Martyn Oliver's speech at the Festival of Education
Sir Martyn Oliver, Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, spoke at the 2025 Festival of Education.
Optimism, inclusion and Ian Dury
Good morning, everybody. I’m delighted to be here at the festival of education; to be here in the beautiful grounds of Wellington school; here in the sunshine.
And that’s apt because I’m hoping in the time we have together this morning we can let a little sunshine in. We can talk a bit about optimism. I want us to think about why we do what we do as educators, as people who work in this field: in many cases, as people who have dedicated their working lives to improving the life chances and prospects of a younger generation.
I thought I’d open my speech this morning with a cliché. And I thought I’d try and find out who coined that cliché and how far back it goes. But there is no clarity about who first said, ‘school days are the best days of your life’. So, as we all do, I asked AI for the answer – and I know a lot of the discussions over the next couple of days are going to be dominated by the march of AI.
The AI summary told me that ‘the phrase doesn’t have a clear single origin or a specific person who first said it’. It went on: “one early reference comes from a 1910 song titled School Days by Will D. Cobb and Gus Edwards which includes the line school days, school days, dear old golden rule days. While not an exact match it captures the nostalgic view of school days as a cherished time.”
So, no answer then.
Like all cliches, this one has survived because it works – because it’s true, at least for many of us (though not all, and I’ll return to this later). It alludes to the idea of a more carefree time, of friendships built in the playground, of growing confidence, moments of satisfaction, of joy – reasons to be cheerful to quote Ian Dury. That’s why we say it.
I’m starting with that cliché because I want to strike an optimistic note this morning – which is not always a natural position for people in our profession to adopt. Things are always tough in education; there are always challenges to overcome. There are new expectations put on all of us – and it’s not lost on me that you’re waiting to read about Ofsted’s revised inspection model in September. There’s never enough money to go around. Doing ‘more with less’ is another cliché – as old as it is tiresome – but still a reality that we need to accommodate.
But even so, I still believe there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful and reasons to be optimistic. And those reasons are rooted in schools. These transformative institutions that have shaped lives for centuries and will, I hope, shape them for centuries to come.
However hard bitten and cynical we may have become over the years, most of us can look back to our school days and agree that they were, at least some of the happiest days of our lives.
Schooling shapes lives
I want to talk a little bit about what school meant for me.
I’ll do my best to do this without the aid of rose-tinted spectacles. I shan’t be skipping through the daisies of my mind as it were. There’s a lot that wasn’t great about my school days. The quality of teaching and the quality of the curriculum I was taught was not good enough – and I think that was something that an awful lot of schools in the 1970s and 80s had in common. Standards were not high, and aspiration was not always encouraged.
But, as with many of us, I had stand-out, individual teachers – people who I really connected with and who helped shape my life. People like my art teacher, Mrs Scarsbrick – she had a wonderful skill for painting and drawing landscapes. I remember that watercolour paintings of trees was her particular talent, whilst I was already increasingly focusing on portraiture, which I later went on to study.
Then Mr Senior, the English teacher who inspired me from the first lesson at the beginning of secondary school. That very first lesson in September started with a brand new, hardback book: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. We spent the first 10 minutes being instructed on how to loosen the binding and prevent cracking the spine. I also remember being devastated when he took a secondment to the USA when I was in Year 4/5 (Year 10/11 now): I took GCSEs in their first year of use and can recall even now that some teachers were totally lost in the new specification – so losing my trusted English tutor at this crucial time was especially difficult.
And there was Mr Ashton, the PE teacher who arranged for me to go training 3 lunchtimes a week – running the well-known, and often well-hated, cross-country course with his staff, as I was a budding cross-country runner.
Each of these experiences recall relationships. Relationships with teachers – teachers who went above and beyond, teachers who I placed trust in and who I knew had my best interests at heart. They didn’t just inspire in art, English and PE, they inspired my interest in education, in teaching itself.
And school had another function for me. It was the place I built friendships.
I was extremely ill from the age of 2 to 12 (the crucial years to get the best start in life) and whilst my school attendance was good, the powerful drug I was on had clear side effects for me which affected my concentration. The drug relied on sedation – ideal in helping me be well, but not at all good for educational purposes!
I undoubtedly would have had an EHCP had such things existed then. Instead, I had a few stand-out teachers who cared for me as an individual and I had an army of excellent friends. The benefit of living on a new housing estate meant that many families moved onto the estate at the same time and I had dozens of peers who lived on the same street, let alone the same estate, who I could rely upon to help me.
