Teaching Matters | NEETS, Quiets & The Rich Exit

Teaching Matters returns for the new school year. It’s your weekly panel show from Education Matters, hosted by Paul Hazzard who this week is joined by John Gibbs.We help you unwind, not wind you up.The first conversation is based on The Guardian's article by Richard Partington which explores the major review led by Alan Milburn. A chief recommendation is that primary schools in England identify children as young as pre-school who are at risk of future youth worklessness. Paul asks whether a ten-year-old can really be marked out for a life of unemployment, education or training gaps, and John doesn't shy away from the tension at the heart of it. "The child is father to the man," he says, borrowing from Wordsworth, before warning that pushing determinism too far "would negate education" altogether. Their exchange ranges across nature and nurture, the anti-educational risk of writing children off early and the loaded vocabulary of policy reviews, where words like "upstream failure" reveal more values than their authors perhaps intend. John's line that teachers "have to behave as though everything was possible for every child, even though we must also know that can't be true" sits right at the centre of this discussion, and it's one that will resonate with anyone working in teacher education or school leadership.Next, we turn to quieter classrooms and quieter children. We're drawing on Sean Sutton's writing on inclusive classroom practice. John and I talk through what it actually means to make space for shy or introverted learners without forcing them into performative moments they dread. John remembers teaching a boy who stumbled through reading aloud in front of the class and reflects on how far schools have come since then, and I share a memory of a Lego club that unlocked confidence in children who were otherwise painfully quiet. It's a warm, practical stretch of the conversation if you're thinking about classroom culture, pastoral care or CPD around pupil wellbeing, and a reminder that rapport often does more than curriculum ever could. John puts it simply, "it's a relationship profession," and we both agree that knowing a child well enough to spot their quiet strengths matters just as much as any lesson plan.Our last story looks at high earning parents, largely in the United States, who are ditching traditional schools in favour of personalised, entrepreneurial and AI driven alternatives, as reported by Katherine Bindley in the Wall Street Journal. John's sceptical of parents trying to future proof their children with skills that will likely be redundant by the time they're grown, and he doesn't hold back: "privilege will buy privilege for their kids, and that definitely works," whether that's elite schooling, tutoring or simply access to galleries and dinner table conversation. It leaves us asking something I think every listener will recognise, wherever you're teaching, from the UK and Ireland to the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada: what does a genuinely well-educated young person actually look like now, and can any single system deliver it?And of course we finish with Banana Time. I share a short video from Andy Hargreaves on the quiet teacher, and John tells me the story of stumbling across Richard Dadd's extraordinary painting The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke decades ago, and his plans to finally see it in person at the Royal Academy this September.