Writing to inform

The Uncreative Curriculum: How Schools Are Teaching a Generation to Stop Thinking

Somewhere between the ages of five and fifteen, something happens to children's relationship with creativity. At five, give a child a blank piece of paper and they will fill it without hesitation. At fifteen, give the same child a blank piece of paper and they will ask what format is required, how many marks are available, and whether they need to include a conclusion.

This is not a coincidence. It is an outcome.

The British school curriculum, as currently structured, treats creativity not as a capacity to be developed but as a subject to be contained — housed in art, music, and drama lessons, managed with assessment frameworks, and evaluated through the same examination logic that governs science and history. This would be unremarkable if creativity were simply a leisure activity. But it is not. Creativity — the ability to think in unfamiliar ways, to synthesise across disciplines, to produce something that did not previously exist — is the skill most consistently identified by employers, economists, and researchers as the defining competency of the twenty-first century. And we are systematically educating it out of our students.

The evidence is not difficult to find. Since 2010, the proportion of students taking a creative arts subject at GCSE has fallen by more than thirty percent. The English Baccalaureate — the government's preferred measure of school performance — does not include any arts subject. Schools whose performance tables are dominated by EBacc metrics face a structural incentive to deprioritise the creative arts in favour of the subjects that count. The result is a generation of students whose academic achievements are real and whose creative capacities have been quietly abandoned.

I am not arguing that core academic subjects are unimportant. They are not. But the assumption underlying the current curriculum — that intellectual rigour and creative development are in competition, that time spent in a drama lesson is time stolen from mathematics — is false. The research on cross-disciplinary thinking consistently demonstrates the opposite: creative engagement enhances analytical capacity. Students who learn to think creatively solve abstract problems better. The science is clear. The curriculum is not listening.

What would a creative education look like? It would not look like fewer exams and more finger-painting. It would look like a curriculum that values the processes of thinking — hypothesising, experimenting, failing, revising — as much as it values correct answers. It would look like a school system that does not treat the arts as the consolation prize for students who struggle with mathematics. It would look like trusting young people to make something, and valuing what they make.

We have spent fifteen years optimising our schools for measurable performance. It may be time to ask what, in the process, we have made impossible to measure — and whether we can afford to keep losing it.

WHY THE BEST THING FOR YOUR BRAIN IS ALSO COMPLETELY FREE

The science of nature, attention, and why your screen can't compete

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There is a room in the University of Michigan's psychology department that has produced some of the most influential findings in the science of attention. The experiments conducted there follow a consistent pattern: one group of participants walks through a botanical garden, another walks through a city centre. They then complete a series of tasks measuring concentration, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. The pattern of results is, by now, almost boringly consistent. The nature group does better. Every time.

This is not a new discovery. William James — the father of modern psychology — wrote about the restorative power of natural environments in 1892. What is new is the urgency with which researchers are now pursuing it, because the capacity that nature restores is one that modern life is uniquely good at destroying: the ability to pay attention.

Why Nature Restores What Screens Deplete

Attention is not a single thing. Psychologists distinguish between directed attention — the focused, effortful concentration required to write a report or solve a problem — and involuntary attention — the effortless, automatic engagement that arises when something genuinely interests us. Looking at a city street requires directed attention; it is full of things we must process and respond to. Looking at a lake requires almost none. The lake gives directed attention a rest — and it is during this rest that it recovers.

Screens, by contrast, make constant demands on directed attention while simultaneously depleting it. The notification, the scroll, the autoplay — all of these are designed to capture involuntary attention while preventing directed attention from resting. The result, experienced by most frequent smartphone users, is a persistent sense of mental fatigue: the feeling of having been busy all day without having done anything.

What the Science Actually Recommends

Researchers are careful not to overstate the prescription. You do not need to move to the countryside or meditate under a tree. Studies consistently show benefits from as little as twenty minutes in a green space — a park, a garden, a tree-lined street. The key variables are access to natural elements (plants, water, open sky), reduced exposure to human-made noise, and the absence of screens.

The NHS has, in recent years, begun to formalise this through 'green social prescribing' — a scheme in which GPs in several pilot areas can prescribe nature-based activities (walking groups, community gardening, outdoor volunteering) alongside or instead of conventional treatment for mild to moderate anxiety and depression. Early results are encouraging.

The Simple Version

Go outside. Leave your phone indoors. Walk somewhere with trees. Do it for twenty minutes, three times a week. The science says it will help. The science, in this instance, is also your intuition — and your intuition has been telling you this for years.

