Confidence is national education standards has dropped dramatically

Responses were averaged for September to September each year to show the changes across demographics in order to understand the way that feelings toward education in the U.K. had altered on a year on year basis.

Year; Good; Bad; Don’t Know

19/20; 44%; 28%; 28%

20/21; 46%; 28%; 26%

21/22; 41%; 29%; 30%

22/23; 36%; 35%; 29%

23/24; 35%; 39%; 27%

When the answers were averaged for all respondents, the trends became very clear showing that between September 2019 and September 2024 the number of people who felt education was ‘bad’ nationally had risen 11% from 28% to 39% overall.

Conversely, those who felt it was ‘good’ had fallen from 44% of responses, by 9% to 35% in total.

While the majority of respondents trended towards ‘good’ from 2019 to 2023, in the period from September 2023 to September 2024 the results shifted to ‘bad’ being the majority response.

When broken down by age demographics, those in the 18-24 and 65+ age groups maintained a positive outlook on education and schools but 18-24 year olds (the demographic who most recently experienced it first hand) did so by a larger margin of 6%.

The 25-49 age group trended towards the negative response by 8% with 41% of this age group feeling the state of education and schools nationally was ‘bad’. This age group also covers those which the Office of National Statistics estimated in 2019 to make up the majority of parents with children of primary school age.

The 50-64 year old age group had the highest negative perception, and the highest split between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with 46% and a percentage difference of 14%.

Regionally, London was the only are in which the responses showed a positive majority, with 40% of those surveyed stating they felt education nationally was ‘good’. Elsewhere, the results were fairly similar with the Rest of South, North and Wales areas reporting 39% in the ‘bad’ column.

Scotland however stood apart with 45% giving the negative response, showing the highest difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ at 16%.

Greg Smith from Oxford Home Schooling gave his thoughts on the results:

“Schools are in a difficult position nationally, often underfunded and as the sector struggles with shortages of teachers, a high standard of education can be difficult to maintain.

“The Education Policy Institute estimated in 2022 that spending per pupil fell by 9% between 2009/10 and 2019/20 and more recently the institute for Fiscal Studies estimated another £3.2 Billion in extra funding would be needed to address this in 2024/25.

“Moreover, workforce data for 2022 showed that almost 40,000 teachers stopped working in state schools that year, and retention of teachers is an ongoing crisis in 2024.

“Until funding and staffing issues for the nations schools are addressed at a governmental level, we may well continue to see sentiment to education nationally fall despite the best efforts of educators and administrators.