1 What is a GSCE?
2 Why do you always turn your comments off?
As part of our once in a generation reforms to the curriculum, Key Stage 3 will get the focus it needs to be engaging, exciting, and richer so that more children participate and progress. To do this, schools should not routinely bring forward GSCE content and options into this important and distinct part of a child’s education. https://t.co/vdULSkSSA5
— Lucy Powell MP (@LucyMPowell) November 8, 2026
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The Education Secretary’s latest tweet is pure sloganeering dressed up as wisdom.
Lucy Powell, the UK Education Secretary, posted the other day: “I think education should be about what you can do, and not what you can’t do.” It was tied to her Observer piece pushing reforms that soften the focus on exams, expand practical elements in GCSEs, and shift away from what she and allies call a “one-size-fits-all straitjacket” or “exam factory.”
It sounds warm and inclusive. It is also utterly moronic as a guiding principle for education policy.
Education has always been about both. You cannot meaningfully expand what someone can do without rigorously identifying, confronting, and closing the gaps in what they cannot do yet. Reading, writing, arithmetic, scientific knowledge, historical understanding, and the ability to construct a coherent argument are not optional extras or elitist impositions. They are the foundations that make genuine agency possible. Pretending otherwise is how you get systems that celebrate “potential” while leaving large numbers of children unable to access proper further study, skilled work, or independent adult life.
The soft framing,“what you can do, not what you can’t”, is a classic progressive rhetorical move. It reframes high standards and honest assessment as negativity or exclusion. In practice it risks lowering the bar so that fewer people feel like failures, rather than equipping more people to clear a high bar. Countries and systems that actually deliver strong outcomes for broad groups of pupils do not pretend knowledge and skills are in conflict, or that rigorous testing is the enemy of talent. They insist on mastery of core knowledge and practical application. England’s relative strength in international comparisons did not appear by accident; it came from a sustained (if imperfect) push toward knowledge-rich curricula and higher expectations after years of drift.
Powell’s version risks the opposite: diluting academic content in the name of “relevance,” “belonging,” and “pathways for all,” while talking up vocational routes as if they magically solve the problem of weak foundational skills. Vocational and technical education is valuable. It is not a substitute for literacy, numeracy, and disciplined thinking. Students who leave school without those basics are not liberated by “what they can do”; they are constrained by what they still cannot.
A serious education secretary would say: we will relentlessly raise what every child can do by refusing to lower expectations about what they must master. That means honest diagnosis of weaknesses, high-quality teaching of the knowledge that unlocks everything else, and assessments that measure real competence rather than participation. Feel-good tweets that treat standards as the problem are not bold vision. They are an abdication of the hard part of the job.
Children do not need more slogans about potential. They need adults in charge who understand that the point of school is to close the gap between what is and what could be—through knowledge, practice, and accountability, not by redefining success downward.