YOUR FEED IS LYING TO YOU — AND HERE IS WHAT IT IS DOING TO YOUR BRAIN

We all know social media can make us feel bad. Understanding why might be the first step to changing it.

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You have probably had the experience. You open Instagram intending to check one thing and emerge, thirty minutes later, feeling vaguely worse than you did before. Not dramatically worse — not in crisis — just slightly hollower. Slightly more aware of everything you do not have, have not done, do not look like. You close the app. You open it again. You are not sure why.

This is not a moral failing. It is a design feature.

The Comparison Machine

Social media platforms are, at their core, comparison machines. They are built around the presentation of curated versions of people's lives — the holiday, the outfit, the achievement, the group photo — and the implicit invitation to compare your unfiltered experience against everyone else's edited highlights. Psychologists call this social comparison, and they have been studying it since the 1950s. What they have found is straightforward: upward social comparison (comparing yourself to people who seem to have more, do more, or be more) consistently reduces wellbeing.

On social media, upward social comparison is not occasional. It is the entire experience.

The Numbers

A study published in the journal Psychological Medicine tracked over ten thousand young people between the ages of ten and fifteen over three years. Those who spent more than three hours per day on social media were significantly more likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety by the end of the study period. Importantly, the effect was stronger for girls than boys — and stronger still for girls who were already experiencing low self-esteem.

This does not mean that social media causes depression in everyone who uses it. It means the relationship is real, and it is not equally distributed.

It Is Also More Complicated Than That

Here is the part that tends to get left out of the conversation: for some young people, social media is not a source of anxiety — it is a lifeline. For LGBTQ+ teenagers in unsupportive environments, it provides community. For students in rural or isolated areas, it provides connection. For young people with shared interests that their school does not cater for, it provides belonging. These are not trivial things.

The honest answer is that social media is neither the cause of the mental health crisis nor the solution to it. It is a tool — and, like most tools, its effect depends on how, when, and why you use it.

What You Can Actually Do

Research on reducing social media's negative impact consistently identifies three practical strategies:

• Reduce passive scrolling: consuming content without interacting with it is consistently associated with worse outcomes than active use (posting, messaging, engaging).
• Audit your following list: unfollow accounts that reliably make you feel worse. This sounds simple because it is.
• Designate phone-free times: the hour before bed, mealtimes, and the first thirty minutes of the morning. Your sleep will improve. Your mood will follow.

Understanding why social media affects you the way it does does not make the feeling go away. But it is harder to be controlled by something once you understand the mechanism. And that, at least, is a start.

The Road to 2030: Why the Electric Vehicle Mandate Is Not Ambitious Enough

In 2021, the UK government announced that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned by 2030 — then delayed this to 2035. In doing so, it joined a growing number of nations that have recognised the internal combustion engine's role in the climate emergency and concluded, after years of slower action, that market incentives alone would not produce change at the required speed. The decision was the right one. The timeline was the wrong one.

The case for an earlier and more comprehensive transition to electric vehicles is not primarily environmental, though the environmental argument is compelling enough. It is economic. The countries that dominate the electric vehicle market in 2035 will be the countries that shape the global automotive industry for the following forty years. China understood this in 2015. Germany understood it in 2019. The UK's extended timeline places its manufacturers in a position of managed decline rather than competitive reinvention.

The counter-argument — that mandating electric vehicles by 2030 places an unacceptable burden on lower-income households, for whom the cost of an electric vehicle remains prohibitive — is serious and must be addressed directly. It is correct that the average electric vehicle currently costs more than its petrol equivalent. It is incorrect that this makes a 2030 mandate unworkable. The solution is not to delay the mandate; it is to invest the transition's social cost in the communities most exposed to it. A subsidy scheme, modelled on those operating successfully in Norway and the Netherlands, would make new electric vehicles affordable across income brackets — and would, over the lifetime of the vehicles, save the households in question significant sums in fuel and maintenance costs.

The infrastructure argument — that the charging network is insufficient for a full transition by 2030 — is stronger, and more honestly addressed. The charging network is indeed insufficient. But a 2030 mandate, properly legislated and properly funded, would resolve this: the private sector will not build charging infrastructure at the scale required until it knows the market is committed. The commitment creates the infrastructure, not the other way around.

The transition to electric vehicles is not a sacrifice. It is a reorientation — of our manufacturing base, our energy infrastructure, and our expectations of what personal transport is for. The countries that make this reorientation earliest will lead the industry that follows. The countries that delay will buy their electric vehicles from the countries that did not. The question, for the UK, is which side of that transaction it intends to be on.