Emma Williams – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

On Being Smart

There is a peculiar kind of misery that belongs almost exclusively to children who are accustomed to getting things right. It is not the sadness of failing an examination after months of hard work, nor the disappointment of discovering that a coveted place on a sports team has gone to somebody else. It is the unsettling discombobulation of the first time you encounter something that you cannot do, despite having always assumed that you could do pretty much anything if you tried. For a child whose experience of school has consisted largely of praise, good marks and the reassuring knowledge that they are one of the clever ones, genuine difficulty or sudden failure can come as something of a shock.

This is one of the great misconceptions about high-achieving children. We tend to assume that bright children are the lucky ones, and of course, in many respects they are. Academic ability undoubtedly makes school easier. It can open doors, generate opportunities and bring the considerable satisfaction of discovering that you are good at something. Yet being academically capable is not an unqualified advantage. In some circumstances, being accustomed to success can make failure harder to bear.

As a tutor, I see this particularly clearly when students reach the point at which their natural aptitude stops being sufficient. There is usually a stage in a child’s education when things have to change. Perhaps the subject becomes more demanding, perhaps the examination requires a greater depth of understanding, or perhaps the student has simply reached the limits of what can be achieved without putting in some serious effort. For a child who has always found schoolwork straightforward, this can be profoundly unsettling. They have never needed to learn how to struggle.

Struggling, in fact, is a skill. That may sound absurd, but I genuinely believe it is one of the most important things that children can learn at school. We spend a great deal of time teaching young people how to succeed and considerably less time teaching them how to fail. Yet anybody can enjoy learning when everything goes well; the more useful skill is learning how to keep going when it doesn’t.

Children who have struggled academically from an early age have, at least in one respect, an advantage over those who have always sailed through. They have had opportunities to discover that failure is survivable. They have made mistakes, received disappointing marks, gone back and tried again. They may have become accustomed to asking for help. They may have learned, sometimes painfully, that not understanding something immediately does not mean that they will never understand it.

A child who has always been successful may have had very little reason to develop true resilience. I vividly remember the highly successful older brother of a school-friend, who had secured a scholarship to Eton College and was wildly successful at everything he did. He cried when he failed his driving test.

I am always more concerned when a student tells me that they have “never had to revise” than when they tell me that they have always struggled. The former sounds like an advantage, until you consider what happens when revision becomes necessary (which it inevitably will). If a student has reached their late teens having achieved excellent results simply by turning up, listening and possessing a reasonably good memory, they may have absolutely no idea how to study when the material becomes too extensive to absorb by osmosis. Suddenly, they are expected to retrieve, practise, organise, plan and persevere, and nobody has ever taught them how.

There is also a psychological problem. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the identities that adults construct around them, and “clever” can become a particularly powerful one. A child who is repeatedly praised for being clever may begin to understand that cleverness is not simply something they possess but something they must demonstrate. Success becomes evidence that they are clever; failure therefore becomes evidence of the opposite. The stakes of getting something wrong are suddenly much higher than the mark on the piece of paper would suggest. Perfectionism is sometimes presented as though it were simply an admirable character trait taken to excess. After all, what could be wrong with wanting to do things well? The problem arises when “I want to do this well” becomes “I must not get this wrong”. The former encourages care and ambition. The latter can become utterly paralysing.

I have encountered students who would rather spend twenty minutes staring at a question than write down an answer they suspect might be wrong. They are not lazy and they are certainly not unintelligent. Quite the opposite. They have become so accustomed to being right that the prospect of being wrong feels intolerable. The irony is that their fear of making mistakes prevents them from doing the very thing that would make them better.

There is an enormous difference between high standards and perfectionism. High standards allow for imperfection along the way. Perfectionism does not. One says, “I want to produce something excellent.” The other says, “Anything less than excellent proves that I am not good enough.” That distinction becomes particularly important during adolescence, when academic performance can become tangled up with a young person’s increasingly complicated sense of identity.

The pressure does not always come from parents. Sometimes, it comes from the children themselves. Parents may be perfectly supportive and genuinely uninterested in whether their child achieves the highest possible grade, while the child is quietly placing enormous expectations upon themselves. They have spent years being told that they are clever and they have internalised the message. Being clever has become part of who they are, and losing that status can feel like losing something fundamental.

There is another peculiar phenomenon that can affect bright children: boredom. A child who understands new material quickly may spend considerable periods of time waiting for everybody else to catch up. If this happens repeatedly, they may develop the unfortunate habit of associating school with effortless achievement rather than intellectual challenge. They learn to expect that understanding should arrive quickly and that being confused is a sign that something has gone wrong.

This is one reason why genuinely challenging work matters, even for students who appear to need very little help. Bright children need opportunities to discover that there are things they do not yet know. They need to encounter problems for which the answer is not immediately apparent. They need to experience the slightly disconcerting sensation of being the least knowledgeable person in the room. They need to discover that other people can know things they do not know without this diminishing them in any way. They need an education rather than a succession of confirmations that they are clever.

This is one of the reasons I am rather suspicious of the tendency to praise children exclusively for their intelligence. It seems harmless enough, and nobody is going to object to being told that their child is bright, but there is a difference between saying “you are very clever” and “you worked that out beautifully”. The first describes an attribute. The second draws attention to what the child actually did. It is a small distinction, but over many years these messages accumulate.

There is, of course, a danger in taking this too far. Bright children should not be deliberately made to struggle merely to teach them a lesson. There is nothing virtuous about making education unnecessarily difficult, and a child who is capable of achieving highly should be allowed to enjoy that achievement. Nor should we romanticise academic struggle or pretend that every child who finds school difficult is therefore developing superior resilience. Struggling without adequate support is not character-building; sometimes it is simply miserable. The point is rather that children need a mixture of success and challenge. They need to know what competence feels like, but they also need to know what it feels like not to be competent yet. The “yet” matters. It introduces the possibility of change.

