By Rich Atterton, ASCL Vice President 2026-27 and Assistant Headteacher, The Marlborough Science Academy and Helen Wakefield, ASCL representative and Senior Deputy Headteacher, Ashby School

Read part one of Rich and Helen’s two-part blog.

The fiftieth anniversary arrives at an unusually appropriate moment. We have a new Prime Minister and a new Secretary of State for Education. They inherit a formidable list of immediate challenges, but a change in political leadership also creates an opportunity to do something rarer: to step back and ask what we actually want from our education system.

Fifty years after Callaghan, perhaps this is the moment for a Great Debate for the 21st century.

That does not mean another curriculum review commissioned before we have agreed what the curriculum is trying to achieve. Nor should it mean another accountability framework designed before we have established what we really want to hold schools accountable for. It should not begin with structures, measures or preferred policy solutions. It should begin with purposes.

Questions of purpose
What knowledge, skills, values and experiences should every young person possess when they leave education? How should education respond to artificial intelligence, technological change and a labour market we cannot confidently predict? What should schools and colleges reasonably be expected to achieve, and where must responsibility also lie with government, families, employers and wider society? What do we mean by standards? What should inclusion look like? How should success be recognised? What conditions do teachers and leaders need if they are to fulfil the ambitions we collectively set?

There will be disagreement. There should be. The original Great Debate was not valuable because everyone agreed about the answers, but because fundamental questions about education were brought into public discussion.

The challenge is to avoid replacing the secret garden with a political football. Education cannot be removed from democratic debate, nor should it be. But neither should every change of minister or government require another swing of the policy pendulum.

Perhaps there is a better settlement to be found: one in which we are prepared to debate the purposes of education vigorously, draw on evidence and professional expertise, listen to parents, employers and young people, and then give schools and colleges sufficient stability to get on with the difficult business of delivering it.

Lessons from history 
There is a lesson here in ASCL’s own history. Our predecessors did not respond to Callaghan by demanding a retreat behind the garden wall. They joined the debate. They accepted the need for scrutiny, evidence and improvement while challenging simplistic judgements and defending professional expertise.

Fifty years later, ASCL and the leaders we represent should be equally central to that conversation. School and college leaders should not simply be recipients of education policy or the people charged with implementing decisions made elsewhere. Their experience should help shape what comes next.

Perhaps beneath all the arguments about pedagogy, curriculum, accountability, inspection and politics sits something more fundamental: a moral question about what we want for children and young people. Whatever our political differences, surely there is more that unites us than divides us in our ambition to give them the best possible start in life.

As Callaghan quoted R.H. Tawney in 1976, “The endowment of our children is the most precious of the natural resources of this community.”

Fifty years ago, the challenge was to open the secret garden and allow education to become the subject of wider public debate. Fifty years later, the challenge may be different. We need to create the space for a serious conversation about the future of education without assuming that the answer must always be another round of reform.

A new Prime Minister and a new Secretary of State have an opportunity to begin that conversation. Not to recreate the Great Debate of 1976, but to ask the fundamental questions afresh for the world our children will inhabit.

A Great Debate for the 21st century.

And perhaps, once we have had it, we might even give schools and colleges the time, resources and stability to get on with the job.