For the past decade, we’ve been living through a quiet crisis in education: the erasure of critical thinking from our classrooms.

No one set out to remove it, but a series of well-intended reforms, trends and accountability pressures have mutated over time and managed to squeeze thinking out.

Here’s how it happened, and what we need to do to put things right.

Coaching became all about performance

Instructional coaching has grown in popularity in recent years, becoming one of the most widespread approaches to professional development across the sector.

When applied faithfully, coaching helps teachers to focus on clarity, responsiveness and the learner’s thinking.

However, in many schools, coaching has become performative. The routines have become ends in themselves, and a focus on what the teacher is doing has taken precedence over what the learner is thinking.

Assessment reform rewrote the rules

The 2015 exam reforms linearised qualifications, collapsed modularity and intensified stakes in a way that made exam grades near-total proxies for the quality of teaching and leadership. Yet the new qualifications did not, on the whole, reward critical thought. They rewarded accuracy, recall, structure and adherence to highly specific models.

Over time, we shifted teaching to align with this, training students to shape their work to match. The priority was not to analyse, question or construct meaning, but to fit responses to a predetermined outline.

Checking for understanding mutated

Ofsted placed new emphasis on “checking for understanding” in its 2012 framework.

Mini-whiteboards, “1-2-3 show me” and “rapid-fire CFU” are all excellent approaches when used diagnostically. But in many settings, the new focus led “checking for understanding” to morph into “checking for correctness”.

A room full of whiteboards showing the “right” answer became a proxy for good teaching, while wrong answers were a sign the teacher was doing something wrong.

The disappearance of productive struggle

Perhaps the most damaging consequence of all of this has been the disappearance of productive struggle. Critical thinking thrives in friction: in wrestling with ideas, testing approaches, making and remaking meaning. But if the system interprets struggle as a sign of weak teaching, then teachers will naturally buffer students from it.

Smooth lessons look safer, while messy thinking looks risky. And so struggle becomes something to avoid rather than something to plan for.

How do we get critical thinking back?

Critical thinking wasn’t deliberately squeezed out; it slipped away through multiple small pressures.

So what might help us to bring it back?

1. Better tools to teach thinking

The professional tools teachers need to teach critical thinking are currently absent from CPD cycles. Most teachers do not receive regular, sustained development in teaching reasoning, inference, argumentation or conceptual grappling.

This is not because educators don’t value these tools, but because the system hasn’t invested in them or reinforced their importance. This lack of focus and investment needs to be reversed.

2. Incentivise critical thought

When teacher effectiveness is judged primarily through exam results - results produced by qualifications that don’t reward critical thinking - the safest professional approach is to focus on coverage, correctness and predictability.

Deep thinking looks too uncertain, too slow and too difficult to justify within current accountability structures. There needs to be a shift in how we measure success in schools, to consider all the messiness that comes from taking a more critical view.

In other words, teachers should feel pressure to expand minds, rather than to secure grades.

3. Make space

Curricula have become so content-heavy, densely packed and time-pressured that there is almost no room for sustained inquiry, grappling or cognitive tension. Every lesson becomes a race for coverage.

Critical thinking needs time. Our current curriculum does not offer enough of that. This is something that needs to be carefully considered as the Department for Education works to put the recommendations of the curriculum and assessment review into place.

Can AI help?

There’s a widespread fear that AI will kill critical thinking, but I believe it actually presents us with an opportunity to strengthen it.

If AI can produce the perfect model answer in seconds, then the value of education shifts from producing the answer to critiquing, refining and interrogating it.

Imagine if it were normal for pupils to co-construct responses with AI in the classroom, and if we had qualifications that assessed a student’s ability to improve, challenge or adapt AI output. What if our teaching integrated AI as a thinking partner, and this was complemented by a curriculum that prioritised judgement, discernment and reasoning over recall?

Beyond this, we can:

• Allow children to be wrong without fear.
• Use CFU to diagnose, not to perform.
• Re-engineer CPD to rebuild teachers’ tools for teaching reasoning.
• Slim curricula so thinking has room to breathe.
• Design lessons where grappling is a feature, not a flaw.

Ultimately, the disappearance of critical thinking is the outcome of a system that incentivised everything except thinking. But we still have the power to take it back.

Alice Whitby is teacher development lead for Oasis Community Learning multi-academy trust

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