This is a particularly important lesson for bright children because, sooner or later, life will provide them with something that school has not. There will be a subject they cannot master immediately, a job they cannot do perfectly, a relationship they cannot control, a decision for which there is no obviously correct answer. Nobody is naturally good at adulthood. We are all improvising. The real curse of being bright is therefore not being intelligent. It is being allowed to believe that intelligence will always be enough.

A child who learns that mistakes are tolerable, that effort is worthwhile and that competence can be developed has been given something considerably more valuable than a string of excellent marks. They have learned how to learn. And when the day eventually comes when something does not come easily, they will be much less likely to interpret that difficulty as evidence that they have stopped being clever and much more likely to see it for what it actually is: the beginning of learning something new.

The Dangerous Myth of the “Natural” Student

“She’s just not a languages person.”

If I had a pound for every time a parent has said these words to me, I could probably have retired by now.

Every now and then somebody announces, with complete conviction, that their child simply “doesn’t have a languages brain”. They might say the same about the sciences. Whatever the subject, the sentiment is always the same: somewhere along the line, often years before they arrived in front of me, students have absorbed a mythology about what kind of learner they are. More importantly, they have already reached a conclusion about what kind of learner they are not.

The extraordinary thing is the certainty with which the students themselves then make those pronouncements. They are delivered not as opinions but as established facts, rather like informing me that they have blue eyes or are left-handed. “I’m just not academic.” “I’ve never been any good at languages.” “My sister got the brains.” There is no discussion to be had. The case, apparently, is closed. In many cases, they have reached this conclusion after spending no more than two or three hours a fortnight studying the subject.

Imagine hearing a fourteen-year-old say, “I’m just not a driving person.” Or, “I’m not really a mortgage sort of individual.” We would laugh, because those are things they have never seriously attempted. Yet children routinely write themselves off in academic subjects before they have even finished compulsory education. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, they have somehow become convinced that their intellectual destiny has already been mapped out.

I suspect that adults bear some responsibility for this. We are extraordinarily fond of describing children with labels. One child is “sporty”. Another is “creative”. Somebody else is “musical”. We speak warmly of “natural mathematicians” and “born linguists”. Children who succeed with apparent ease are praised for being clever, while those who struggle are reassured that “not everybody is academic.” All of this is done with kindness. None of it is intended to do harm. Yet, perhaps contrary to popular belief, children tend to believe what adults tell them.

The educational psychologist Carol Dweck became famous for distinguishing between what she called a “fixed” mindset and a “growth” mindset. Like all psychological theories, it has been over-simplified to the point of parody, and there is now a healthy academic debate about precisely how powerful those effects are. (Spoiler alert: not very, if you try to replicate them artificially). Nevertheless, the central idea has always struck me as reasonable and worthwhile. Children who believe that ability can develop through hard work generally respond to difficulty very differently from those who believe that intelligence is something fixed at birth. One group tends to interpret failure as evidence that they have more to learn. The other is far more likely to interpret it as evidence that they were never capable in the first place. The question is whether it is possible to actively encourage a growth mindset and the answer to date appears to be “no”. Like most important learning, the development of a growth mindset comes subliminally, from watching your parents and your peers, not from being told to get one. If your family lives and breathes it as their approach to life, then you are far more likely to develop one yourself. Like so many things in childhood, our earliest attitudes towards learning owe a great deal to simple good fortune.

Once you become aware that some students have more of a growth mindset than others, you begin to realise just how important it is. One student translates a difficult Latin sentence incorrectly and says, “Can you explain where I went wrong?” Another translates the same sentence incorrectly and sighs, “I told you I wasn’t any good at this.” The first student has made a mistake. The second has made a judgement about themselves. They are not remotely the same thing.

But there is another side to this story that is discussed rather less often. People assume that being labelled “clever” is entirely beneficial, yet I have taught plenty of students for whom this has become something of a burden. If a child grows up believing that success ought to come naturally, what happens when they finally encounter something genuinely difficult? Very often, they panic. Suddenly, they are no longer the child who always gets things right and that, when you think about it, is terrifying: it shatters their very sense of self. Rather than seeing challenge as an inevitable stage in learning, students whose identity has become bound up with being clever can begin to wonder whether they have somehow ceased to be so. It is one of the reasons why some exceptionally bright students develop a horror of making mistakes. Their identity has become entangled with effortless success. Yet genuine learning is rarely effortless.

As I explored a few weeks ago, one of the most important findings to emerge from cognitive science is that learning often feels considerably less successful than students imagine it ought to. Retrieval practice is frustrating. Spaced revision feels inefficient. Difficult questions expose weaknesses that many students would rather not confront. In other words, the very strategies that produce the strongest long-term learning are often the ones that make students feel least intelligent while they are doing them. Education has an awkward habit of rewarding perseverance rather more reliably than immediate brilliance.

One of the great privileges of tutoring is that I get to watch children change their minds about themselves. Contrary to what television dramas would have us believe, this does not happen in a single inspirational lesson accompanied by soaring orchestral music. It usually happens so gradually that neither the student nor I notices it at first. A child who once apologised before answering begins having a go without prompting. Somebody who announced in September that they “couldn’t do Latin” quietly translates a difficult passage by Easter. Nothing miraculous has happened. They have simply accumulated enough evidence to make their old story about themselves increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is why I have become rather wary of the word “gifted”. Of course, natural aptitude exists: anyone who has taught for more than about five minutes knows that children differ enormously in the speed with which they grasp new ideas. To pretend otherwise would be absurd. Yet, education is not a horse race in which the order established after the first furlong determines the final result. Children develop at different rates and excellent teaching can transform performance. So can hard work. So can discovering, perhaps for the first time, that making mistakes is not a catastrophe.

Perhaps the greatest danger posed by the myth of the “natural” student is that it persuades children to mistake who they are today for who they will always be. It encourages them to believe that ability is something to be discovered rather than something to be developed. Once that idea takes hold, challenge becomes threatening rather than exciting, because every struggle feels like confirmation of an identity that has already been decided.

