Is The Education System Failing The Next Generation?

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself increasingly questioning whether the education system is truly set up to help children learn and develop their minds or merely to cultivate a culture of compliance. More recently, through personal experiences, that question has become more pointed on whether we’re also failing children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)?

Unfortunately, the more time spent thinking about and observing the topic, the clearer the answer becomes.

Like most complex issues, there isn’t a singular cause nor is there an easy, straightforward solution. Lack of consistent support for SEND children, lengthy delays in diagnosis, flawed systems, rigid policies, limited understanding and a lack of empathy. These are just some of the contributors to the overall problem that exist both inside and outside of the classroom.

Getting to the heart of the issue requires that we look at it through multiple lenses: educational, governmental, and societal. Only by recognising how these parts interconnect and contribute to the problem can we begin to understand how we reached this point as well as how to move beyond it.

Treating Teaching as a Calling, Not a Convenience

In developed countries, most children pass through some form of public education designed to prepare them academically and personally for the next phase of life. This makes teaching one of the most important professions in any society.

Yet the system doesn’t seem designed to reward teachers in proportion to the impact they have. Lower comparable pay, excessive workloads, and long hours have become the norm in the profession. Granted, the best teachers don’t enter the profession for financial gain, they do it because they feel called to. But not everyone employed to teach has that sense of vocation.

Some people fall into teaching as a job rather than a calling, and the difference is often clear. Great teachers are empathetic, observant, and attuned to the emotional as well as intellectual needs of their students. Rather than just reciting information from a syllabus they’re able to translate, adapt, and make it resonate.

Having a mum and cousin who both taught and in the latter instance still does, I’m intensely aware of how challenging the profession is. It requires long hours, constant adaptation, and managing the emotional weight of responsibility to each child. All this means that even the most gifted teachers can get stretched to their limits.

If we’re serious about fixing the system, ensuring that teaching remains a vocation for those who can truly connect with children, and making it sustainable for them to stay in the profession, has to be a key point on the agenda.

Have We Built a System of Measurement Instead of Support?

It appears education is becoming less and less about learning and more about striving for KPI’s. Attendance rates, exam results, and Ofsted ratings have come to define success, leaving less room for what really matters; connection, understanding, care, and the development of young minds.

Of course, schools need ways to measure performance and maintain high standards but the current metrics and approach don’t feel like they’re set up to effectively achieve this. High attendance rates and test scores only tell one side of the story: the ability to pass tests. They tell us very little, however about a school’s ability to look after their students including caring for their emotional and mental wellbeing.

Failure to think through the indirect incentives for poorly thought out metrics can have serious consequences. When schools are incentivised to protect their statistics, children with low attendance or challenging behaviour can be quietly pushed out. Not because they can’t be taught, but because they might end up contributing to lower averages and impacting overall assessment scoring. Teachers, under pressure to meet targets, are left with little time to focus on anything outside of the core metrics let alone on those who need more attentiveness to their needs.

Even schools that genuinely want to provide strong SEND support face systemic constraints. Staff are overstretched, resources are often limited, and temporary assistants come and go based on availability. The result is that “SEND provision” can become a checkbox exercise, with installed systems and provisions often being temporary or time bound in nature rather than a meaningful, sustainable practice. It becomes a case of ‘let’s show we tried this’ then revert back to the mean regardless of whether it’s been effective or not. There simply isn’t the capacity to keep it up.

The unfortunate knock on consequence is that even when a student may feel like they’re making progress with additional support in place, they can quickly be asked to integrate back into unsupported learning taking them back to square one.

The Hidden Cost of Misunderstanding

Autism and ADHD are amongst the most common as well as most misunderstood conditions that prevail in schools. Both exist on a spectrum, making each case unique, but also harder to fit neatly into any standard education framework.

For children at the more visible or extreme ends of the spectrum, the journey toward diagnosis and support is often long and emotionally draining for parents. For those whose challenges are less pronounced, it’s even harder. Many end up slipping through the cracks entirely, expected to function “normally” within an environment that was never designed with them in mind.

Telling a child with ADHD to “just focus” is like asking someone to read in the dark; even if they might try their best, the conditions make it nearly impossible for them. For a child with autism, being told to “just explain how you feel” is equally unfair given that self-expression is often one of the core challenges of their neurodiversity.