Generational shifts
A lot has changed over the years in our schools. The quality of education has most definitely changed for the better. There are lots of reasons for that – including better training and development for teachers – the greater professionalisation of the sector in general. And you would expect me to make an argument that the introduction of Ofsted 30-odd years ago had a real impact in improving consistency in education and driving improvements.
But alongside rising standards, schools have also changed to fit the needs and expectations of each generation. They’ve evolved alongside society. They have adapted to new qualifications, crafted new curriculums, embraced new subjects. Perhaps more than anything else, schools have responded to the advance of new technology.
In my school days technology in the classroom was generally limited to that moment when the teacher would wheel out the big telly to play us a video – hugely exciting at the time of course. (The debate then was Betamax or VHS, what’s the equivalent debate now? Is it perhaps, generative or predictive AI?)
But as computers made their way into schools, there was a more profound change. And that became seismic when the computers were no longer confined to the corners of classrooms and moved into our pockets. Their influence is everywhere and drives the debates and disagreements over the place of technology in learning.
Artificial intelligence
Right now, that debate is focused on artificial intelligence. It dominates the discourse in the media, and at events like this one. It’s a big topic of conversation at Ofsted and within government more widely.
We’ve recently published a piece of research commissioned by the DfE which looks at early AI adopters in education. The research found that AI is beginning to have real benefits in terms of staff workload – particularly in areas like lesson planning; and that leaders are clear that they are prioritising safe, ethical and responsible uses of AI. So no robot teachers yet!
It seems that there is always a commentator keen to tell us how AI will either transform learning or destroy it; how it presents an existential challenge to the traditional approach to education that we’ve all grown up with.
But I would mount a defence of the traditional approach. Right now, many children live much of their lives online. Socially, they are never ‘off’ and always in touch with their friends. And they increasingly receive life lessons from influencers or AI- generated summaries. I would argue that the place of learning, real learning, classroom learning – with human interactions – has never been more important.
Young people are growing up in an increasingly curated world in which their favoured influencers or corporate algorithms can have a disproportionate impression on their views and opinions. It’s more important than ever that young people are able to lift their eyes from the screen and connect with their teachers, in person.
They need broad, balanced, considered and above all challenging information to help them learn and to help them grow. Being an art teacher, it was never lost on me that drawing makes you look harder at the world around you, it greatly increases your attention. It seems to me that many technologies now do the exact opposite and actively seek to give short-term, instant gratification.
Not far short of 4 hundred years ago, John Milton wrote that he couldn’t ‘praise a cloistered and fugitive virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.’ He was arguing in favour of freedom of speech – ironically one of the great supposed touchstones for today’s keyboard warriors. Except, of course, they generally mean freedom of speech only for those that agree with them. In fact, in Areopagitica, Milton highlights the idea that true virtue is developed through experience and engagement with challenges, not through avoidance or seclusion.
In a way there’s something cloistered about living one’s life in a curated online environment. You may be able to find ‘the best that has been thought or said’ if you go looking for it. But who’s guiding you through it? Where’s the human connection? And of course, where’s the protection?
Community, relationships and learning
Schools have never just been places of learning. They were, and are places of safety, even refuge. Places of community and connection. Places of friendship and humanity. They are citadels of childhood: communities within communities looking after their own and helping children develop into well-rounded adults – capable of looking after others in turn.
Human relationships lie at the heart of every school’s success. And I’ve said ‘schools’ today, as they are the great universal service. But of course, those relationships begin for many in nurseries and continue on into further or higher education. Human connection is what makes education tick. And that is particularly true for more vulnerable children – those who need a little more attention paid to their wellbeing, alongside their education.
Of course, schools have statutory roles to play. Safeguarding is an absolutely fundamental part of what we look at on inspection. Its principles are described over nearly 200 pages of guidance in Keeping Children Safe in Education. Safeguarding is something that all of us involved in education prioritise perhaps above everything else – and it’s a human process, not paperwork. People working together to safeguard children. Nothing infuriates me more than glib commentary about schools falling short on inspection because of duff paperwork – or schools pulling the wool over inspectors’ eyes because their paperwork is on point.
Any of us here who have worked in schools understand that safeguarding starts with relationships. Good teachers, good head teachers know their pupils. They know which children are having a tough time in their life. They know which children are experiencing vulnerability for one reason or another. Perhaps it’s part of their life story – they are a child in care, or a child with special educational needs, or a child growing up in poverty. But really great teachers understand too that children will experience short-term difficulties – because childhood is full of challenges. Well-being issues, mental health issues, family issues, financial issues. It’s the ebb and flow of growing up for so many children and the really great schools get that.