I would much rather children left school believing something altogether different. By all means recognise talent when you see it, celebrate achievement and admire those who make difficult things look easy. But never allow a child to conclude that the boundaries of their ability have already been fixed. Childhood is surely far too early to decide what sort of learner you are going to be for the rest of your life.

The Hidden Curriculum

“Why don’t schools teach [insert personal life-skill I have struggled with here]?”

From tax returns to wiring a plug (I KNOW THAT DATES ME!), this is one of those complaints that appears with remarkable regularity in the press, usually accompanied by a list of supposedly useless things that schools insist upon teaching instead. Why study Dickens when you could learn about mortgages? Why learn about the life-cycle of the moth when you could learn how to change a tyre? Why spend time analysing poetry when you could be finding out about investments? Such criticisms are superficially appealing but fundamentally baseless.

Firstly, schools do in fact teach many of the things people claim they do not. Budgeting, careers education and interview skills all feature in modern citizenship, which is compulsory in all schools. Whether students remember these lessons is another matter entirely, as in my experience they were spectacularly uninterested. Who wants to learn “life skills” from a boring old teacher? Most teachers can testify that the average teenager is not an enthusiastic participant in discussions about tax codes and household budgeting. They didn’t even seem particularly enthralled when it came to sex ed. There is a certain irony in hearing adults complain that schools never taught them something when I know for a fact that this is impossible. So, next time you bemoan the fact that you weren’t taught something in school, do please consider the notion that you were actually taught it and you simply weren’t listening.

Even this revelation misses the bigger picture, which is that the most important life skills children learn at school are often not formally taught at all. Educationalists sometimes refer to this as the “hidden curriculum”. The phrase sounds faintly mysterious, as though schools are secretly teaching children things behind closed doors or using subliminal messaging to indoctrinate the next generation. In reality, the hidden curriculum refers to everything that children learn simply by participating in school life.

Consider punctuality and equipment rules. No school offers a GCSE in arriving on time. There is no examination in remembering your stuff or organising yourself for the day ahead. Yet children spend years learning that other people are affected by their reliability, that deadlines matter and that poor preparation has consequences. This is one of the many reasons why the most successful schools have made this a huge focus. As the Headteacher of Harrow once said, “we make a fuss about the little things.”

In a good school, children learn to remember books, equipment, homework, revision materials and commitments. They learn that forgetting things has consequences. They learn that somebody else will not always be available to solve every problem on their behalf or cover for them when they mess up. Some master these skills quickly, while others take considerably longer and need more support. Many adults are still working on them.

Consider social interaction. A significant proportion of school life involves learning how to function alongside a diverse range of human beings and this is a good thing. Friendships must be formed and maintained, disagreements navigated and conflicts resolved. Children learn how to join groups, leave groups, compromise, negotiate and apologise. They learn that not everybody thinks the same way they do. They learn that some people are easy to get along with and others require considerably more effort. Adults frequently underestimate how complicated this process of socialisation is and how long it takes for young people to develop these skills. No formal lesson on “interpersonal skills” could fully replicate that experience.

School provides one of the first opportunities for children to participate in a community that exists beyond their immediate family. At home, rules are usually created by people who know and love us unconditionally. School introduces something different. Children must learn to operate within a larger institution, one designed around the needs of hundreds of people. This is where they begin learning about cooperation, compromise and collective responsibility. Lest we forget, for some children who do not come from loving and stable homes, school can provide a safe and predictable sanctuary from the chaos. I will never forget being profoundly affected during training when I was told that as a form tutor I may potentially be the first adult that some children have interacted with positively (or indeed at all) on that day. I never forgot it.

Contrary to popular belief, providing a stable school environment with clear boundaries is not primarily about obedience or authoritarianism. It is about helping young people to recognise that participation in any community requires a degree of give and take. Adults encounter this reality constantly in their workplaces, neighbourhoods and organisations. School is the crucial dry run.

In addition to all of this, and perhaps most controversially, schools also provide children with regular opportunities to fail. A disappointing test result, not making the team, forgetting their homework, falling out with a friend, getting something wrong in front of the class. None of these experiences are enjoyable and some of them, as I discussed a few weeks ago, may loom large in our memories for life. Yet they provide opportunities to learn a lesson that becomes increasingly important with age: disappointment is both inevitable and survivable.

Much of adulthood consists of recovering from setbacks, adapting to changing circumstances and continuing despite occasional failure. As a tutor, I occasionally encounter students who are academically capable but deeply uncomfortable with making mistakes. Somewhere along the way, they have absorbed the idea that getting things wrong is evidence of inadequacy rather than a normal part of learning. Yet mistakes are not evidence that education has failed. More often, they are evidence that education is happening. Schools provide a relatively safe environment in which these experiences can occur and students can learn from them.

Most of these lessons never appear on a timetable. There is no examination in resilience. No coursework assignment on conflict resolution. No formal qualification in learning to cope when things do not go according to plan. Yet these skills often prove every bit as important as the academic content that receives so much attention. This may help to explain why so many adults remember school in emotional rather than academic terms. When people reflect on their education, they rarely begin by discussing a particular worksheet or textbook. They remember the teacher who inspired confidence. The friend who taught them loyalty. The setback that taught them perseverance. The embarrassing moment that taught them humility. In many respects, these experiences are part of the curriculum.

So, the next time somebody on television or on social media complains that schools should spend less time teaching academic subjects and more time teaching life skills, it may be worth remembering two things. Firstly, schools already do teach far more practical skills than many critics realise. Secondly, some of the most important life skills cannot be taught through lessons alone. The most important life skills are not learned from lessons about life. They are learned through living. School is where much of that living takes place.

Now you know it, now you don’t

“I’m fine with that.”

It is one of the most common phrases I hear as a tutor. Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s not.

Most teachers and tutors will recognise the phenomenon immediately. A student looks at a piece of information and experiences a powerful feeling of familiarity. They’ve seen it before. They recognise the terminology. The explanation seems clear. The worked example makes perfect sense. Everything feels comfortable. Then they attempt a question on their own and discover that they have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

The experience is so common that educational psychologists have spent decades trying to understand it. Why do students so often believe they understand something when they do not? The answer is both fascinating and counter-intuitive.