When these differences are misunderstood or dismissed, children begin to internalise their problems, incorrectly believing they’re the issue rather than the environment and system they’re being asked to conform to. Over time, this leads to anxiety, school avoidance, frustration, and in many cases the end result is exclusion. To compound matters, with several areas facing waiting lists for school entry, once you have an exclusion on your record it becomes even more difficult to find a new school.

Behind far too many exclusion statistics is a misunderstood child and an exhausted parent who ran out of fight trying to get the education system to listen.

If we truly want to support SEND children, we need broader awareness of how these conditions manifest and the flexibility to adapt education accordingly. Otherwise, we risk forcing children to bend to a system that isn’t designed to meet them halfway.

The misunderstanding may not be confined only to within the school gates though.

A Generational Gap in Understanding

When I was growing up, it was common to hear that “parents just don’t understand.” Ironically, it feels like many of us have now become those same parents.

When children struggle with school, attendance, or behaviour, it’s easy to fall back on familiar lines:

“School was hard for me too.”
“Just behave.”
“Everyone has to go, you’ll be fine.”

This type of sentiment and statement overlooks the reality that this generation faces an entirely different set of pressures to the ones of our generation. When I was a teenager, the biggest decision after school was deciding whether to meet friends at the park or in town. The internet was still relatively young, accessed through grainy, noisy modems, and social media didn’t exist. The best thing our phones had was snake and the ability to create your own ringtone!

Today’s children are growing up in a world where their sense of self-worth is often tied to online validation, where constant comparison is the norm, and where attention spans are continually under assault. Add to that the once in a century pandemic that isolated them during some of the most formative years for their social and emotional development, and it becomes clear their world is fundamentally different from ours.

I see many adults still dealing with problems that appear to have been born out of pandemic isolation and the increased anxiety that it brought along with it. Yet somehow, we expect children to have emerged from it unaffected. This seems both unrealistic, naïve and incredibly unfair.

There seems to be a quiet hypocrisy that we both felt our parents’ generation didn’t get our challenges yet we’re quick to dismiss the next generations without acknowledging that their experience and frame of reference differ from ours.

If we want to improve the system, we have to start by improving our empathy. Understanding today’s children means accepting that their world and the pressures within it aren’t the same as the one we grew up in.

Change Is Long Overdue. It’s Time for a Rethink

The purpose of education should be to cultivate understanding, not to enforce compliance. To teach children how to think, not just what to remember. And to do that effectively, we have to recognise that not all children learn the same way.

If teachers are to reach students of all learning needs, they need time, resources, and trust. But as long as the system continues to prioritise metrics over meaning, that space simply doesn’t exist. What gets measured gets managed and what doesn’t, often disappears. This is a term used frequently in the business environment where KPI’s are even more common yet feels like its for some reason discounted when it comes to education.

We owe it to teachers to relieve some of the pressure and to give them the freedom to focus on what really matters: connection, adaptability, and growth. And we owe it to parents and children to ensure they’re not left fighting endless bureaucratic battles just to get their child seen and supported.

If we persist in tackling today’s challenges with yesterday’s mindset, this cycle is destined to continue. Increasing numbers of children will find themselves locked out of the system, more families burnt out, and more potential bright futures wasted.

Final Thoughts

I fully acknowledge that the education system is under immense strain.  It’s underfunded, understaffed, and over measured. We need to look past just the numbers though ensure we see the full story otherwise we risk missing the forest from the trees. Behind every attendance report or test result are children with unique minds, personalities, and challenges that a simple data point fails to capture.

Fixing the system means moving from a culture of metrics and expectation to one rooted in empathy, understanding, and adaptability. It means recognising that the challenges facing this generation are not the same as those that faced ours, and that the next generation’s will be different still.

If we fail to act, we risk perpetuating a system that excludes by design. One where the children who need the most support are left behind because they don’t fit the model of “normal” the system was built for.

True education should meet every child where they are. It should nurture their mind, cultivate curiosity, and encourage deep learning, helping them reach what they’re truly capable of. Every child deserves to have this regardless of whether they have additional learning disabilities and challenges.