This is written in the aftermath of the suicide of Jason Arday, the star professor of sociology and education at Jesus College, Cambridge. It became apparent that much of his back-story, his claimed sporting and even academic successes were the product of a Walter Mitty mind rather than reality. And yet he was taken on by the faculty. I don’t want to go further into the very sad story of Arday himself, but instead look at his immediate boss, Professor Hilary Cremin, head of the faculty of education. She effusively praised Jason Arday in public for his research and would have been part of his interview committee. In 2024, Professor Cremin lead a seminar entitled ‘the Rewilding of Education’. A catchy title, and still online! So I looked at it in order to understand the mind-set of those involved in that world. I’ve viewed it and read the transcript several times in order to try to see what I might have missed the first time. Spoiler alert - the title to this essay is ‘word soup’ – not ‘academic rigour’.

Professor Cremin starts by saying that she thinks that “our systems of education throughout the world are fundamentally broken” meaning that “we need to think very differently about what it is to educate.” She goes on: “...education needs to take account of us as embodied beings with gender and ethnicity and hormones and genes and all the things that radically alter how we see the world, not only from person to person, but from moment to moment. And yet we think about knowledge and truth as somehow existing outside of time and space, as somehow universal and abstract...”. So then she is saying that our imperfect ability to perceive what is going on actually means that there are no universal truths to uncover. A non-sequitur if ever I saw one. She evidently believes that all truth is relative. A fashionable view, but obviously wrong, as the recent total eclipse demonstrated.

She then recited a poem she had written contrasting the life outcomes of a poor child with that of a rich child. “So I think what I'm saying...is that education is a driver of inequality; that the grades that you get depend more on the wealth of your parents than on any other factor... There's a collective madness when we think about education and schooling...”. She then makes the assertion that all children’s grades are proportional to wealth, giving this justification:

“The attainment gap between the richest and poorest children grows wider at every stage of education, more than doubling by the end of primary and then doubling again by the end of secondary school. Schools are not reducing the gap. If you're entitled to free school meals in the UK you're four times more likely to be excluded in 2021. if you have special educational needs and disabilities you are six times more likely to be excluded from school.”

She ignores completely the Michaela Community School and other similar schools. At Michaela this year 40 per cent of the pupils were on free school meals, compared with 27 per cent nationally, but a third of A-level grades were A*, compared to a tenth nationally. And then she is comparing extremes of poverty and wealth, rather than looking at the vast majority who lie in the middle. What are the figures for them?

So why the title of her seminar? She says:

“I like the metaphor of rewilding for thinking about how we might improve education and I think that's for two reasons: one is that we genuinely need to rewild the planet...[to return] areas of land to a wild state.. And I'd like to think we can return education to its natural state from before modernity and the industrial era back to a time where learning happened as part of a village. The phrase ‘it takes a village to educate a child’.”

Perhaps in those fabled ‘good old days’, the village could teach the children what they would need in order to follow in their ancestors’ bucolic footsteps. But we do not live in those times. And so I’m not convinced that the average village would be able to educate today’s children adequately: a multiplicity of subjects is needed in today’s society.

She continues:  “So what's the problem that we're trying to address? We face significant and growing global inequality and depletion of the Earth's resources. We face an Omnicrisis - the climate emergency, the negative impact of some aspects of AI or the ways in which it will be appropriated. Geopolitics, pandemics, rapid population decline from about 2050. Schools are modelled on the prison, on the Army and on the factory... And violent cultures of schooling, both direct violence and indirect violence, are at worst driving, but at best exacerbating or failing to address inequality, ill health, democratic deficit, social division, hatred of the other.”

She provides neither examples nor any justification to support her description of schools, nor to explain why the schools should offer solutions to such a wide range of political issues. And I suspect that she has a slightly unusual definition of violence, although she doesn’t tell us what it is. However, if maintaining discipline in schools is to model them on prison, the army and the factory, then so be it. All require a certain amount of discipline in order to function. I was required to go to school – which was fortunate, as absence from school correlates very strongly with lack of success in adulthood. And no, I don’t recall being locked up in a cell or standing at a production line.

She tells us that there are shocking numbers of children living in poverty both in the UK and globally. She doesn’t make any reference to the incidence of absolute poverty which has actually fallen in most parts of the world – and certainly in the UK. Professor Cremin then says:

“But education is going to lift them all out of poverty, right? Universal primary education a good thing? universal secondary education, get them into school? The gap between the richest parts of society and the poorest parts of society are stubbornly resistant to change and I would argue that education exacerbates the problem. It's a driver of inequality rather than the opposite, and it does it through myths such as the myth of meritocracy: the idea that the brightest and the best, through grammar schools or whatever other iteration of education and schooling, will enable the exam system to pick out the brightest. It doesn't work.”

What doesn’t work? Is the exam system defective? Or is it that the idea of meritocracy is at fault? What should replace it? In fact, she believes that wealth produces what only appears to be a meritocracy: she tells us that only the children of parents who have the means to buy the expensive houses in the catchment areas of high-performing state schools will succeed. Michaela? No doubt a factor with a number of schools – but to what extent? We don’t know. And the solution she offers is that we should abolish education as we know it – to recreate the pre-industrial time where inequality was, well, actually, much worse than now. It all speaks of a woolliness of thinking and an effort to fit what data she has into a pre-conceived socio-political framework.

D minus

In the meantime, as reported by the Observer on 20th August, researchers in Bradford had investigated why literacy rates there were so low. Instead of just looking at schools’ data, they studied the information collected separately by the NHS and the Department for Education. And found that a third of pupils diagnosed with poor eyesight by the health service were not going to the optician for glasses, and so they struggled to read. All children were therefore given a vision test in reception: those who needed spectacles were automatically given two pairs – one to take home and one to keep in class. In 2017, when the programme started, the pupils were 6.2 percentage points behind the national average in reading at the end of primary school. By 2018, the gap had narrowed by almost a third and by 2019 it had halved to 3.1 percentage points. The researchers are now looking at dentistry: they found that one of the main explanations for school absences (and the inevitable consequences in later life) was tooth decay. So instead of hiring truancy officers, they sent dentists into schools.

Practical action driven by data.

A plus

23 August 2026

Paul Buckingham