Lucy Powell's hardest education challenge is prioritising among many worthy reforms that schools cannot absorb at once
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/editorial. "The Guardian view on schools: the hardest questions for Lucy Powell are about priorities | Editorial | The Guardian." October 18, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
The Guardian says the education secretary is right to want big changes, like making speaking skills as important as reading and writing. But she has a long list of other reforms too, and schools can only handle so much change at once. Her toughest job is deciding what to do first.
Conclusion
Although Lucy Powell is right to pursue ambitious change in English education, including giving oracy equal status with reading and writing, her hardest task is deciding which reforms to prioritise, because schools can only cope with so many changes at once.
Premises
- Speaking skills (oracy) are increasingly important because AI is likely to automate many jobs while in-person, public-facing jobs are least likely to be automated.
- Children's language development is declining, linked to high screen use, which strengthens the case for embedding oracy in schools.
- The delayed curriculum revisions are the obvious place to start on oracy, since the English curriculum is overly prescriptive and grammar-obsessed and puts pupils off, even though standards in maths and science have risen.
- Powell faces many other worthy and demanding reforms: special educational needs reform, new maths and English qualifications to replace GCSE resits, the arts, vocational education, the BTec replacement, Ofsted's inspection framework, and university funding and student loans.
- Many of these reforms carry significant implementation challenges and need careful monitoring, and some are already causing anxiety or criticism among families, schools, councils and college-sector experts.
- Schools have limited capacity to absorb change, and there are only so many changes they can be expected to cope with on top of special educational needs reforms.
Assumptions
- Schools' capacity to absorb reform is finite, and overloading them with changes harms implementation quality.
- The government cannot or should not do everything at once, so sequencing is a real choice with trade-offs.
- Oracy is a valuable enough goal to deserve equal status with reading and writing.
- Rising maths and science scores indicate that earlier reforms worked, so the English curriculum is the sensible place to focus.
- The decline in children's language skills is caused in part by screen use and can be reversed through schooling.
- Automation will not cover in-person, public-facing jobs, so speaking skills will hold their economic value.