When I was head teacher of a secondary school with 2,200 pupils, those personal relationships were clearly difficult, but I always made it my priority to support those who needed us most, no matter how busy I might be – and that always involved working with parents and carers, as well as the pupil. I also understood, from my own personal experience, that children form relationships with those they trust – their art, English or PE teacher, in my case.
Schools provide a safe, protective environment. To continue with my ‘citadels of childhood’ metaphor: they have walls, and they have watchers on those walls. But it’s within the walls where lives are changed. Where sparks of interest are fanned into flames and children can discover talents, they weren’t aware of, and passions that take them by surprise. They are taught the knowledge and skills that they need for life – but also the subjects that bring them joy.
Cynics sometimes decry the norms of education. Exams are ‘gradgrindian’ in their eyes, the 3 R’s are no longer preparing children for the ‘jobs of tomorrow’. And Ofsted are accused of being enforcers for this ‘out-of-date’, ‘joyless’ system – forcing schools to jump through these hoops.
Well let me tell you how it looks from where I’m standing. For Ofsted, teaching a full, rich range of subjects isn’t just a nice to have, it’s fundamental to a great education. Music and art and sports aren’t add-ons to the core curriculum, they are some of the most important subjects to study, in terms of developing a child’s awareness of the world around them. And in a more macro sense, feeding into the cultural evolution of our country and pushing civilization on.
It often surprises people when I say that I started out as an art teacher, in 1995. Art was my passion then and it’s still my passion now. When I have the time I love to paint. I find that it forces me to slow down and deeply observe the world around me. But I too feel that temptation to pick up my smartphone and check my emails far too often, breaking the observational trance-like state. I can only imagine how difficult and tempting this is for children.
Opening doors
Of course, learning about art means learning about perspective.
That’s a good thing in the context of mental health and well-being – such hot topics, sadly, at the moment. But if you think about the influence of art on human history – its central role in the Renaissance, or the influence of perspective on the Age of Discovery – art has been a driver of exploration, of invention and pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge.
It is also no surprise to an art historian that there is expression in breaking the established rules – that’s the essence of original creativity. So 500 years after the rules of perspective were established, the Cubists proved this point. Life evolves as we move with the times. Another favourite quote of mine is from Lampedusa’s, Il Gattopardo, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. It’s quite a common refrain that children should be taught ‘creativity’ – but creativity relies upon a deep understanding of knowledge and facts; it comes from pushing at the limits of knowledge, and first you need to be taught where those limits are.
Every subject we teach our children opens doors for them. So, the rounded classroom experience: a broad and rich curriculum, structured carefully by expert teachers and taught within a safe and welcoming environment, is fundamental to the intellectual growth of individuals and the development of society. Matthew Arnold’s quote still holds. ‘The best that has been thought and said’ still matters. And while an AI-enabled search engine can find the raw material, I wouldn’t want to entrust the teaching to the same machine – at least not without the art and skill of the teacher as a guide and storyteller.
The classroom experience is based on human relationships and a sense of belonging. I spoke about the first priority for schools being the safety of children. Well, children feel safe when they know somebody cares. When they know that their teachers will show up and keep showing up day after day to make sure they’ve learned what they were taught yesterday and are ready to learn something new today. We can’t outsource human contact. Teachers are, and must always remain, the heart of education.
And education is an exercise of the heart as much as it is of the head. It’s about support and care, as well as instruction. They go hand in hand. Which brings me on to inclusion.
Inclusion
As you’ll all be aware Ofsted will publish the full details of our revised education inspection framework in early September. We’re taking time to analyse and consider all of the feedback we were given in the public consultation this spring. There will be some changes from the proposals we published back in February. But I don’t think I’m jumping the gun to say that inclusion will remain a central tenet – perhaps the central tenet in our new approach.
And I hope the reason for that is obvious. It’s my north star. Inclusion is both my guiding principle and the fire in my belly. That was true as a teacher, as a head of sixth form, as a head teacher, as a multi-academy trust leader. It’s true now for me as His Majesty’s Chief Inspector.
Those of you who have spent far more time than is healthy listening to or reading about the things that I’ve said since taking on the job, will have heard me talk about vulnerable and disadvantaged children. Asserting repeatedly that if schools get it right for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged among their pupils, they will get it right for all of their pupils.
I use that phrase time and time again because I happen to believe that it’s true. And I have been challenged on my assertion now and then. But I have never seen or heard of a school that looks after the interests of disadvantaged and vulnerable children perfectly well but lets down those pupils who aren’t grappling with some of life’s more obvious challenges.
That’s because those schools get it. They know their children and they understand that the secret of success lies in the relationships that bind the school community together.
