Why Schools Can't Be Everything
The Victorian architects of mass education had a clear mission: a school building in every village, town and borough where children would be taught basic literacy and numeracy, creating a disciplined workforce for industrial Britain and the expanding Empire. The strategy was elegant in its clarity—purpose-built facilities would house teachers who taught, children who learned, sent by parents fed and ready. Like a classic Victoria sponge, everyone knew exactly what they were ordering and what they would receive.
This wasn't just educational policy—it was imperial infrastructure strategy. Britain needed educated workers for increasingly complex industrial processes, literate soldiers for global operations, and competent administrators for colonial governance. School buildings provided the foundation for this national mission, whilst educational delivery within them served with laser focus. Every lesson plan, every disciplinary procedure, every curriculum choice reinforced the same clear objective: producing citizens capable of serving Britain's industrial and imperial needs.
This infrastructure-supported model served its function for over a century. The buildings evolved, certainly—expanding to accommodate sciences, arts, sports—but their core purpose remained intact and understood by all. Teachers knew they were nation-builders through education. School buildings knew they existed to house this educational mission. The infrastructure served the purpose, and the purpose justified the infrastructure, in perfect alignment.
Then came the layers. Each national tragedy, each social crisis, each governmental initiative added responsibilities without removing any or reconsidering the basic mission. The death of Victoria Climbié added safeguarding duties to what teachers did inside school buildings. Rising childhood obesity added nutritional responsibilities. Mental health crises among young people added wellbeing obligations. County lines drug dealing added crime prevention roles.
Consider what educational delivery within school buildings is now expected to accomplish alongside core teaching:
Each addition made sense in isolation. Each responded to genuine need. But nobody asked whether the educational function within school buildings could maintain its identity while simultaneously being everything to everyone, or whether we were creating institutional confusion by demanding teachers know what they are when their role changes with every crisis.
Every new responsibility doesn't simply add to teachers' workload—it multiplies complexity exponentially. Safeguarding duties interact with mental health responsibilities which overlap with nutritional concerns which connect to attendance monitoring. A child arriving late and hungry might trigger four different procedures, three referral pathways, and two multi-agency meetings. The same teacher trying to teach them mathematics must navigate this maze while maintaining educational standards that haven't been adjusted to reflect these additional duties.
The financial implications of this fragmented system are staggering. Education and children's services typically consume 60-70% of local authority budgets—the largest slice of public spending outside the NHS. Yet this money maintains parallel universes of provision that barely communicate, with school buildings, social services offices, CAMHS centres, and youth centres all maintaining separate facilities, often within miles of each other.
A single family with complex needs might interact with teachers within school buildings, social workers in offices across town, health visitors in clinics, CAMHS practitioners in specialist centres, family support workers in community venues, and housing officers in council buildings—all employed by different organisations, using different systems, rarely working from the same location. The inefficiency isn't just financial; it's human. Each professional sees a fragment of the family's reality, nobody holds the complete picture, and the family repeats their story endlessly to strangers.
This structural incoherence creates profound professional identity confusion. Teachers trained in pedagogy find themselves acting as social workers. Social workers spend hours trying to understand school contexts from distant offices. Mental health professionals work from waiting lists rather than within communities. Each profession guards its boundaries while simultaneously being asked to work in "multi-agency partnerships" that exist more in policy documents than daily reality.
The recent recruitment crisis in teaching isn't just about pay or workload—it's about professional identity. Young teachers enter the profession to educate, to inspire, to share their subject passion. Instead, they find themselves documenting safeguarding concerns, managing mental health crises, and attending multi-agency meetings about families they know only through classroom interaction. The job they trained for barely exists in the job they're asked to do.
This institutional identity crisis creates a perverse inequality. Many students navigate the confused system successfully—they extract the education they need despite the institutional chaos surrounding them. Their parents understand how to support learning both within and outside school buildings, how to advocate effectively, and how to supplement where the educational function falls short. These families treat what happens in school buildings as educational delivery and source other support elsewhere.
But children from complex family situations—precisely those the expanded educational mandate was designed to serve—often receive neither good education nor effective support. Teachers find themselves "propping up" vulnerable children rather than teaching them, while simultaneously trying to maintain educational standards for engaged learners. The result is a two-tier system within the same building: some children receive education despite the institutional confusion, while others receive neither education nor the specialised help they actually need.
The cruel irony is that the very children whose crises drove the expansion of what happens in school buildings are often least well-served by it. A hungry child needs feeding, but they also need mathematical competence. A child experiencing family trauma needs therapeutic support, but they also need to read fluently. When educational delivery tries to be everything, it often accomplishes neither education nor specialised intervention effectively, leaving vulnerable children with fragmented, inadequate responses to both their learning and their broader needs.
