England’s new initiative, which launched Sept. 1, is called “.” It’s a government-funded effort designed to provide 30 hours of free child care a week, 38 weeks out of the year, for working families with children between 9 months and 4 years of age. Unlike the vision of universal systems put forth in Canada and New Mexico, England’s goal is targeted towards low- and middle-income families. To qualify, each working parent in a family must make less than 100,000 pounds a year, which as of the current exchange rate is a little more than $130,000. There is also a minimum income requirement that each parent must meet, which is equivalent to working at least 16 hours a week at .

This isn’t a brand new system, but rather one that builds upon existing policies. For example, as it stands, English families that have a 2-year-old can get if they get “extra support” — in American terms, public assistance or welfare — which they can receive for a number of reasons including their income level or if they’re raising a child with a disability. Additionally, all 3- and 4-year-olds in England get 15 hours of free care as a matter of entitlement, with no eligibility check. In theory, the recent expansion increases access so more families can get more hours of free child care. But in practice, it is proving to be a complicated program that’s leading to unintended consequences related to child care capacity and equitable access for families. 

When it comes to child care supply, the initiative has raised a number of problems. Like the U.S., England is also plagued by , which few experts seem to think this new policy change addresses. In fact, some warn that it may actually be worsening the issue because the free child care promise but the rate the government is funding is lower than the true cost of care. In short, England is running smack into the same wall as many child care reforms in other countries, including America: they aren’t paying enough. For years, child care providers and advocacy groups have that the per-hour reimbursement rate is too low to run sustainable operations, and in many cases providers have been balancing the books by raising the cost of non-subsidized hours. The expansion of free hours may therefore, perversely, damage child care supply by turning program budgets upside-down, and — which will fall at the feet not just of affluent families, but low-income households too. 

The Guardian reported that the initiative has already , including Roo, a civil servant whose family is ineligible for the new program because her partner’s annual income is too high. “Our fees went up by 30% in April,” Roo said in the article, adding that it was an increase of about 330 pounds a month, or about $430. The Guardian goes on to note that some parents may now be incentivized to cut back their hours or otherwise shift their earnings around to get under the 100,000 pound threshold for eligibility. On the other end of the income spectrum, an by New Economics Foundation, a left-leaning British think tank, concluded that just 11% of English families in the lowest income quintile will qualify for the full 30 hours because they’re not meeting the income requirements, meaning they too may have to rely more on the unsubsidized hours that could be getting more expensive.

To add to the cost issues, the up front that families may be asked by their child care providers to pay additional fees for “extras” like meals, diapers and activities — and that they can opt to pay or discuss alternatives. There have been reports of child care programs as a way to try and adapt. Neil Leitch, CEO of the Early Years Alliance, England’s largest early educator membership organization, The Independent that if the funding for the free child care initiative is continually inadequate, “the infrastructure will collapse over a period of time.” He warned: “I can’t say it will be one year or five years, but you can bet your bottom dollar if you don’t give somebody enough money to deliver a service, at some point they stop.”

Many of these challenges track back to the first-order choice to expand child care by having the government cover the cost for a given number of hours per week. That option stands in stark contrast to government-subsidized models in Canada and the Nordic nations, which lean heavily on covering programs’ monthly operational costs in exchange for low fees. It also differs from the approach taken in some American states, including Vermont and New Mexico which rely on a high concentration of voucher-like subsidies. The hours-based model has meager evidence of being effective, and places that have tried it, like New Zealand, similarly .

As the United States grapples with how to evolve its child care policies, there are lessons to be learned from England’s implementation. Political communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio often her clients to “sell the brownie, not the recipe,” signaling that it’s more effective to hype the outcome, rather than how it will operate, but the recipe also really matters. Without thoughtful policy design to back it up, even a strong idea with the right messaging could end up having limited real-world impact and bad press. 

Moreover, the negative downstream effects of England’s inadequate per-hour funding demonstrates, yet again, that child care cannot be fixed on the cheap, while the convoluted nature of the new system illustrates that layering a new program on top of an existing one can be less effective than coming up with a single comprehensive policy.