One of the most important discoveries in modern cognitive science is that the feeling of learning and the reality of learning are not the same thing. This may sound obvious, yet it runs contrary to much of our intuition. We tend to assume that if something feels easy, we are learning it effectively. Conversely, if something feels difficult, we assume that learning is not taking place. In reality, the opposite is often true.

Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as an “illusion of competence”. Students mistake familiarity for understanding and fluency for mastery. Because information feels familiar, they assume it has been learned.

A classic example is rereading. Faced with an upcoming examination, many students return repeatedly to the same textbook chapter or revision guide. The first reading feels difficult. The second feels easier. By the third or fourth reading, the material begins to feel hugely familiar. At this point, many students conclude that they know the material. The problem is that recognising information is not the same thing as being able to retrieve it independently. The latter is what students need to practise.

Anyone who has ever found themselves singing along confidently to a song only to forget the next line when the music stops has experienced the distinction. Recognition is much easier than genuine recall. The textbook provides constant prompts and cues. An examination paper does not.

The distinction was explored extensively by the cognitive psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, whose work has profoundly influenced modern thinking about learning. They argued that students often confuse current performance with long-term learning. In other words, they judge their understanding based on how things feel in the moment rather than on what they will be able to remember later.

Highlighting provides another excellent example of something which students often over-estimate as a learning tool. I have nothing against highlighting per se, indeed I use it as a methodology in presenting set texts. Colour-coding is useful for organisation and can be an effective way to draw links. Yet the process of using a highlighter creates an illusion of productivity, when in actual fact the student is learning far less than they imagine. A page covered in fluorescent yellow marks certainly looks as though something important has happened. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that highlighting alone does virtually nothing to improve long-term retention.

Similarly, students frequently spend hours producing beautifully organised revision materials. Their notes are often immaculate. The handwriting is exemplary, different colours have been deployed with military precision and the result resembles a work of art. Yet, if the process has been done as a reference and copy exercise, very little useful learning will have taken place. Such activities feel productive and can even create a real sense of engagement: the brain remains busy and the student remains occupied. Yet much of the cognitive work required for durable learning is missing.

What, then, does effective learning feel like? This, I’m afraid, is where things become particularly inconvenient. According to a substantial body of research, some of the most effective learning strategies feel harder, not easier, than the methodologies reviewed above. Retrieving information from memory, answering questions without notes, explaining concepts in your own words and attempting problems independently all require considerably more effort than rereading or highlighting.

This idea was popularised by researchers such as Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, whose work on retrieval practice demonstrated that actively recalling information produces stronger long-term retention than repeatedly reviewing it. Put simply, testing yourself is more effective than studying.

Students rarely enjoy hearing this. If given the choice between reading notes for the fifth time and completing a challenging retrieval exercise, many will choose the former. It feels more successful and it does not put them in the deeply uncomfortable position of being forced to attempt to recall something they currently feel inadequately on top of. The problem is that such feelings are not reliable indicators of learning.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman described two broad modes of thinking. One is fast, intuitive and effortless. The other is slower, more deliberate and more demanding. Effective learning often requires us to engage this second system, but unfortunately, the intense effort required can easily be mistaken for failure. I see this repeatedly when students begin using retrieval practice for the first time: they become frustrated by the failure rate, since they cannot remember everything immediately. Their conclusion is often that the method is not working when in fact it is the best and only route to success. The struggle is precisely the point. Every successful act of retrieval, however minor, strengthens the memory. Likewise, every failed attempt identifies a gap in knowledge. Both outcomes are useful. The process feels horrendously difficult at first, because the brain is being asked to do genuine cognitive work. And our brains are evolved to choose the path of least resistance, in the same way that we have evolved to take as many opportunities to rest and relax as possible. In the modern world we have built for ourselves, this evolutionary tendency works against us.

The educational psychologist Robert Bjork introduced the concept of “desirable difficulties” to describe this phenomenon. Certain challenges make learning feel harder in the short term while improving retention in the long term. Spacing out revision, mixing different topics together and retrieving information from memory all fall into this category. Once again, it can feel counter-intuitive to mix up revision topics. Won’t I get confused? Answer, no: by switching topics you are giving your brain time to forget what you’ve just learned, then challenging it to recall the same information again when you return to it. This is crucial to the learning process. The difficulty is desirable because it produces stronger learning.

Unfortunately, students are not the only people susceptible to the illusion that ease of process is a good proxy for learning. Teachers can fall victim to this hallucination as well. A lesson in which students nod enthusiastically, answer guided questions correctly and appear fully engaged can create a powerful impression of success for the teacher. Yet genuine understanding may not be demonstrated days or weeks later, when students attempt to apply their knowledge independently.

Parents are vulnerable too. Watching a child spend three hours revising comfortably and calmly can feel immensely reassuring. Yet the quantity of revision and the quality of revision are not necessarily the same thing. Effective studying often looks rather strange from the outside. Students engaged in genuine retrieval practice may spend long periods staring into space, scribbling incomplete answers, making mistakes and struggling to remember information. It looks less impressive than a beautifully highlighted revision guide or a perfectly copied set of notes. Yet it is far more effective.

Forgetting itself plays a role in the process. As I have explored in many previous posts, memory is not a camcorder. Learning requires us to retrieve and reconstruct information repeatedly over time. Some forgetting is inevitable and even useful, because it creates opportunities for the retrieval that strengthens memory.

Perhaps the most important lesson from cognitive science is that knowing something and feeling as though you know something are not the same thing. The human brain is remarkably good at creating an illusion of understanding. We mistake familiarity for mastery, recognition for recall and activity for progress. The challenge for teachers, tutors and students alike is learning to distrust those feelings. Real learning is often slower, messier and more uncomfortable than we would like.

In praise of boredom

One of the strangest conversations I have with parents takes place every summer. It usually begins with a degree of anxiety.

