Moonshots and milestones: How schools can embrace the ‘Opportunity Mission’
by James Townsend
Executive Director
The Reach Foundation
There was a moment during the first covid lockdown when our social imagination ran wild.
We were going to value key workers, spend more quality time with friends and families and change society. We developed a renewed appreciation for the role of schools as important community institutions and the many and varied skills and contributions of our teachers. In the midst of the awfulness of the pandemic, it felt hopeful to imagine and debate what could be.
Since then, schools have done a remarkable job in ‘getting back on track’. This year, 61% of children achieved the expected standard in KS2 SATs reading, writing and maths combined. Not quite back to the pre-pandemic high of 65% but given the extent of disruption to this cohort’s education and the pitifully low ‘catch-up’ resources given to schools, it is impressive and a testament to the resilience and shared moral purpose of our workforce.
But the challenge of ‘getting back on track’ has been so all-consuming that the spark of imagination has gradually dimmed, just when we need it most. One in three children in the UK now live in poverty (SMC, 2024). One million children are classed as ‘destitute’ (JRF, 2023)—without the means to be warm, dry, clean and well-fed. Support from denuded local authorities is dangerously limited, putting additional strain on schools (Schools Week, 2024). The ‘disadvantage gap’ remains as wide as ever (EPI, 2024) and children report that school is the area of their lives where they are least happy (The Children’s Society, 2024). The faith of children, families and teachers in the current system is foundering and large numbers are voting with their feet.
The new government’s ‘Opportunity Mission’ offers an opportunity to rekindle our collective imagination.
Inspired by Mariana Mazzucato’s 2018 book, ‘The Mission Economy’, the mission-led approach to government is—taken non-cynically—an invitation to us all to contribute to solving society’s toughest challenges. We should embrace this invitation and the open, collaborative leadership that mission-oriented approaches require. Leaders participating in our LeadingTrusts programme are doing that together.
As Mazzucato describes, the original mission (or ‘moonshot’) was JFK’s pledge, made in a famous speech in 1962, to put a man on the moon:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Putting a man on the moon is a wonderfully clear goal. The Opportunity Mission—“to break down barriers to opportunity by reforming our childcare and education systems to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of children in Britain”, is not yet quite so sharp—although recent efforts have helpfully sharpened our collective focus further.
Nevertheless, our first opportunity is to use this moment to clarify our goals as schools, trusts, local authorities and communities. That the Opportunity Mission is not just a school mission is a strength. Its breadth invites us to consider what we want for our children, now and as they grow up, and how we can shape the system to make this a reality.
It pushes us to consider how we could (in one of Mazzucato’s phrases) ‘tilt the field, not just level it’ in favour of our most disadvantaged children. The process of galvanising around shared goals for our children has the potential to begin to forge the cross-phase, cross-sector relationships and solutions needed to achieve breakthroughs in what is possible for all children.
When JFK announced the USA would put a man on the moon within a decade, the gaps in the knowledge of how to do this were massive.
Kennedy acknowledged this and used it as a means of harnessing “the best of our energies and skills.” NASA led the way but the mission “crowded-in” people, ideas and resources from all sectors to achieve their shared goal. Similarly, acknowledging that we are a long way from enabling all children to succeed can - with the right leadership - unleash a new wave of innovation and discovery.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted in 2022:
“Despite decades of policy attention, there has been virtually no change in the ‘disadvantage gap’ in GCSE attainment over the past 20 years.”
The growth in the use of evidence in education over the last 15 years (led by the EEF) has provided us with some of the knowledge we need to help all children thrive. To push to the next level, we will also need to find and pull some additional levers and combine the knowledge we have now with new and emergent approaches.
The EEF plays a similar role in education to that of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in health. NICE helps “practitioners and commissioners get the best care to patients, fast, while ensuring value for the taxpayer.”
But in health, there is also a significant innovation infrastructure. The Wellcome Trust, for example, will spend £16 billion between now and 2032 to “solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone.” A significant proportion of this will be spent on ‘Discovery Research’ that is long-term, “spans all fields and disciplines” and explicitly seeks to “generate new knowledge.”
Whilst there is no Wellcome Trust equivalent in education, we can commit to using our agency to (as Mazzucato says) “identify missing links, failure and bottlenecks in the system”.
We can generate new knowledge. We can think long-term and build partnerships to achieve our shared goals for children.
Through our LeadingTrusts programme for aspiring trust CEOs, participants learn from trust CEOs who are doing just that. Whether it is Jon Coles at United Learning and the launch of the new United Communities Foundation; Lucy Heller at Ark with EdCity and the twenty plus education organisations Ark has incubated over the years; Hamid Patel at Star with the Eton Star Partnership; Vanessa Ogden with the ‘Mulberry Changemaker’ programmes; or, Cassie Buchanan and The Charter Schools Education Trust’s ‘Partnerships Make a Difference’—all are striving restlessly for new and more effective means of supporting all children to thrive.
With the right combination of humility to recognise we don’t have all the answers and the entrepreneurial spirit to collectively go out and find them, we might just achieve our mission together.
