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.”

Its , or party platform, describes , including one on education and workforce training named “Break down barriers to opportunity.” Details are provided in a companion 130-page focused on “Learning and Skills.“

Labour’s education and workforce training agenda for working families in the United Kingdom is similar to those numerous states and communities in the U.S. are creating under the banner of career pathways programs. It also has similarities to the bipartisan bill reauthorizing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and is under consideration by the Senate. 

This approach reflects , a viewpoint that encourages policymakers to create different education and training pathways and personal support programs so individuals can acquire the knowledge, skills and networks they need for jobs and careers. Policymakers and other analysts could benefit from comparing these similar U.S. and U.K. agendas, even though education governance in America is more decentralized than in Britain. Creating an opportunity pluralism learning agenda would advance the interests of working families and the prosperity of both nations.

The Manifesto describes a strategy for — career pathways for those 16 and older that include guaranteed job training, an apprenticeship and personal assistance in getting a job. It proposes changing how apprenticeships are funded by letting employers use some , which is currently paid to the national government, to develop local job training programs. It would allow vocational programs known as to apply to become Technical Education Colleges, which offer teenagers academic and specialized training — much like U.S. high school career and technical education. The shift would provide additional funds and allow the schools to respond to local community job needs. Finally, a new organization called Skills England would oversee implementation efforts by employers, training providers and unions.

In short, this approach dovetails with U.S. conversations on career pathway programs, created by education and training providers to prepare individuals for jobs that align with local labor market demands. These programs include apprenticeships and internships; career and technical education; dual enrollment in high school and college; career academies; early college high schools; bootcamps for learning specific skills; and staffing, placement and other assistance for job seekers, and they have five common features: an academic curriculum linked to labor market needs, leading to a recognized credential and decent income; career exposure and work, including engagement with and supervision by adults; advisers who help participants answer any questions they might have and deal with issues may they confront, ensuring they complete the program; a written civic compact among employers, trade associations and community partners; and local, state and federal policies that make these programs possible and track outcomes.

“Learning and Skills” proposes a makeover of the national government’s school and adult career services. This includes placing a career leader in each school and requiring all schools to become part of the current network of . These offer advice and technical assistance as schools develop their programs so they align with national benchmarks for good career guidance. Schools would also have access to all the career planning resources and job search tools that the hub offers, including a job mentor for every student.  

Some of the work of these hubs is akin to U.S. state-based efforts that develop career services and education frameworks. For example,   includes three program and activity categories: learning about work, learning through work and learning at work.  approach is based on career exploration, preparation and job seeking and advancement. The includes descriptions of the roles and responsibilities of training providers, primary and secondary schools, colleges, workforce boards and other community organizations. 

Central to these approaches is the  of career navigators and navigator organizations, similar to the Labour proposal for career leaders and hubs. Navigators provide information and guidance to students and families as they explore career pathways. They  participants identify their strengths, understand job requirements and get the education and credentials they need for career success. Their organizations have  that collect and aggregate information to assist in this navigation process, including using  to help navigators and their clients.

This approach to career pathways programs provides insight into the two dimensions that are needed to prepare individuals for meaningful work. The goal is to give people the knowledge, skills, relationships and networks they need to flourish and achieve success. As the adage reminds us, it is not only what you know but also who you know. Pursuing opportunity involves acquiring knowledge that pays and relationships that are priceless. 

A U.S. and U.K. learning agenda, sharing lessons learned from implementing an education and training agenda as described above, would have many benefits for each country. 

For example, the U.S. could profit from learning how the U.K.’s approach to apprenticeships beginning in the 1990s has increased the number of prepared job-seekers. As Ryan Craig explains in his book , many factors contributed to this growth. Two that would be particularly pertinent for the U.S. are the role of the federal government in providing financial support to states and communities to create more training providers and in developing national frameworks that describe the knowledge and skills needed for different occupations.

On the other hand, the U.K. could profit from examining how America’s decentralized system of education and training has produced many approaches to implementing an opportunity program that begins as early as middle school; how navigation services and their technology platforms have been used to assist students, their families and mentors; and whether using states and communities as laboratories of democracy and opportunity has a U.K equivalent. 

Britain’s Labour Party has embarked on its own July Fourth revolution for opportunity. It bears watching, as both nations can learn much to advance their opportunity agendas for students and the working class.

During the early days of the pandemic, with students around the world shut out of school buildings and many struggling to succeed in virtual classrooms, academics and philanthropies in several countries embraced a novel solution: online tutoring. In recent months, the first research studies on those initial efforts — one based in the United Kingdom, the other in Italy — have emerged, showing significant evidence of effectiveness.

Preliminary from the National Online Tutoring Pilot, launched last June by four existing tutoring organizations in partnership with a consortium of British charities, indicate that online tutoring was a successful means of reaching over 1,000 disadvantaged students, and that participants were overwhelmingly likely to say they enjoyed the experience. Even more striking, a of the Italian Tutoring Online Program (TOP) found that it delivered sizable benefits to pupils in terms of academic performance, life aspirations, and even psychological health. In cases where participants were randomly assigned to receive twice the amount of tutoring than other participants, their academic gains measured against similar students almost doubled.

While caveats exist, including the potential challenges of offering digital assistance to children who may not have reliable internet connections, the results could lend weight to the arguments for an American approach to online tutoring. Largely in response to reports of learning loss experienced by students who have missed a year or more of in-person school, a coalition of education leaders, politicians, and nonprofit organizations has recently begun advocating for a national mobilization of volunteer tutors.