“What should my child be doing over the holidays?”

The question is perfectly understandable. Parents are bombarded with messages about the dangers of lost learning and the importance of maintaining academic momentum. The implication is often that six weeks spent doing anything other than educationally enriching activities represents an existential threat to their children’s development.

I understand the concern. Last week, I explored the evidence that long summer holidays can contribute to widening educational inequalities and the research in this area is difficult to ignore. Children do forget things over the summer and those from more affluent backgrounds often have access to experiences that continue to support learning long after schools have closed their doors. A knowledge of this can convince some families that it is their duty to be providing a plethora of enriching and exciting activities throughout the summer, in a desperate bid to avoid disadvantaging their children.

Yet there is a danger in taking this argument too far. If we are not careful, we can end up viewing every moment of childhood through the lens of educational productivity. The logical conclusion is absurd: a summer spent quietly reading, daydreaming, wandering around the garden and yes, complaining of boredom, becomes infinitely less valuable than one packed with endless organised activities and carefully curated experiences. In fact, the reality of learning and progress is a great deal more complicated than that.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about education is the idea that learning and development only takes place when somebody is active. Schools reinforce this impression because they are places where learning is expected to be visible. Exercise books are continuously filled with what we laughably like to call “evidence of progress” and the regular book checks I faced as a teacher, in which Senior Management went hunting for said “progress” is one of my least favourite memories from my time at the chalk-face.

Here’s the truth. The human brain is doing a remarkable amount of work when it appears to be doing very little. Neuroscientists have long known that memories continue to develop after initial learning has taken place and learning is not a single event but a dynamic process. Information is encountered, encoded, reorganised and gradually integrated into existing knowledge. Sleep plays an essential role in this process, but extended periods of reduced cognitive demand appear to matter as well. Far from switching off when formal education pauses, the brain continues to sort, organise and strengthen what it has already encountered.

Students frequently assume that more study automatically leads to more learning. In practice, there comes a point at which additional effort produces diminishing returns. The brain needs opportunities to process information rather than simply receive it. The brain is not a machine that performs best when operating continuously, rather it requires periods of activity and periods of recovery. Schools are designed to provide the former. Summer holidays, at their best, provide the latter. Anyone who has ever solved a problem while taking a walk will recognise the phenomenon. Many of our best ideas arrive not when we are concentrating intensely but when our minds are allowed to wander. Writers experience it, as do scientists, mathematicians and artists. We have all, I think, had the peculiar experience of abandoning a difficult problem only to discover that a solution presents itself hours later whilst we are doing something entirely unrelated.

Researchers have become increasingly interested in what is known as the brain’s “default mode network”, a collection of interconnected regions that becomes active when we are not focused on a specific external task. Although there is still much that we do not understand, this network appears to play a role in reflection, imagination, planning and the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. In other words, some of the brain’s most important work, the cognitive capability that defines us as a species, takes place when the brain appears to be doing nothing at all.

Boredom has a terrible reputation. Understandably, parents dread hearing the words “I’m bored” and children often speak of boredom as though it were a form of mild torture. Yet, boredom may be considerably more useful than we give it credit for. Psychologists increasingly view boredom not as a defect but as a signal. It tells us that our current situation is no longer sufficiently stimulating and encourages us to seek something more engaging. Without boredom, there would be little motivation for humans to explore, create or discover.

None of this should be taken as an argument against educational enrichment. Reading remains valuable. Museums remain valuable. Family outings remain valuable. Summer programmes and holiday clubs can be transformative, particularly for children who might otherwise lack access to such opportunities. What we should resist, however, is the temptation to view childhood as a continuous optimisation project. Not every hour needs to be productive. Not every activity needs to be educational. Not every moment of apparent idleness represents a missed opportunity.

Thinking back to my own childhood, I can remember long stretches of summer holidays that felt endless. There were no smartphones and no streaming services and entertainment was not available at the touch of a button. We had three television channels and they were not available 24 hours a day. If there was nothing worth watching, there was nothing worth watching; there was no infinite scroll waiting to rescue us from our own thoughts. Many of the activities I remember most vividly emerged directly from boredom. An improvised fashion show in which a group of us demonstrated the new and interesting ways that we could wear our PE kits (knee socks became evening gloves). Designing and building a showjumping arena in my back garden with a next-door neighbour. Collecting worms into an improvised wormery, courtesy of some grass clippings and a shoe box. (Don’t worry, my father made me release them). This is not empty nostalgia. Boredom acts as the bridge between passive consumption and active engagement. Faced with enough boredom, children begin to create their own solutions.

The challenge, of course, is that not all boredom is equal. There is a world of difference between a child who is bored in a secure environment filled with books, opportunities and supportive adults and a child who is bored because there is simply nothing available to engage them. This is one reason why discussions about the summer holiday can become so complicated. The same period of unstructured time that encourages creativity and independence in one child will reinforce disadvantage in another: during lockdown, we saw this in extremis and the educational gap between the haves and the have-nots is even wider as a direct result of that time.

The solution is not to eliminate boredom altogether, nor is it to ensure that every moment of the summer holiday is carefully programmed. Instead, the challenge is to create environments in which boredom can become productive pressure rather than a frustrating, inescapable trap. Perhaps this is where modern childhood has become particularly complicated. Many adults, myself included, worry that children spend too much time on screens, and their attraction is precisely because digital devices are extraordinarily effective boredom-elimination machines. In the modern world, the moment boredom begins to appear, it can be instantly suppressed with videos, games or social media. While there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities, one cannot help wondering how many opportunities for creativity and self-directed exploration disappear along with the boredom we so fear.

The widening summer gap

Last week, I explored the surprisingly complex history of the long school summer holiday and explained why it owes much more to Victorian urbanisation and changing attitudes towards leisure than it does to children helping with the harvest. This week, I want to ask a more uncomfortable question. What if the six-week summer break is actually bad for learning?