That said, it’s important to recognize that multiple things can be true at once. The desire of England’s Labour Party leaders to expand provision of free child care is laudable, and some families are already benefiting mightily. The popularity shows just how much parents are looking for support around care, and leaders shouldn’t be knocked for their policy ambition. At the same time, a poorly developed child care system can end up harming families and providers, and could even turn the public against a good underlying idea. 

It’s early days for England’s new child care initiative, and there’s still time to accept the weaknesses of the underlying policy design and adjust course. In fact, that would be a lesson in and of itself.

Groshell, a former Seattle-area fourth-grade teacher, had to laugh: “Nobody knows me here in the U.S.,” he said in an interview.

But in Britain, lots of teachers know his name. An in-demand speaker at education conferences, he flies to London “as frequently as I can” to discuss , his 2024 book on explicit instruction. Over the past year, Groshell has appeared virtually about once a month and has made two personal appearances at events across England.

The reason? A discipline known as cognitive science. Born in the U.S., it relies on decades of research on how kids learn to guide teachers in the classroom, and is at the root of several effective reforms, including the Science of Reading.

In nearly a dozen interviews, educators and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic said that while it’s caught fire in England, from the classroom to the halls of government, the idea has made little traction in its home country. Benjamin Riley, founder of , a Texas-based group that has pushed to make cognitive science more central to U.S. teacher training programs, jokingly refers to it as a “reverse Beatles” effect, with British educators pining for American insights.

“Cognitive science gives you a vocabulary and a language, a common framing, to talk about how minds work,” said Riley. “That is one of the hallmarks, typically, of professions: There’s an agreed-upon body of knowledge that constitutes the things that professionals need to know in order to be practitioners in that space. And education, at least in the United States, has never really done that.”

The result, observers say, is slow, steady academic progress for 9 million English students, even as U.S. results falter.

From 2011 to 2021, English students’ average scores in the International Benchmarks of Reading Achievement, a key global comparison, rose six points, placing them fourth worldwide, while U.S. students’ dropped eight points, ranking the U.S. just below England. Essentially, American fourth-graders in 2021 read nearly as well as English students did .

In the bargain, English schools cut students’ gender gap in reading by more than half.

Other commonwealth countries have taken notice, with policymakers in , and working to duplicate England’s progress.

Is U.S. system ‘too big for things to catch fire’?

Developed in the 1950s, cognitive science essentially explains how we learn, think, remember and process information. Applied to education, it allows teachers to maximize learning by incorporating key principles, among them:

• working memory and cognitive load: Students have limited capacity to remember several important things at a time, so teachers should break down complex information into smaller chunks to avoid overwhelming them. For instance, a teacher introducing a lesson on multiplying fractions should first ensure that students’ recall of multiplication facts is solid and that they can multiply numbers automatically in their heads.
• spaced practice and retrieval: Rather than cramming a lot of information into a single session, teachers should space out learning over time and regularly ask students to retrieve information from memory via review sessions and low-stakes quizzes.
• prior knowledge activation: Teachers should explicitly connect new concepts to students’ existing knowledge and experiences before introducing unfamiliar material. For instance, in a lesson about how seeds grow into plants, teachers should begin by asking students if they’ve ever planted seeds in a garden and what they noticed.
• metacognition: Teaching students to “think about their thinking” helps them become more effective learners. For instance, in a lesson that features a word problem, a teacher might say, “Let’s slow down and figure out what to do first, second and third.” When students make errors, a teacher can ask, “Walk me through your thinking. What steps did you take?” 

In England these days, said Groshell, the Seattle teacher, such jargon is now mainstream: “It’s impossible now to find a teacher who doesn’t know about retrieval practice, cognitive load theory or explicit instruction.” 

What began as a grassroots movement among teachers coalesced into national policy around 2010, when a series of structural reforms made it easier to embrace cognitive science.

That is when Michael Gove, education secretary under Prime Minister David Cameron, allowed virtually any public school to convert to “academy” status — British educator Dylan Wiliam calls them “charter schools on steroids.”

Freed from local authority, but funded centrally, these schools can pool resources to hire research advisors, directors of teaching and learning and the like. “These people have really engaged with the research,” Wiliam said.

In an interview, former Minister of State for Schools noted the irony that most of these ideas are American-made, developed by U.S. researchers. In 2006, Gibb recalled first encountering . Authored by E.D. Hirsch, a University of Virginia scholar, it argued for a content-rich curriculum, traditional math and phonics-based reading lessons.