As momentum builds behind the proposal, advocates can look to the European initiatives as possible models. Both were executed at a small scale, benefiting only a few thousand students between them, but they were also established within a remarkably short span of time and under some of the most trying circumstances imaginable.

Eliana La Ferrara, an economics professor at Milan’s Bocconi University, raced to develop TOP last spring as the first wave of COVID-19 gripped Italy. When most Westerners still wondered whether the novel coronavirus posed a serious threat, the wealthy Lombardy region, of which Milan is the capital, was almost immediately hit with in the world. Mandatory school closures convinced La Ferrara and her collaborator, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Michela Carlana, that fast action was necessary.

“There was this climate of crisis, and it became clear to us that families were struggling and this would not be over within a month,” she told ����Ӱ�� in an interview. “We felt like we could predict that this would affect every other country the same way, so that was part of the eagerness to get things started.”

Within weeks, they had contacted middle school principals across the country to identify students who needed help in math, English, and Italian (most often a combination of the three) and identified over 1,000 potential beneficiaries from 76 schools. They also recruited hundreds of volunteer tutors from undergraduate and graduate programs at three Milan universities, connecting them with online training resources designed by a team of pedagogical experts. Amid the sprint, 530 students were randomly assigned to receive free virtual tutoring sessions of between three and six hours per week, while the rest were observed as a control group.

The researchers’ findings showed that children received clear advantages from a tutoring regimen with a median length of just five weeks. According to survey data from students, parents, and teachers, they spent an average of 10 minutes more per day on homework, were 16 percent more likely to attend online classes regularly, were 10 percent less likely to say they found the classes hard to follow, and were 6 percent less likely to exhibit behavioral problems during the school day. In a concluding examination designed by expert middle school teachers to mimic Italy’s annual tests, which were canceled in 2020, tutored students saw an increase in correct answers of 9 percent over the control group.

The program’s effects on non-academic outcomes were smaller, but still notable. TOP students were more likely to say they intended to attend college (and their teachers were more likely to say they should) and less likely to say they planned to attend a vocational high school. Compared with struggling peers who received no tutoring, they had significantly higher chances of reporting that they saw the events of their lives as being in their own control. And at a time when they were suddenly cut off from their friends and teachers, they said they experienced fewer symptoms of depression and higher overall happiness.

While the program was helpful for participants of all backgrounds, its effects were particularly concentrated among certain groups: Students with learning disorders like dyslexia saw a boost in test scores that far exceeded that of typical students. A smaller group, chosen randomly from the population of kids struggling in more than one subject, were assigned tutors who were willing to volunteer for six hours per week; they experienced academic gains roughly double the size of other participating children. And the uptick in mental health was driven almost entirely by immigrants — possibly, La Ferrara said, because they were more likely to draw connection and encouragement from their relationships with tutors.

“It’s a very clear finding, and it told us that the way our kids are dealing with isolation is basically through other social networks where they interact,” she said. “It’s a speculation, but it seems as if these kids from immigrant backgrounds might have been less well-connected outside the classroom, so perhaps having a tutor who is there to talk to you and who cares about you might have an effect.”

While designed to answer more conceptual questions — mainly, whether it was even possible to reach large numbers of pupils during the summer through virtual tutoring — on Britain’s National Online Tutoring Pilot offered similarly hopeful conclusions.

The study examined a pilot after the first COVID wave crested in much of Europe. Funding and coordination came from a range of philanthropic sources, most prominently the Education Endowment Foundation, and instruction was offered by four U.K. tutoring services with experience working with disadvantaged students.

Between June and October 2020, nearly 10,000 tutoring sessions, each lasting about an hour, were delivered to 1,425 students across 65 schools. Participants were somewhat older than those identified by TOP, with most between the ages of 14 and 16. A majority met eligibility standards for “pupil premium” funding, essentially a British equivalent of Title I dollars.

Survey answers from students indicate an overwhelmingly positive response to the pilot. Nearly all agreed either somewhat or strongly that their tutor was helpful; majorities strongly agreed that their tutors were knowledgeable, patient, fun, and even inspiring; majorities said they liked completing online lessons and felt more confident in their schoolwork because of the tutoring; and 87 percent said that they would prefer to continue with it if given the opportunity. All told, three-quarters of students said they enjoyed learning more than they did before taking part.

Researchers warned that a few obstacles prevented students from getting more out of the pilot, mostly relating to technological difficulties. Eight percent of learners reported missing a session because of a lack of necessary equipment, such as a laptop or tablet, while 16 percent said they had because of bad internet connectivity. In a survey of school leaders, nearly half said that equipment issues made it more challenging for kids to access the virtual instruction.

In a set of recommendations accompanying the report, authors advised that schools and tutoring entities “work together to identify any technological barriers for individual learners and consider appropriate solutions,” including both offering equipment to families in need and hosting the online sessions in schools rather than students’ homes.

The pilot study leaves much to be discovered, and a more fully developed was established last fall to provide supplemental instruction to additional students through an approved list of over 30 partner organizations. Likewise, a second round of TOP is under way during this school year, from which La Ferrara and her collaborators hope to learn more — including the impact of tutoring on both students and the tutors themselves.

“At the time, all this discussion about COVID and mental health was not in the air yet, because we were just beginning. For us, it was not salient, but if I could do it again, I would [try to measure] those outcomes.”