Few aspects of the school calendar are as fiercely defended as the summer holiday. Mention the possibility of shortening it and you can practically hear the collective gasp from children, parents and teachers alike. The long break has become so deeply embedded within our culture that it feels almost untouchable. Yet educational researchers have spent decades examining its effects and their findings are not always reassuring.

The phenomenon has become known as “summer learning loss” or, more recently, “summer learning decay”. The idea is simple enough. During a lengthy period away from formal education, children inevitably forget some of what they have previously learned. Any teacher who has stood in front of a class in September will recognise the experience. Skills that seemed secure in July suddenly appear less robust. Knowledge that was readily accessible has become harder to retrieve. Time must be spent revisiting old material before new learning can begin.

For years, many teachers viewed this as little more than an anecdotal observation. More recently, however, researchers have attempted to measure the effect. The evidence suggests that some degree of forgetting is not only normal but essential. Human memory is not a filing cabinet in which information remains permanently preserved. Unless knowledge is revisited and used, some of it will inevitably fade; it’s part of the learning process and I have explored this in multiple posts previously.

The real question is not whether children forget things during the summer. Of course they do! The more important question is whether some children forget more than others and what impact this has upon social mobility. This is where the debate becomes particularly interesting and, perhaps, politically uncomfortable.

Research has repeatedly suggested that lengthy summer holidays can contribute to widening educational inequalities. While children from affluent families often continue to encounter enriching experiences throughout the summer, those from less advantaged backgrounds may have fewer opportunities to do so. The difference is not simply a matter of expensive foreign holidays, despite what the glossy brochures and people’s social media feeds might suggest. A child does not need a fortnight in sunnier climes to benefit educationally from the summer break. Reading books at home, visiting museums, engaging in conversations with adults, taking part in organised activities, attending sports clubs or simply having access to a rich variety of experiences will all contribute to learning. The issue is that these opportunities are not distributed equally.

The notion of a “summer learning loss” implies that all children are moving backwards at the same rate. In reality, some continue moving forwards while others stand still or drift backwards. As a result, the gap between them widens. When schools close, they temporarily suspend one of the few institutions in society that provides broadly equal access to educational experiences. During term time, children spend their days in classrooms following the same curriculum, guided by the same teachers and exposed to many of the same opportunities. The moment schools close, those shared experiences fragment. Some children return to homes filled with books, enrichment activities and educational experiences. Others do not.

Although private tuition is often perceived as the preserve of affluent families, I actually work with students from a remarkably wide range of circumstances. While some of my students return in September eager to discuss the novels they have read, the museums they have visited or the places they have travelled to, others return having spent six weeks trying to occupy themselves while their parents worked long hours and household budgets remained under pressure. The difference is not a matter of intelligence, effort or aspiration: it is entirely a matter of circumstance.

The issue of the summer break extends beyond academic challenge. Summer holidays can also expose wider inequalities relating to nutrition, childcare and wellbeing. During term time, schools provide structure and routine. They offer access to sports facilities, social opportunities and, for some children, reliable meals. The long summer break removes those supports for several weeks. It is no coincidence that many communities now operate holiday food programmes and summer activity schemes. Such initiatives exist because policymakers have recognised that the holiday period creates challenges for some families that simply do not exist for others.

None of this means that summer holidays are inherently harmful. It is important not to romanticise schooling to the point where children become educational battery hens, permanently confined to classrooms in pursuit of ever-higher examination results. Childhood should of course include freedom, exploration and opportunities for experiences that cannot be timetabled. The trouble is that for many children, such imaginings are exactly that.

Many of the strongest arguments in favour of the long summer holiday have little to do with academic attainment. Childhood memories are often formed during these extended periods away from school. Friendships deepen. Independence develops. Families spend time together. Children discover interests that may never appear on a curriculum document. Even from a purely educational perspective, there is something to be said for allowing young minds occasional periods of rest. The challenge, therefore, is not as straightforward as deciding whether summer holidays are good or bad. The evidence suggests that they may be both.

For some children, the summer holiday is a period of enormous enrichment. They read widely, travel, attend camps, develop hobbies and return to school refreshed and inspired. For others, it can represent six weeks during which educational progress stalls and social inequalities become more pronounced. The same institution can simultaneously be a source of joy and a mechanism through which disadvantage grows. This helps to explain why proposals to reform the school calendar have repeatedly resurfaced. Some countries spread holidays more evenly throughout the year. Advocates for this argue that shorter breaks reduce learning loss while providing families with regular opportunities for rest. Others favour targeted summer programmes designed to support students who are most vulnerable to falling behind.

Yet reform remains politically difficult. Parents organise childcare around existing arrangements and teachers (many of whom are also parents) value the opportunity for genuine recuperation after a demanding academic year. Entire sectors of the economy, from tourism to hospitality, depend upon the predictability of the summer season. The school calendar may have evolved by accident, but it is now supported by a vast network of social and economic interests.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that educational inequality does not disappear when schools close their doors in July. If anything, it becomes more visible. The six-week summer holiday acts rather like a magnifying glass, revealing differences in opportunity that are often less obvious during the school year. This does not mean that we should abolish the summer holiday, nor does it mean that children should spend August completing worksheets. It does, however, require us to think carefully about who benefits most from our current arrangements and who pays the price.

The summer holiday remains one of the most cherished features of childhood. For many families, it provides treasured memories that last a lifetime. Yet it is worth remembering that not all children experience those six weeks in the same way. While some return to school carrying souvenirs, stories and new experiences, others return with little more than the knowledge that another summer has passed. If educational inequality matters to us, then what happens outside the school gates may be just as important as what happens inside them.

School’s out — but why?

Every year, as June gives way to July, a familiar ritual unfolds across the UK. Exercise books are collected in for the final time and children emerge through school gates with the exhilarating knowledge that six weeks of freedom stretch ahead of them.

To all of us, especially those of us that have always worked in education, the school summer holiday feels as inevitable and natural as the changing of the seasons. Yet the long break that dominates the school calendar is neither ancient nor inevitable; it is the product of centuries of social change, economic necessity, political compromise and cultural expectation. The story of why schools close for such a lengthy period in summer reveals much about how Britain itself has evolved over the generations.

