Writing in the Daily Telegraph in August 2022, Tony Blair bemoans that: “We have analogue learning for a digital age: a paper-based system that revolves around snapshot judgments instead of assessing whether schools are preparing young people for the future they face.”

Such evocation of the need for education change in the face of a radically different digital future is remarkably reminiscent to the arguments made by Tony Blair when UK Prime Minister during the 1990s – leading a New Labour government that made a concerted effort to push ‘information and communications technology’ (ICT) into schools.

As Blair argued at the launch of the 1997 ‘National Grid for Learning’ initiative, “Children cannot be effective in tomorrow’s world if they are trained in yesterday’s skills”. Twenty-five years later, it is telling to see the same rhetoric being used to presumably similar limited effect.

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Blair, T. (2022). Its time to scrap GCSEs and A-levels. Daily Telegraph, 23rd August, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/23/time-scrap-gcses-a-levels/