By Santiago Bracho
This article is being published to mark World Children’s Day on the 20 November 2025, the 36th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
The UK Labour government has announced extensive reforms to the mandatory education curriculum, which are already under attack by many figures in the right-wing media. Much of the debate is set against the backdrop of children’s issues being brought front-and-centre in culture war debates, promoting reactionary views on education. All whilst in the UK, children are often the first victims of a failing system.
Education reforms in the UK
Secretary of State for Education Bridgette Phillipson has agreed to adopt many of the recommendations of the Curriculum and Assessment Review in the UK, which was released in November 2025. The key changes include citizenship studies being compulsory from primary school, new qualifications in data science with AI for 16–18-year-olds, and encouragement for students to study a greater breadth of GCSE subjects including the arts, humanities and languages alongside English, maths and science. This would also allow students to choose certain subjects which will not be judged via traditional timed exams. For the first time, primary aged children will also gain skills like how to spot fake news and identify misinformation and disinformation.
Conservatives have claimed the curriculum is being “dumbed down”. GB News presenters used a phrase coined by Conservative politicians, “educational vandalism”, whilst they were interviewing Phillipson. The return of citizenship studies as a mandatory curriculum subject is being criticised as an ideological indoctrination of children to promote diversity values.
The vilifying nature of these criticism raises concerns. The phrase “dumbing down” of the curriculum, due to reducing the number of exams, has been used when reporting these reforms by outlets such as Daily Mail and Talk TV. Yet Professor Becky Francis (writer of the curriculum review) has noted that in the UK “we are an international outlier in the [high] number of exams and the volume of exams we have aged 16, only Singapore is anywhere near us”.
The pushback to the UK’s proposed education reforms might appear to be an issue of political parties disagreeing on policy. However, it also represents a larger environment which promotes reactionary views on children’s education within the UK’s ‘culture war’ discourse.
Children being used as pawns in reactionary politics
Since 2020, the UK’s GCSE (mandatory secondary school qualifications in the UK) passing grades have dropped from pre-pandemic levels and stagnated. Many right-wing figures and pundits have claimed educational institutions have a left-wing bias, which is to blame for the drop in grades. This antagonism is perpetrated by figures such as Reform Party leader Nigel Farage who said his potential government would “go to war… with left-wing teachers’ unions”. This larger narrative claims academic standards are too easy, promoting “indoctrinating” humanity subjects over STEM subjects or trades, and in some cases even claiming children are over-using mental health services.
The “over diagnosis” of mental health conditions for children has been a common myth, which has been repeated by Jeremy Hunt, a former Conservative Health Secretary, and Nigel Farage. In 2022, misogynistic media figure Andrew Tate was a guest on Piers Morgan Uncensored show on TalkTV where he repeated his claim that “depression isn’t real”. This claim was then clipped for TalkTV’s YouTube channel, where it has over 200,000 views. Reactionary views such as these have been given a boost by much of the British media.
In similar fashion, the platforming of figures such as Katharine Birbalsingh, dubbed “Britain’s Toughest Headteacher” has pushed these narratives. Birbalsingh was platformed across much of mainstream British media, with multiple interviews on Good Morning Britain, across many years. She was billed as an education expert, and renowned former headteacher. However, her comments have merged into ideological politics, claiming transgenderism amongst young people is a “fad”, diversity training is based on “white guilt” and saying Bridgette Phillipson has a “Marxist ideological bias”. The presentation of Birbalsingh as an education expert on news media platforms, gives credence to her offensive statements, which are dog whistles alluding to ‘culture war’ staples in the UK. They believe there is a left-wing institutional bias in education promoting mental health diagnosis, transgenderism and diversity.
Children being left behind
These reactionary views on education that receive media coverage, have unfortunately ignored problems at the heart of the educational system. In October 2025, the Labour government delayed reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system until 2026. Disability activists claim these delays are ignoring the needs of working-class children with learning difficulties who could be lost in the system due to lack of funding and reforms.
Another example of institutional failure, which the news media has not emphasised enough, is the 2020 grading controversy. Students in the UK during the pandemic could not sit exams, therefore their grades were determined by “a standardisation algorithm” created by exam regulating body Ofqual. It was immediately criticised by students, parents and activist and the decision was reversed after over a third of exam results were downgraded, whilst private schools saw a rise in results compared to 2019.
However, the debacle has not created a larger media narrative in the UK, in the manner of other Covid era scandals. For example, when using the search function within the public Covid-19 Inquiry website, the prompt “Ofqual” only garners 8 results, out of thousands of documents submitted to the inquiry for multiple scandals, perpetrated by the British government.
Institutional failures such as SEND delays and the 2020 Ofqual scandal should also be mentioned by media institutions as blatant examples of working class children being ignored institutionally by the system in place.
In contrast, reports such as the DEMOS report “Inside the mind of a Sixteen year-old” show how the media habits of adolescents can be reported with care and with respect to their views.
We must ensure debate around education reform is portrayed in the media under these parameters, which will help children and young people become more involved and create a more harmonious media environment and society.
