There’s a predictable rhythm to education. Every few years we rediscover an idea we abandoned a decade earlier and insist it’s revolutionary. The only constant is the pendulum swing: one decade it’s all soft lighting, beanbags, and “let the children lead”; the next it’s rigid scripts, highly structured lessons, and the kind of certainty usually found in cult literature.
In 2025, the pendulum kept doing what pendulums do.
We lurched, again, from one extreme to the other.
On one side: the long hangover of progressive, guidance-free, teacher-as-facilitator thinking.
On the other: the current crusade for explicit instruction, delivered with the zeal of a late-night televangelist selling salvation through worked examples.
And here we are, heading into 2026, pretending this newest swing is finally the one that will fix everything.
It won’t.
Because the problem isn’t the swing.
The problem is our refusal to step off the ride.
But if 2025 taught us anything, it’s that we desperately need to start asking better questions. Not more questions… better questions. Questions that cut through the noise, the tribalism, and the political chest-thumping. Questions that force us to reckon with the actual work of schools, not the fantasy versions politicians keep inventing.
So here are the three big questions that will shape 2026, whether we like it or not.
How do we protect teachers’ time so that good practice is actually possible?
Before we get excited about the new curricula, literacy reforms, tech rollouts, wellbeing initiatives, or whatever transformation agenda we’re recycling this year, we need to deal with the one thing the system continues to avoid: teachers do not have the time to do what is being asked of them.
Not enough time to plan, to assess, to analyse data, to differentiate, to collaborate, to reflect… or, occasionally, to breathe.
2025 was the year everyone finally admitted the workload crisis was real, but no one was willing to slow the reform treadmill long enough to address it. We just kept adding tasks, forms, check-ins, templates, and compliance layers like we were building an IKEA flat-pack cabinet with no instructions and hoping for the best.
Until we deal with time, nothing else matters.
Pedagogy, reform, innovation, world-class schooling – all of it is academic if the people meant to enact it are drowning.
The first question for 2026 is really the simplest:
How do we give teachers enough time to be the professionals we claim we want them to be?
Until we answer that, everything else is theatre.
Can we start using tools as tools again, instead of turning them into identities?
This is the pendulum question.
One of the most unhelpful habits in education is our tendency to turn tools into belief systems. We did it with open classrooms. We did it with inquiry. We did it with tech. And now we’re doing it with explicit instruction and cognitive load theory.
Let me be clear: explicit instruction works. CLT is robust. Both are supported by evidence. Both are strong default positions, especially for novices (deep dive into this next month). Any sane teacher should have them in their repertoire.
Repertoire, being the keyword here.
But somewhere in the last few years, these ideas stopped being tools and became identities. You’re either explicit instruction, or you’re progressive. You’re CLT, or you’re chaos. The nuance is gone. The middle ground is treated like intellectual weakness. And suddenly we’re back to arguing about extremes that real teachers don’t actually inhabit.
Meanwhile, technology has become its own religion. Every vendor promises transformation. Every platform is revolutionary. AI will either save education or destroy it. And once again, we treat tools like magic rather than what they are: tools.
A good teacher uses what works, when it works, for the students in front of them.
Not because it aligns with a movement.
Not because it wins Twitter (X) points.
Not because it satisfies some ideological purity test.
The second question for 2026 is this:
Can we stop worshipping the tools and start using them again?
Because tools are meant to serve teachers, not define them.
What would it take to rebuild trust across the system?
Trust didn’t collapse suddenly. It eroded slowly, year after year, reform after reform. Teachers stopped trusting politicians (understandably). Politicians stopped trusting teachers (predictably). Parents stopped trusting both (inevitably). And by 2025, every group was talking about each other rather than to each other.
The attempt to solve this through ever-increasing surveillance, compliance, data collection, and ideological purity tests has only made it worse.
If 2026 is going to be anything other than another year of finger-pointing, we need to ask the hardest question of all:
What would genuine trust-building look like?
Not slogans.
Not PR campaigns.
Not another round of accountability measures dressed up as support… Actual trust: professional autonomy, workload honesty, real consultation, and leadership that doesn’t confuse control with quality.
If we cannot rebuild trust, the pendulum will keep swinging harder each time, and the people caught in the middle, teachers and most importantly, students, will keep absorbing the impact.
Looking Ahead: Choosing the Middle Instead of the Next Extreme
2026 doesn’t need another big idea.
Or another grand reform.
Or another pendulum swing we all pretend is the future.
What it needs is a pause.
A breath.
A willingness to step into the boring, unsexy, intellectually demanding middle where real practice lives.
The middle is where you use explicit instruction without worshipping it.
Where you value inquiry without losing structure.
Where tech helps instead of dominates.
Where teachers get time without being micromanaged.
Where trust is rebuilt one conversation at a time.
The middle is neither glamorous nor marketable.
But it’s the only place schools have ever actually worked.
If we can ask and genuinely sit with these three questions in 2026, we might finally slow the pendulum long enough to see the system clearly.
And who knows.
Maybe we’ll even fix something on purpose.
Maximising Student Potential 