John Bazalgette's Critique of Recent Education Policy Proposals
John Bazalgette says that the schools’ hidden curriculum transmits crucial lessons about power, hierarchy, and belonging through unspoken rules and institutional structures rather than through formal teaching.
Drawing on his own schooling experiences across three radically different educational contexts—two Venezuelan day schools and the UK’s Tonbridge boarding school—Bazalgette distinguishes between 'education' (formal curriculum content) and 'schooling' (the implicit formation process).
His central thesis is that whilst knowledge and skills can be taught consciously and lodge in students' minds, the understanding of power and institutional authority is learned intuitively through the lived experience and becomes embedded in hearts, ultimately shaping both individual identity and the collective capacity for democratic citizenship.
Bazalgette explains how elite institutions have long understood and deliberately structured themselves to form leaders who will reproduce the existing power hierarchies, using concepts like ‘school spirit’ as an intangible glue that binds school members whilst remaining deliberately undefined to evade scrutiny.
His Venezuelan experience, particularly witnessing how authoritarian regimes suppressed democratic initiatives that threatened established power structures, provides a crucial lens for understanding why genuine educational reform faces resistance.
His father's progressive welfare initiatives at Shell Oil—encompassing health, education, training, and social services—were systematically dismantled by the military junta who perceived them as dangerously ‘communist’, precisely because these programmes would empower ordinary people and thereby threaten existing hierarchical control. This taught Bazalgette that those determined to retain past hierarchies will invariably mobilise force, whether military or institutional, to suppress democratic change.
Any reform that would expose and democratise this educational formation process, making conscious and available to all students what has been secretly provided to a few, represents a fundamental a threat to existing power arrangements as did his father's welfare initiatives did to the Venezuelan military regime.
The Venezuelan experience thus reveals that resistance to educational reform is not merely pedagogical conservatism but a protective response by those who understand that true reform of formation processes—not just curriculum content—would fundamentally alter who holds power in the next generation and how they exercise it.
The relevance to Professor Francis's Curriculum and Assessment Review becomes particularly acute in Bazalgette's critique that, despite promising steps towards practical, life-ready skills and enhanced citizenship education, the Review perpetuates a fundamental misunderstanding by assuming everything necessary can be contained within the taught curriculum.
Bazalgette argues that whilst the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has articulated that ‘every child should learn to belong,’ the Review fails to address how schools actually teach belonging—not through curriculum content but through daily navigation of institutional power structures. This gap between rhetoric and reality is especially significant given the Electoral Commission's 2025 proposal to lower the voting age to sixteen, making power literacy not merely desirable but urgent for democratic society.
Bazalgette's prescription for reform transcends adding citizenship to the curriculum, demanding instead a fundamental restructuring of power relationships within schools themselves—how decisions are made, responsibility distributed, conflicts resolved, and how young people experience and learn to exercise authority.
He contends that to resist the gravitational pull toward authoritarianism resurgent globally, schools must consciously design structures that nurture ‘strong democrats’—young people formed through experience to exercise accountable power, inspire rather than coerce, and build institutions resilient enough to accommodate dissent. Until educational reform addresses formation rather than merely curriculum—exposing and democratising the hidden curriculum that truly shapes young people—it will continue to miss the Education Secretary's real intention of creating active citizens capable of understanding and shaping power dynamics rather than being unconsciously shaped by them.