“It just explained everything I was instinctively feeling about our school system,” said Gibb, who recalled that English schools at the time were steeped in more progressive methods. He made everyone he met read the book — including Gove, the education secretary.

“That really formed the basis of our reform programming from 2010 onwards,” said Gibb. It gave rise to universal phonics screening and adoption of the more traditional, step-by-step . 

The movement really bloomed in 2013, when Scottish educator Tom Bennett created the first in a series of affordable research conferences for teachers. Dubbed , the conferences, which continue 12 years later, have built an international appetite for scientifically proven classroom practices.

In 2019, the government introduced an for teachers, which standardized training on “very practice-focused” principles, said Wiliam, the British educator. Since then, every school that recruits a teacher out of a university training program must report how well they succeed in classrooms. If programs don’t get positive reports about trainees, they can lose accreditation.

“There’s a really strong alignment between the needs of the system and what is being provided in initial teacher preparation programs, in a way that doesn’t actually happen in the U.S. at scale,” he said

It’s a source of frustration for Wiliam, who now works as an independent consultant in northern Florida. Despite the movement’s success in England, he said, just 10% of his work is based in U.S. schools. “I find it quite difficult to get any American school districts to engage me,” he said. But he’s got three scheduled trips to Australia this year, among others. 

Riley, the Deans for Impact founder, noted that American public schools are governed by 50 different state agencies that rarely row in the same direction. The U.S. may just be “too big for things to catch fire” the way they can elsewhere, especially in centralized systems like the United Kingdom.

Beyond state control, he said, most U.S. teachers’ colleges “are not designed with learning science principles at their core — quite frankly there’s just a lot of stuff in schools of education that is not very good from a research standpoint, but that nonetheless has become ingrained. It’s a generational battle to try to change that.”

Like Groshell, Riley laughed at the contrast with the U.K. “I am beloved over in England, and increasingly [in] Australia, in a way that just is simply not true here in the United States,” he said. 

Sarah Oberle, a Delaware first-grade teacher who is active in research and training, said U.S. teacher prep doesn’t typically focus on cognitive science because many think it favors a kind of “authoritative and cold” approach. “But when you really understand science, you realize just this knowledge gives me the power to make changes within my practice that will actually protect and support my students.”

Oberle stumbled upon cognitive science about five years ago, when the Science of Reading movement started building momentum in the U.S., and wondered why she never learned about it during her training. She went back to school and earned a doctorate in education science.

“Our business is learning,” she said. “How do we facilitate learning when we don’t understand how learning happens?” 

‘Comrades in arms’ 

While much of England’s progress is traceable to shifts in national policies, several British teachers described moments early in their careers when, like Oberle, they got a taste of cognitive science and began questioning their training.

Daisy Christodoulou, a former London high school English teacher, began her career in 2007 as a member of , the international iteration of Teach For America. She had an inkling that much of her training wasn’t just unhelpful but wrong, with discredited ideas held up as best practices with little evidence they worked. “I was just looking at [them], going, ‘Really? Is this really best practice?’”

In 2010, she came across Daniel Willingham’s book Subtitled, “A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom,” it revolutionized how Christodoulou thought about her work. Over the past 15 years, Willingham’s book has been “enormously influential here,” she said, turning the genial scholar into another American celebrity.

In an interview, Willingham agreed that many U.S. teaching candidates are exposed to views about how children learn that aren’t all accurate. For instance, he said, “This phrase that you hear so often, ‘Every child learns differently,’ is, in one sense, true. But it’s kind of true in a trivial sense, and in a more important sense, it’s really not true.”

Peps Mccrea, a former teacher in Brighton, on the southern British coast said blogs written by colleagues have become another way for educators to share research, finding “comrades in arms” in a movement that continues to grow. More than 20 years after he first entered a classroom, Mccrea hosts a that unpacks research-based teaching methods. 

And Gibb has taken to touting England’s advances more widely. Last month, he met in Washington, D.C., with U.S. Education Secretary , raising hopes that the British reforms might find an audience here. A spokesperson for McMahon did not reply to a request for comment.

Actually, said Oberle, the Delaware teacher, the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction from U.K.-style national policies, pushing to abolish the U.S. Education Department and creating the potential for “even more individuality between states.”