A school that truly understands the needs of its pupils will do right by its most vulnerable children, by its most gifted students and by all those children in-between.
As always when we at Ofsted talk about a concept – like inclusion – it sparks debate and it energises the commentators and consultants to try and unpick what we mean.
It’s really about relationships. It’s about belonging and thriving. It doesn’t mean being soft on behaviour or attendance. It doesn’t mean taking a dim view of head teachers who find the need to suspend or exclude a child, either in the pupil’s best interests or the interests of their classmates.
When we talk about schools as places where children can feel safe, to grow, develop and express themselves we mustn’t forget how stabilising it is to understand the rules and to know they will be applied consistently and fairly. In the words of that 1910 song again: “School days – dear old golden rule days.”
No – inclusion is about making sure that all pupils feel that they belong – no matter their personal talents or aptitudes, or the barriers and obstacles they need to overcome to feel that sense of belonging.
And it is about putting disadvantaged and vulnerable children at the heart of what you do – as they will be at the heart of what we do as an inspectorate.
And just as the term ‘inclusion’ can be a little hard to pin down, it’s also not easy to define what we mean by vulnerable. I think we all instinctively have a better understanding of disadvantage. There are clearer definitions. I’m sure everybody here who works in a school will be aware of how many of their children attract pupil premium for example. I’m sure many of you could reel off names.
The concept of vulnerability is a little looser. Statutory responsibilities point us to formal designations: children with SEND, children who are looked after by the state. It’s absolutely right that we all maintain a laser-like focus on those children. But what about others who are experiencing vulnerability?
I recently met with groups of young carers. Listening to their experiences and perspectives was both interesting and humbling. They feel a bit forgotten. All too often they are not included in our headline definitions of vulnerable children. And yet they are vulnerable. They don’t have the care structures that so many of us took for granted during our own childhoods. Instead, they themselves are the care structures for the adults in their lives. That has a huge impact on the way they view themselves, the way they view their potential and the way they think about their future.
This week we published a piece of work that we commissioned from the National Children’s Bureau. We asked the NCB to consider how we might better define vulnerability in the context of our work.
Their report is entitled ‘from trait to state’ and the definition of vulnerability that it puts forward leans into the idea that children move into and out of various degrees of vulnerability throughout their childhood.
This describes vulnerability less as an immutable trait and more of a fluid state. It’s an interesting, and a logical concept, speaking to the importance of relationships that I’ve addressed in my comments today. Of course, it doesn’t detract from the responsibility that we all have to the children with SEND, those in care and children supported through pupil premium funding.
But I think this definition gives us more latitude to think about how life impacts on the well-being of children in different ways, at different times. And how we best address vulnerability within the safe and nurturing communities that we create.
I remember a particularly vulnerable cohort of SEND students who my SENDCO was desperately worried about leaving school at 16. So, she worked with their families and offered a uniquely bespoke post-16 course which gave this group the time and support that they needed to prepare for the transition to further education and employment. My wonderful SENDCO knew the children and worked to influence the entire school’s post-16 provision to meet their needs…it wasn’t a case of insisting that those children meet the needs of the school!
Aspiration and optimism
Education should be aspirational. And it should be aspirational for every child. Not everyone can ace their exams and get into Oxbridge. Not everyone will want to. Not everyone will turn a passion for music into a career as a concert pianist. But everyone can aim to learn a little more, develop a new skill and improve themselves one step at a time.
That is as true for children with SEND as it is for those without; it’s as true for the poorest children as it is for the wealthiest. That’s not to deny the existence of barriers, but rather to flag a determination to overcome them.
And if we are aspirational for all children, it stands to reason that we should be aspirational for all schools. I nodded earlier to the influence of Ofsted over the last 3 decades. I do believe that inspection helps schools look at where and how they can improve. It doesn’t make the improvement happen – that’s down to brilliant teachers and brilliant leaders working within their school community. But done right inspection can provide some pointers in the right direction.
I’ve repeatedly said that I want inspection to feel done with not done to. That’s not just a nice touchy-feely sentiment. I want inspection to mirror what goes on in the places we inspect. Education at its best is done with, not done to. The best schools – the citadels of childhood – are places of belonging, rooted in human relationships and a sense of shared endeavour. They are optimistic places.
Optimism isn’t easy. Particularly at our age…and especially if we read the papers!
But children are optimistic. It’s a natural state of mind when you’re young, with your life stretching ahead of you, enjoying the best years of your life.
It’s so much easier to be pessimistic and cynical as you get older. Because they are learned behaviours. But they should never be taught ones.
That’s on all of us.
Thank you for all you do for children and learners – and thank you for listening.