In education, the loudest, sharpest and most immediate crises often get the fastest fixes. But what about the slow-burning problems, the ones that never quite reach boiling point, yet quietly corrode equity and opportunity over time, and then tip into outright systemic crisis?
To understand this pattern, we can turn to psychology.
The Region-Beta Paradox, proposed by Daniel Gilbert and colleagues, describes a counterintuitive phenomenon: people tend to recover faster from more severe experiences than from moderate ones.
Why? Because more intense situations provoke stronger coping mechanisms.
The paradox extends far beyond individual behaviour; it maps uncomfortably well onto the patterns of educational policymaking in England.
Take special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). For years, the system operated within a zone of tolerable dysfunction. Identification of need has risen sharply, delays in education, health and care plans have become the norm and mainstream schools have been left to absorb increasingly complex demands without the training or capacity to respond effectively.
And yet, until recently, this dysfunction wasn’t labelled a “crisis”. It was simply how the system worked.
The SEND crisis
Only since last summer, amid record backlogs, soaring tribunal rates, widespread breakdowns in local authority provision and, most importantly, a colossal and burgeoning funding issue, did the incoming government grasp the nettle and acknowledge the SEND system as being in crisis.
But the warning signs have been visible for years. Like in the Region-Beta Paradox, it wasn’t until the dysfunction tipped into outright collapse that serious political attention followed.
Or look at the attainment and progress gap for white British pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM), the largest disadvantaged group in the country. This has been known for decades, yet it has rarely been at the centre of national strategy.
Unlike more visible or politically salient groups, white British FSM pupils often sit just below the crisis radar: underperforming, but persistently so. Their outcomes have been deemed not so dramatic enough to provoke emergency response, but bad enough to entrench disadvantage across generations, and are now right on the precipice.
Or consider teacher recruitment and retention. Outside acute shortages in physics or computing, the profession has faced a slow exodus of early career teachers and a deepening morale crisis. But only when vacancy rates spike or workload becomes visibly unmanageable does the alarm ring.
Or pupil mental health. Or chronic absence. Or secondary literacy. Again and again, we tolerate widespread, low-level failure because it doesn’t look like collapse, until it does collapse.
Fraying education system
Crucially, the aggregation of these multiple Region-Beta dynamics is having a compounding effect on the wider delivery of education, especially in places already facing deep structural disadvantage.
In the North East of England, where I grew up, outcomes for secondary students are now the lowest in the country, with entrenched socioeconomic challenges, rising exclusions, problematic attendance issues and a spike in serious youth violence.
The education system is not failing in one dramatic way; it is fraying in dozens of quiet, interconnected ways.
But the problems for families and communities there also extend into housing and health, as well as employment.
And the result is a regional crisis, social as well as educational, that could have been foreseen and mitigated had earlier warning signs triggered meaningful action.
Bridget Phillipson’s signs of change
This is the real cost of a reactive system. When support is mobilised only once problems are “bad enough”, large cohorts fall through the cracks. The Region-Beta Paradox shows us that threshold-based intervention is not enough. We need a system that notices - and acts - before dysfunction becomes unignorable.
There are promising signs of change. In Bridget Phillipson, we now have a secretary of state committed to long-term solutions rather than short-term firefighting. Her emphasis on system design, fairness and early intervention marks a departure from crisis-led reform.
But to succeed, she needs to be afforded the time and grace to implement these reforms against a challenging financial backdrop, and what appears to be resistance from unions, some CEOs and other wider groups battling low-level, short-term skirmishes.
As always, the wider profession and the “troops on the ground” stand willing to meet these long-term challenges head-on, as they always have done.
If we want an education system that is truly inclusive, equitable and sustainable, we need to look beyond the spectacular failures and start fixing the quiet ones, too, before it’s too late.
Andrew O’Neill is headteacher at All Saints Catholic College
For the latest education news and analysis delivered every weekday morning, sign up for the Tes Daily newsletter
