. This eerie, almost dystopian image of a toddler fixated on a screen, outside on the sunniest day of the year, may seem like an extraordinary exception.

As I try to wrestle my 15-month-old son into a nappy, or stop him from throwing himself down an escalator, or teach him not to spear himself with a fork, I remember that slightly lesser-known Winston Churchill quote: 'I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.' It appears, however, that children are increasingly not ready to learn, and parents increasingly dislike doing the teaching. The results of the annual survey of primary school teachers are not just mildly depressing reading on a rainy January day: they are a stark and shameful indictment of the failures of so many parents. Teachers claim that 37 per cent of children starting reception class are simply not ready, the highest on record.

Historically, home-schooling has been seen as a niche or eccentric choice of education: an option only really considered by hippies, conspiracy theorists, religious fanatics or socially awkward geniuses. Its reputation has not been a positive one: critics argue that home-schooled children are at risk of abuse and radicalisation; that it is a form of social imprisonment, keeping students away from their peers; and that it is more about pleasing over-protective, paranoid parents than doing what is best for the child. Banning home-schooling is not the answer Not anymore. Despite the stigma, an ever-growing minority of parents are choosing to home-school their children: 175,000 students were home-schooled in 2024/5, an increase of 15 per cent from the previous year.

All parents and teachers of teenagers will know two things. The first is that teenagers are the human equivalent of seismometers when it comes to perceived unfairness: they are acutely sensitive to any injustice or unequal treatment, and if they feel they are not being treated the same as their peers, this can quickly erupt into an outburst of outrage or denial. The second is that, try as we might, parents and teachers are not cool. We are not cool at the best of times, but we are definitely not cool when we are telling teenagers not to do something – and there is always the risk that lecturing them about how dangerous or transgressive something is only makes it all the more appealing.