One of the most persistent myths surrounding the extended summer holiday is that it was created so that children could help to bring in the harvest. This is an explanation repeated so often that it has acquired the status of common knowledge. In reality, the agricultural calendar was far more complicated than the popular story suggests.

It is easy to forget that, prior to the 19th century, there was no single national pattern for schooling. The existence of any education at all was patchy, irregular and highly localised. Where schools existed, their calendars reflected local circumstances rather than national rules. In rural areas, children were often absent from lessons at various points throughout the year, whenever their labour was required. Spring planting, autumn harvesting, bird scaring and countless other agricultural tasks took precedence over attendance. In many communities, children simply came and went according to the needs of the farms on which their families lived and worked. If you haven’t come across it before, I would highly recommend the podcast called Lessons from History, produced and presented by Daisy Christodoulou and Elizabeth Wells, which offers a fascinating account of how English schools developed and how the education system as we know it today evolved.

One of the most obvious and glaring errors in the summer-holidays-were-for-the-harvest myth is that the harvest took place in very late summer and early autumn, not during the height of summer. If school calendars had been designed solely around agricultural labour, the longest breaks would likely have fallen considerably later in the year. In reality, 19th century children missed school at multiple times throughout the farming cycle. What has emerged as the modern pattern of the long summer holiday owed far more to urbanisation than it did to agriculture.

The industrial revolution transformed Britain from a predominantly rural society into an increasingly urban one. Millions of people moved into towns and cities, where factories, mills and workshops became the defining features of daily life, especially for children. At the same time, reformers were beginning to argue that literacy and numeracy were becoming essential for individual advancement and for national prosperity. Throughout the 19th century, governments gradually became involved in education, which had previously been the domain of the church and charitable groups. The landmark Elementary Education Act of 1870 established a framework for widespread schooling, while subsequent legislation made attendance increasingly compulsory. As schools became more regulated, so too did their calendars, and the haphazard patchwork of local customs slowly gave way to more standardised arrangements. The rise in city dwelling helped to create the need for a long summer break as Victorian urban centres were crowded, polluted and often unsanitary. Many classrooms lacked adequate ventilation and public health concerns loomed large. Disease was known to spread readily in densely populated environments, so educational authorities increasingly viewed summer closure as beneficial to public health.

At the same time, a burgeoning middle class was developing new attitudes towards leisure. The 19th century witnessed the birth of the very concept of the modern-day “holiday”. Expanding railway networks allowed families to travel more easily than ever before and seaside resorts began to flourish. Places such as Blackpool, Brighton and Scarborough became symbols of a new culture of recreation and, for families who could afford it, summer increasingly became associated with travel, fresh air and an escape from urban life. Educational planners thus found themselves balancing multiple interests. Farmers still required flexibility, urban authorities were worried about public health and the rising middle classes began to demand opportunities for family time and travel. The emerging solution was a substantial summer holiday, something that could broadly accommodate everyone.

By the late 19th century, the shape of the school year was becoming something that we would recognise. Although regional variations remained, many schools were operating with a lengthy summer closure accompanied by shorter breaks around Christmas and Easter. The arrangement reflected compromise rather than grand design. No single committee sat down and invented the six-week holiday. Instead, it evolved gradually from the interaction of social forces.

The 20th century cemented the emerging pattern. As Britain became wealthier, holidays became accessible to an even larger proportion of the population and the introduction of paid annual leave transformed family life. What had once been the privilege of the affluent increasingly became an expectation for working people. The school summer holiday and the expectation of a family summer holiday thus became intertwined. The development of the tourism industry strengthened this relationship further. Hotels, guesthouses, transport providers and seaside attractions all adapted to the predictable rhythm of the school calendar and entire local economies came to depend upon the influx of families during the summer break. The holiday season became not merely an educational arrangement but an economic institution.

The later 20th century brought additional changes that we perhaps underestimate or take for granted. Firstly, rising car ownership expanded travel opportunities. After that, foreign holidays became increasingly common and it is easy to forget just how recent that change has been. When I was a child, I remember being thoroughly impressed and somewhat bemused by the families who went to Spain every year: in the 1970s and 1980s, it was still not common practice for all families to go abroad. Families heading to airports during the summer holidays is now so deeply embedded in our culture that if one listens to the popular press it is easy to imagine that it is virtually a universal human right.

The endurance of the long summer break has not been without controversy. Critics have frequently argued that lengthy interruptions to learning can hinder academic progress and this is something I plan to explore next week. Educational researchers have identified what is sometimes called “summer learning loss”, the tendency for some students to forget material during their extended periods away from the classroom. Concerns are particularly acute for disadvantaged children, who may have fewer educational opportunities outside the classroom. Supporters of the traditional model counter that children need time for experiences that formal education cannot provide and that summer holidays allow opportunities for reading, exploration, creativity, employment, volunteering and family life. There is no denying the fact, however, that these opportunities are afforded much more to the “haves” rather than the “have-nots”.

Successive governments have occasionally explored alternatives. Some countries operate different systems, distributing holidays more evenly throughout the year. Advocates of year-round schooling suggest that shorter, more frequent breaks could improve retention and reduce childcare pressures. Yet proposals for significant reform have repeatedly encountered resistance from parents, educators and businesses alike. The existing calendar is far from perfect, but it is deeply embedded within British society. The complexity of England’s educational landscape, with its mixture of local authorities, academies and independent schools, makes wholesale reform considerably more difficult than it might first appear.

The school summer holiday is not a fossil from an agricultural age, as popular mythology suggests. Rather, it is the outcome of centuries of adaptation to changing economic, social and cultural realities. It emerged from a society struggling to reconcile the demands of farming, industry, education and leisure. It survived because each generation found new reasons to preserve it. To a certain extent, it continues for no better reason other than the fact that changing it would be so difficult.