The recent local government reorganisation presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address these structural problems and their inequitable outcomes. New unitary authorities, integrated care systems, combined authority mayors—all offered chances to reimagine how we support children and families, particularly those who struggle to navigate fragmented provision. Instead, we've largely moved the same fragmented services into new administrative boundaries, preserving the very separation that disadvantages vulnerable families most.
The irony is palpable. We've created "integrated care systems" for health and social care while maintaining the separation between children's health, education, and social services. We've established "family hubs" as additional services rather than reconceiving existing infrastructure around the families who need it most. We've added "mental health support teams" to school buildings rather than asking why educational delivery has become mental health crisis management, or why some children receive prompt support while others wait months for the same service.
These reforms consistently favour families with social capital—those who know how to access new services, advocate across system boundaries, and supplement where provision falls short. Meanwhile, the children whose needs drove the original expansion of what teachers do within school buildings remain trapped in a system that offers them neither educational excellence nor effective support, just more services to navigate.
Some local authorities have attempted integration, showing this isn't merely theoretical concern:
These examples demonstrate both the persistent recognition that integration is needed and the equally persistent failure to achieve it systemically. Each remains a local experiment rather than national transformation, vulnerable to budget cuts, political change, and the gravitational pull of traditional service boundaries.
The confusion in our current system partly stems from conflating two distinct concepts: school buildings where children gather, and educational delivery as the system of teaching and learning. Imagine instead a radical reconception where we separate these functions:
School Buildings become Community Family Hubs:
The Parish Model - Walking Distance Matters:
Educational Delivery becomes a Protected Professional Space:
Integration happens through Structure, not Burden:
This isn't about adding more to educators—it's about using school buildings differently while protecting educational delivery as a distinct professional function within integrated community services. The London examples show this works best at parish level, where services are genuinely local and accessible. A CAMHS service might cover multiple parishes, but families would always access it through their local primary school building—their family hub.
Such fundamental restructuring faces massive obstacles. Professional bodies defend traditional boundaries. Unions protect existing terms and conditions. Different government departments guard their budgets and jurisdictions. Local authorities fear losing control. The teaching profession worries about further mission creep. Social workers fear being subsumed into education.
Moreover, the political cycle militates against structural reform. Each new education secretary wants their own initiative, their own legacy, their own addition to what happens inside school buildings. Fundamental restructuring takes longer than electoral cycles allow. It's easier to announce a new mental health programme, a new safeguarding requirement, a new curriculum addition, than to acknowledge that the relationship between buildings and function needs complete reconception.
The result is institutional paralysis. Everyone knows the current system is unsustainable, inefficient, and often ineffective. But the barriers to change appear insurmountable, so we continue adding responsibilities and requirements to an educational mission never designed to support such complexity. The original Victorian purpose - focused, clear, achievable - has been buried under layers of well-intentioned additions that no single profession could reasonably deliver.
This essay emerged from recognising the broader systemic issues whilst writing essays about how families and schools navigate children's honesty and dishonesty. The hurdles teachers face in delivering education within buildings designed for multiple purposes, and the barriers students encounter accessing the education they need, reflect the structural incoherence explored here.
For related analysis of how these systemic issues affect daily practice in education and children's services, see our complete psychology essay collection.
The Victoria sponge problem represents our collective failure to match institutional purpose to societal need. We've created institutions asked to be everything while designed to be something specific. We've added responsibilities without clarifying identity. We've demanded integration while maintaining separation.
Perhaps the most radical act would be simple honesty: acknowledging that the current system, however well-intentioned each addition has been, has lost mission coherence. Educational delivery cannot be excellent while simultaneously trying to accomplish social work, mental health support, food provision, and community services—but school buildings could house all these functions if education remained a distinct, protected profession within integrated family hubs.
Real change would require admitting that institutional confusion serves nobody well, and that supporting children properly means reimagining, not just reforming, how we organise services around families. Teachers could return to teaching, their professional expertise valued and protected. Social workers could offer services from the same building without compromising their distinct role. Mental health support could be available without requiring teachers to become therapists. School buildings become community hubs whilst educational delivery returns to its core mission.
The human cost of continuing with institutional confusion is immense. Children navigate fragmented services that should connect but don't. Families repeat their stories to multiple professionals who rarely share information. Parents miss work for appointments scattered across town when everything could happen in one familiar place. Most tragically, vulnerable children—those whose needs drove the expansion of what teachers do within school buildings—receive neither the education nor the specialised support they desperately need.
Whether we find the courage to prioritise institutional clarity over political convenience remains to be seen. Until then, we continue serving neither educational excellence nor effective family support, whilst consuming billions in the process. The families who suffer most are those least able to navigate the confusion we've created in their name.
This essay emerged from recognising the broader systemic issues whilst writing essays about how families and schools navigate children's honesty and dishonesty. The hurdles teachers face in delivering education within buildings designed for multiple purposes, and the barriers students encounter accessing the education they need, reflect the structural incoherence explored here.
For related analysis of how these systemic issues affect daily practice in education and children's services, see our complete psychology essay collection.