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If you grew up in a “failing” town like Hastings in the 1990s or early 2000s, like I did, the local careers advice wasn’t so much a strategy as it was an evacuation plan.

The messaging was subtly, yet relentlessly, baked into everything: “Do your homework, get your grades and, with a bit of luck, you’ll secure a one-way ticket out of here.”

Success was measured in miles away from the pier. The ultimate academic prize? A train ticket to London, leaving behind the amusement arcades, the seagull-inflicted trauma and a town seemingly stuck in permanent economic hibernation.

But decades into this experiment, it’s becoming blindingly obvious how flawed our national obsession with “escape-velocity” education really is.

We have inadvertently engineered a massive, state-sponsored brain drain, telling our brightest sparks that the only way to “be someone” is to abandon the communities that reared them.

If we are ever going to tackle the systemic decline of British coastal towns, we don’t just need more funding or better infrastructure - we need to completely rethink our core educational values first.

The ‘ticket out’ paradox

We’ve all seen the classic educational triumphalism.

A student from a disadvantaged seaside background gets into a top-tier university, the local newspaper takes a photo of them jumping in the air holding an A-level certificate, and the subtext is clear: “They made it out.” But what about the town they left behind?

When the education system defines success exclusively as departure, it anchors a toxic narrative into the local psyche: “If you stay, you’ve failed.” This creates a deeply bizarre paradox.

We pour resources into schools to lift children up, only to instruct the most successful ones to take their skills, their energy and their future tax contributions elsewhere.

It’s not social mobility; it’s community strip-mining. True progress requires a shift towards a “rooted” educational philosophy - one that openly states that success is not about the social mobility that leaves your roots behind.

A great education shouldn’t act as an extraction industry; it should build a young person’s agency so they have the tools to choose their future, whether that means becoming a rocket scientist or thriving in a brilliant local trade.

Celebrating local contribution

To fix our coastal communities, we have to dismantle the quiet academic snobbery that dominates the system. For too long, schools have treated vocational paths or staying local as a consolation prize - the educational equivalent of a participation trophy.

If a kid from Hastings, Torquay, Blackpool, Hull or, to be topical, Clacton wants to stay, build a business, raise a family and invest their brilliant mind back into the local economy, they shouldn’t have to navigate a subtle undercurrent of disappointment from the system.

They should be celebrated as the absolute pinnacle of what education is supposed to achieve: a life of contribution.

Responsibility beyond the school gates

Of course, keeping talent local means we also have to change how schools view their role in the wider town. You can’t tell kids to love their community if the community is actively making their childhood miserable.

Schools cannot operate as isolated islands of learning that ignore the world outside their windows. If a kid is struggling with chaotic transport, substandard housing, poor healthcare or local crime, it doesn’t matter how perfect the lesson plan is - it stops them from learning.

To rebuild these towns, educational leaders have to stick their heads above the parapet. They must actively work with communities to tackle the non-academic barriers that hold families back.

Turning the tide

Leaving your hometown can be a wonderful thing. Exploration is healthy. But it should be an option, not an unspoken prerequisite for success.

Before we can fix the economics of the coast, we have to fix the mindset of the classroom. We need to stop teaching kids that the grass is always greener on the other side of the county line.

Let’s give them the skills, the character and the sheer audacity to stay put, look at their own hometowns and say: “I’m going to make the grass greener right here.”

Hannah Carter is headteacher at Orchards Academy in Kent, part of The Kemnal Academies Trust

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