2040

A little more detail on the New Project, and with it, an invitation.

A few months back, I spoke on here about a new project. It’s a book, commissioned by Penguin (Bodley Head), designed as a follow up to Exam Nation. I think it’s time I explain it a bit more. Rather than give a bitesize pitch, though, I’m going to be grand and talk about ‘my process’, just because I can’t really explain what I’m doing without talking about the way I’m doing it.

I didn’t set out to write non-fiction. It was always novels and short stories for me. But after my first novel was published, I was approached to see if I wanted to write about schools. And as I thought about what this would mean, I realised there would have to be one simple core principle. Whatever I signed up to, it had to be something where the process of writing it would give me something. I’m too old and jaded to think that any given book is going to change my life once its out in the world – so in order to invest my time in something it has to have meaning as I’m doing it. I get this from fiction because I love making shit up. From non-fiction, the meaning of writing for me is that it is an extended exercise in thinking.

What this meant for Exam Nation was that, rather than simply putting down SOME THOUGHTS on the way things should be, I set out to challenge myself. I visited all the kinds of schools I’d never spent time in – primary, special, PRU – and many places I’d never been either. I saw strict schools, struggling schools, tiny schools. And in every one I spent significant amounts of time just chatting to children, letting them talk freely about their experiences. On a really fundamental level, I wanted to use the process of researching the book as a way of changing and extending my thinking.

And it worked. Whatever you think of the book, I felt radically changed by the process of writing it. The conclusions I came to were not the ones I would have expected, and I hope the experience of reading the book reflects that sense of uncertainty and discovery.

So when I pitched the follow up, I wanted to be sure I was both extending the thinking I had already done, and opening up a space for me to learn something new. I’d gained so much from speaking to children last time, but in many ways I felt like I had only scratched the surface of what their lives involved. Every time they spoke to me, things would come up that I thought were worthy of a whole chapter on their own.

So the core of the new project is again that I’m speaking to children – only this time, rather than spreading my attention as far as it will go, I’m trying to get to know my subjects in detail. I’m following them for a number of years (between 3 and 5, depending on the child), and I’m visiting them at home, speaking to parents, watching them in lessons, and talking to them every term throughout that time. And I’m not just looking for what they think about school. I’m looking for what they watch, what they read, who they follow, where they play. I want to get the texture of their lives, because it seems to me there is something very big going on, and we have to start paying attention to it.

The timing of writing Exam Nation was strange. I started it in 2021, at the tail end of the pandemic. That was the story, in many ways. But as I went through the final stages of editing, another story started coming into focus, both in my own professional life, my life as a father, and in the wider world.

The best way of referencing this is with two texts – Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, and James Marriot’s essay on the Dawn of the Post Literate Society. Both point to us being at a moment of inflection, where the nature of modern life is shifting in seismic ways. It seems increasingly accepted that we are, in Naomi Alderman’s words, in the midst of an ‘Information Crisis’.

I think it is accepted by me, too. I certainly see the world of childhood today as one that is radically different from my own experience, and, more importantly, radically different from the norms around which all our expectations of what school should and should not do are built. So when I embarked on this new project, I had in mind a journey that would allow me to spend time with children, watching them grow and change, and think about how we might look to build an education system that took account of the new age without simply giving in to it.

In Exam Nation, I addressed AI in a simple if perhaps dismissive way. I said (and would still say) that essentially whatever AI can do it makes little practical difference to what we should ask children to do, because education is not about outcome, it is about process. We write essays not to have an essay, but to have written an essay, just as we run marathons, not to stand on the finish line, but to have run 26.2 miles.

But there is more to it than that. The invention of cars doesn’t mean we never walk, but it does mean we rarely use horses. And it also means that we need to make the case for walking in a different way – with arguments about fresh air and exercise, not getting to the next town along the valley. A rethinking is necessary. And part of that rethinking involves a proper understanding of what it means to be a child today, as well as what it might mean for those children to be working adults tomorrow.

So this is where I am. I have a lot of children I am getting to know. I am reading a lot. I am thinking, slowly and carefully. And in two or three years time, I might have SOME ACTUAL THOUGHTS. In the meantime, there will be digressions, books I read, kids I’ve met.

But I want to leave you with this basic point. I am in absolutely no doubt that the system we need in 2040 will be radically different from what we have now. But 2040 is only 14 years away. Even the relatively small scale change proposed by the Curriculum and Assessment Review will take five years to implement. If we want more radical things to happen in 14 years time, we need to be doing the thinking now.

I said at the start there was an invitation. It’s simple. Get involved. Get talking. Let’s collectively throw some shit at a bunch of walls and see what sticks.