School Daze

Before reading any further, try a simple experiment. Think of a teacher from your school days. Not necessarily the best teacher you ever had. Not necessarily your favourite. Just the first one who comes into your mind.

I have no doubt that somebody came to you almost immediately. You may be able to picture the classroom. You may remember the sound of their voice, the clothes they wore or a particular phrase they repeated endlessly. You might even recall a specific lesson, despite the fact that years or even decades have passed since you last sat in front of them.

Now, try remembering what you ate for lunch three days ago. Chances are, you’re finding that rather more difficult. This curious imbalance lies at the heart of one of the most fascinating questions in psychology. Why do so many of us retain vivid memories from our school days while forgetting vast stretches of our adult lives?

As a tutor, I am frequently reminded of just how powerful these memories can be. Mention Latin and people often respond not with a discussion about language but with stories about school. Sometimes they remember an inspirational teacher. More often, they recall a terrifying one. They may remember little about the subject (most usually Caecilius est in horto) but they do remember the smell of the classroom and the location of the windows. Such memories remain remarkably persistent.

The human brain is not a recording device. Most of us intuitively imagine memory as something like a video archive, faithfully storing the events of our lives for later retrieval. In reality, memory is selective, reconstructive and deeply influenced by emotion. Not only is the brain constantly making decisions about what information is worth keeping and what can safely be discarded, it reconstructs those memories each time it brings them to mind. From an evolutionary perspective, the process makes perfect sense. A memory system that preserved every detail of every day would quickly become overwhelmed. Forgetting is not a flaw in the system, it is one of its most important features. The interesting question, therefore, is not why we forget so much but why we remember certain things so clearly.

One answer lies in emotion. Psychologists have long known that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be remembered. This does not necessarily mean dramatic or traumatic events (although those are often disturbingly persistent). Embarrassment, excitement, pride, anxiety, surprise and even mild humiliation can all strengthen memory formation. School provides a quite remarkable number of opportunities for such emotions. The first time a child answers a difficult question correctly or incorrectly in front of their peers. The panic of forgetting a line in a school play. The pride and embarrassment of winning a prize. The horror of realising that homework has been left at home. The embarrassment of calling your teacher “Mum” in front of a class (actually, I’ve even been called “Dad”, which was interesting). Such experiences may seem trivial to an outside observer, yet they provoke heightened emotions at the time and hence become deeply embedded in our memory.

Teachers frequently become part of this process. The teachers we remember are not always the most effective educators. More often, for better or for worse, they are the ones who made us feel something: who inspired us, frightened us, encouraged us, challenged us or infuriated us. Emotion acts like a preservative, signalling to the brain that a particular experience may be worth keeping long-term. Even now, my oldest friend and I can remember how terrified we were of our needlework teacher when we were 13. Her favourite method of crowd control was ritual humiliation. “Everyone gather round to see how badly Ros is doing this,” is a classroom memory we will both take to the grave. To this day, I genuinely wish I had found the courage to defend my friend and told that teacher exactly where she could shove it. Exclusion would have been 100% worth it.

School provides us with a series of novel firsts. Much of adult life is surprisingly repetitive and the very predictability that makes adult life manageable can make it difficult to remember. One Tuesday begins to resemble another. Childhood is different, since everything is happening for the first time. Our first day at secondary school. Our first examination. Our first close friendship, the loss of which can be our first taste of heartbreak. Our first major disappointment. Such experiences define our narrative. All of this helps to explain why our memories of school often feel so vivid. It was not necessarily that school itself was more memorable than adult life. Rather, our experiences in school were a plethora of firsts, which our growing brains identified as key events in our evolving self-definition.

In addition to the inescapable fact that our school days introduce us to a series of first-time experiences, it is also important to remember the profound effect that experiences have on us when they happen during our younger years. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”, one of the most intriguing findings in memory research. When older adults are asked to recall events from their lives, they tend to remember a disproportionate number from childhood, adolescence and very early adulthood. Memories from these years appear unusually durable. I have witnessed this first-hand as I have watched my parents age: both of them, now in their 80s, talk more about their childhood and their youth than they have ever done before. Researchers continue to debate exactly why this occurs, but it is a recognised side-effect of ageing and several explanations have been proposed. Our younger years are often characterised by major life transitions and significant personal development; we form identities, establish relationships, make important decisions and experience many of life’s defining moments. That period also coincides with a time when the brain is laying down new neural pathways and thus appears to be particularly sensitive to memory formation. I find this the most interesting part of current theory: many neurologists believe that the changes that the brain is going through during adolescence and our early 20s are as significant as those that happen during our first two to three years of our lives.

For all of us, education is not simply something we experience, it is the environment within which much of our identity is formed. For some people, the experience is something they never quite recover from, and a significant challenge faced by schools is managing the feelings and prejudices projected by some parents for whom school was a thoroughly traumatic experience. For some, school was such a place of struggle and of negative comparison of oneself to others that it becomes associated with entirely negative experiences. School is where many people first encounter challenge and failure and it can be difficult for some adults to let go of the powerfully negative associations they may have towards education as a result.

All adults inevitably revisit their own experiences of school when their own children join the classroom. This sparks memories and every time a memory is reconstructed, it is updated and made more vivid. The past remains alive because we keep returning to it. This process can sometimes create the illusion that we remember school more accurately than we actually do. Every act of remembering involves a degree of reconstruction and we do not retrieve memories so much as rebuild them. This helps to explain why siblings who attended the same school often remember it so differently. They are not recalling a shared objective reality: they are reconstructing experiences through the lens of their own emotions, personalities and subsequent lives.

As somebody who has spent much of my professional life working in schools, I find all of this both fascinating and sobering. Teachers rarely know which moments students will remember. The lesson that took hours to prepare may vanish entirely from memory, whereas a careless throwaway comment may still be remembered forty years later. I am painfully aware of this. Our school experiences occur at precisely the moment when our identities are taking shape, when all of our experiences are new and our emotions feel most intense. The result is a collection of memories that can remain astonishingly vivid for the rest of our lives.