There is a pupil who appears regularly in staffroom conversations. By Year 7, they can read independently, explain an idea in writing and remember everything taught at primary school.
At 16, they know how to revise without being chased. At 18, they can use feedback, weigh evidence and organise a long piece of work. On arrival at university, they understand what lecturers mean by “critical thinking”.
I have never met this pupil. They do remarkably well in meetings, though.
Throughout my career as a secondary English teacher, then working across further and higher education, I have heard “Why don’t they already know this?” multiple times.
I have also asked it myself, in frustration, when realising that something I had taken for granted needs to be taught, after all.
In schools, the teacher we believe to be responsible for this gap might work just down the corridor. In a university, the blame might fall on schools. But is anyone really to blame?
The evolution of instruction
Let’s consider the instruction “use evidence”.
A school student might have to select a quotation and explain how it supports an interpretation. At university, that same student might be expected to weigh competing research claims. Later, as a new graduate, they might be asked by their employer to make a recommendation with incomplete information and explain its consequences.
At any point in this chain, if the individual is not able to effectively complete the task, it’s easy to assume that’s because they weren’t taught to “use evidence” well enough at the stage before.
We often treat a student’s uncertainty about our task as evidence that nobody taught them the earlier one. But while the instruction to use evidence has stayed the same, the specifics of the task have changed.
For example, the sixth-former who revised independently for demanding exams may still need help deciding what to do when there is no agreed answer. That does not mean they have not been taught independence, but that they just need a little support to transfer that skill to a new context.
Teach the change you find
Increasingly, learning journeys are not straightforward. Students meet ideas in lessons and lectures, but also through work, friends, videos, internet searches and AI tools. Some of what they find is excellent; some is confidently wrong. Making sense of it calls for knowledge, attention and judgement, often before a student knows enough to recognise what is missing.
It is quite a lot to expect someone to pick up unaided between one timetable and the next.
Employers tell us graduates lack the skills they need, and some complaints point to genuine gaps. But before declaring one, we could ask a student what they understand by words like “analyse”, “independent” or “professional”, and ask the person who last taught them what those words meant in their setting.
We might discover a missing skill. We might discover a skill hiding under a different name. Either answer is more useful than a complaint passed down the corridor.
Here is a modest place to start. Take one assignment students commonly find difficult. Put it beside an example of work they did in their previous setting. Ask students what they recognise, what seems different and which instructions leave them guessing. Talk to someone who taught the earlier work. Then teach the change you have found.
The mythical student we alluded to in meetings will never arrive. The students in front of us already have. We could spend rather less time asking why someone else has not finished teaching them and get on with teaching them ourselves.
Joanne Irving-Walton is principal lecturer (learning and teaching) in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law at Teesside University.
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