If we’re ever to see cognitive science advance here, Oberle said, it’ll take both a top-down and bottom-up approach: word-of-mouth influence among teachers, via events like researchED, as well as federal and state pressure on training programs to bring the research to teachers. 

“Once they have it clearly and don’t have misconceptions about it, the benefits they will see in their own practice very quickly will make them want more — will make them demand more. It’s just gaining that entry point.”

But she added, “It’s such a long process. There are so many minds to change.”

The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic are likely to be profound and long-lasting. We have already seen substantial short-term effects on young people’s educational experiences, particularly for those from less advantaged backgrounds. It is vital that we fully understand these impacts, including the burden on ethnic minorities and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Amid the pandemic, a team across UCL and the Sutton Trust (a think tank with 25 years’ experience researching social mobility), established the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities study (COSMO for short) to play this vital role for England. Our aim is to build the evidence base to understand the pandemic’s long-term effects on educational and career trajectories.

The study focuses on the experiences of a cohort of young people (those aged 14–15 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic) for whom the disruption had a particularly acute impact at a crucial moment in their educations—with minimal time for catch-up before graduating from secondary school. In addition, this group’s national age-16 examinations (known as GCSEs) were replaced with purely teacher-assessed grades, throwing their usual post-16 transition into further uncertainty.

COSMO has recruited a representative sample of over 13,000 young people in 500 schools across England, over-sampling disadvantaged and ethnic minority groups and targeting other hard-to-reach groups. Young person and parent questionnaires—enhanced with educational administrative data—have collected rich data on young people’s experiences of education and well-being in the aftermath of the pandemic, along with information on their post-16 education transitions. Key findings include:

Young people’s educational experiences during Covid-19 lockdowns varied considerably.

To take one example, we looked at live online lessons, perhaps emblematic of schooling during this period—but certainly not experienced universally. In the early pandemic, the most dramatic differences were between the state and private sectors. State schools with more advantaged students caught up with the amount of live online lessons provided by private schools in the early 2021 lockdown. But schools with poorer students continued to lag, likely because they were tackling important welfare needs.

Young people from less advantaged homes were more likely to report barriers to learning at home.

They were less likely to have a quiet space to focus on learning and more likely to use a mobile device or to share devices to carry out online activities. We also confirmed that those affected by these issues did indeed report spending less time on schoolwork during lockdowns.

The impacts on learning are widespread—and recognized.

Four in five young people told us that their educational progress suffered due to the pandemic. Almost half said that they had not caught up with the learning they lost. Over a third felt they had fallen behind their classmates. This rises to almost half for those who attended schools with the most disadvantaged students.

Efforts to help students catch up have not reached as many as we might hope.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that England’s catch-up spending plans were estimated to be worth around £310 per pupil, vs. £1,830 in the United States. Almost half of young people in the cohort reported that they had received no specific catch-up learning at all. Despite the efforts of the government’s National Tutoring Programme, which aimed to put one-on-one and small group tutoring at the heart of catch-up plans, only 27% of the sample reported receiving this type of assistance.

On a more positive note, there is encouraging evidence that those who did receive small group tutoring were more likely to be from less advantaged backgrounds.

Those who took up tutoring also performed better in their teacher-assessed age-16 examinations, compared to similar individuals who were offered tutoring but did not take it.

We are not the only study across the world aiming to track the long-term implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for young people’s life chances. For example, Generations, led by the Australian National University, is taking a similar approach to ours, tailored to their own context. Other researchers likely are working with similar aims, again with variations depending upon differences in their national contexts and education systems.

Hopefully, we are only at the start of the journey for COSMO. We plan to follow young people as they continue their transition into adult lives, checking in every couple of years or so. This builds on the UK’s existing cohort studies, some of which are now following their members into retirement. About half of our cohort will make this transition via university, starting in autumn 2023. We will seek to learn about their academic preparation for higher education and how they are managing financially against a difficult economic backdrop, among other priorities. Our longer-term follow-ups will focus on experiences in the labor market, family formation, and all other aspects of adult life. Crucially, our research will allow us to understand how these experiences differ depending upon their experiences of the pandemic—and how this has mediated preexisting inequalities.

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