The Hollowing of British Education: 40 Years of Technocratic Illusion

British education is fast losing its soul, if it hasn't already lost it. There is no animating vision of what schooling is for, or what an educated person should be. In its place, there are metrics, performance indicators, randomised controlled trials (RCTs), and efficiency models imported from the world of business consultancy. For four decades, education policy has been increasingly dominated by a technocratic mindset, one that imagines schools as machines and policymakers as engineers, tweaking inputs to optimise outputs.

At the heart of this shift is a fundamental misunderstanding of education itself. Education is not a complicated system, where problems can be solved by breaking them down into smaller parts, fixing what is broken, and reassembling the whole. It is a complex system, where cause and effect are not always obvious, where interventions have unpredictable results, and where the deepest forms of learning emerge in ways that cannot be measured or controlled. But the technocrats do not recognize this distinction. For forty years, they have treated education like a machine to be fine-tuned—unaware, or perhaps indifferent, to the fact that learning is not a mechanical process at all.

From Thatcher to Blair: The Birth of the Technocratic Turn

The immediate origins of this mindset originate in Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, when she sought to impose market discipline on public services. Thatcher’s core belief was that the state was inefficient, that public institutions lacked accountability, and that the only way to drive up performance was through competition and measurement. This logic was applied to healthcare, transport, and—crucially—education.

During the 1980s, Thatcher’s government introduced league tables, standardised assessments, and greater central oversight of schools. These policies established the idea that schools should be accountable not to teachers, communities, or the profession itself, but to government performance indicators. The goal was to make education legible—to transform the messy, organic reality of learning into something that could be monitored, quantified, and improved through managerial techniques.

But it was Tony Blair and New Labour who made this vision concrete. Blair understood that, to be electorally viable, Labour had to prove it could be as competent as the Conservatives at managing the economy and public services. And so, rather than dismantling Thatcher’s legacy, he refined and expanded it, turning education into a system of targets, interventions, and constant monitoring.

Michael Barber and the Deliverology Revolution

The man at the heart of Blair’s education strategy was Michael Barber, a former academic who became Chief Advisor on School Standards and later the architect of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU). Barber’s Deliverology model treated public services as a series of measurable outcomes, each with a clear target and accountability mechanism.

Under Deliverology, education became an efficiency problem: set a goal, measure progress, intervene if necessary. It was a system designed for factories, not classrooms. Schools were given performance targets. Teachers were required to document improvements in student attainment. Local authorities had to report progress back to Whitehall. Everything had to be quantified, monitored, and optimised.

At the heart of this system was a deep distrust of teacher expertise. Blair and Barber did not believe that professional judgment alone could guarantee progress—only data and performance monitoring could. And so, teachers were increasingly treated as service providers, implementing strategies handed down from policymakers rather than making decisions based on their own experience and understanding of their students.

This shift radically altered British education. It created a culture of compliance, where teachers spent more time justifying their work through paperwork than actually teaching. It encouraged teaching to the test, as schools focused on maximising measurable outcomes rather than fostering curiosity or deep learning. And it reduced the role of teachers to that of technicians, delivering pre-approved strategies rather than acting as autonomous professionals.

Gove, Goldacre, and the Rise of Evidence-Based Ideology

If Thatcher introduced competition and Blair imposed managerialism, then Michael Gove took both and fused them with a traditionalist ideology. Gove, Education Secretary from 2010 to 2014, embraced the New Labour obsession with performance data, but repurposed it in the service of a deeply traditionalist vision of schooling.

To justify his reforms, Gove turned to the language of scientific objectivity. He brought in Ben Goldacre, a doctor and journalist who had championed evidence-based medicine, and together they made the case that education should be governed by the same principles as clinical trials. If randomised controlled trials (RCTs) could determine which drugs saved lives, why not use them to determine which teaching methods worked best?

RCTs became the so-called gold standard of education research. The government funded large-scale trials through the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), hoping to establish once and for all which teaching strategies were most effective. It was a seductive vision—one in which learning could be optimised, teaching could be standardised, and education could be finally, indisputably improved.

But the underlying premise was flawed. RCTs work in complicated systems, where variables can be isolated and controlled. They do not work in complex systems, where everything interacts with everything else.

Education is not medicine. A school is not a controlled laboratory. The effectiveness of a teaching method depends on countless factors—the skill and personality of the teacher, the background and motivation of the students, the culture of the school, the socioeconomic environment in which it operates. These factors cannot be controlled or isolated. What works in one school may fail in another. What works for one teacher may not work for another.

But the technocrats were not interested in complexity. The obsession with “what works” was not a genuine pursuit of knowledge—it was a political strategy, designed to give Gove’s reforms the authority of science.

Labour’s Ongoing Captivity to the Technocratic Mindset

One might have expected Labour under Keir Starmer to challenge this technocratic vision. Instead, the party remains trapped in the same loop, still fixated on evidence-based policy, data-driven interventions, and school performance metrics.

Starmer’s Labour, much like Blair’s, is obsessed with proving its competence. Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson talks about “what works” in education, but seldom if ever about what education is for. Labour continues to accept the premise that education must be managed, measured, and optimised, rather than debated, reimagined, and liberated from bureaucracy.

What Has 40 Years of Technocracy Delivered?

After four decades of competition, performance metrics, and evidence-based interventions, British education is hollowed out.

Schools are more accountable than ever before, but is learning better? Students sit more exams, but are they more educated? Teachers follow evidence-based best practices, but are they more effective?

The answer is far from clear. What is clear is that something vital has been lost—a sense of education as a deep, formative process, not just a set of measurable outcomes.

Breaking the Spell of Technocracy

Education cannot be treated as a factory, and learning cannot be measured like production outputs. The obsession with “what works” has blinded policymakers to a deeper truth: education is about wisdom, judgment, and understanding, not just efficiency and performance.

If British education is to recover its purpose, it must break free from the managerial mindset. It must trust teachers, not algorithms. It must embrace complexity, not just measurement. And above all, it must ask not just what works, but what matters.