The Department for Education has recently published its new Enrichment Framework, promising every child an entitlement to culture, sport and time outdoors. It joins a long line of similar papers, most recently the Every Child Achieving and Thriving White Paper. Each one adds another commitment to the page. None of them asks what the page is actually for.
What’s the point?
Start with the end in mind. Strip away the framework language, the accountability metrics and the inspection criteria, and the real goal of schooling is a simple one to state.
Young people who leave school are healthy in mind and body, able to earn a living and build a life that works for them.
Measured against that goal, the current system is failing in ways that are easy to count. Around 15% of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training — close to a million young people. A single permanent exclusion costs the state somewhere between £170,000 and £370,000 over a lifetime, once you account for lost earnings, benefits, healthcare and the justice system.
Both figures are describing the same thing: a school system that sidelines children who don’t fit a narrow academic lens, then pays for it later somewhere else in the public purse.
Government policy still files drama, art, music and sport under “enrichment,” a word that does a lot of quiet damage. It implies garnish or a bolt-on. Something added once the real work of the academic curriculum is done.
This is backwards.
Research consistently links participation in these activities to higher achievement and stronger socio-emotional skills, yet access is wildly uneven. Pupils in the most deprived schools are offered far less choice than those in wealthy areas, and in some high-poverty schools the only club on offer is breakfast club. We are treating the discovery of passion as a luxury good when it is actually doing real cognitive work for every child who gets access to it.
The mechanism matters
A child who spends hundreds of hours getting better at football learns, in a way no lesson can teach directly, that effort produces mastery.
Self-efficacy (the belief in one’s own capacity to achieve) is reliably linked to academic performance, in some studies more consistently than raw IQ. And crucially, it transfers. A child who has proved to themselves they can master something hard is more likely to keep going when a classroom task gets difficult.
We shouldn’t be teaching English and Maths so that children are allowed to play. We should be using play to build the cognitive tools that make English and Maths possible.
The world is changing in ways that make this more urgent, not less. The value of a university degree is under more scrutiny than at any point in recent memory. Growing numbers of young people no longer see exam grades as a reliable route to financial independence or a fulfilling life. The educators who are responding to that reality aren’t abandoning academic rigour. Instead, they are connecting learning to the lives their students actually want to lead, and finding that engagement, when it’s genuine, does the heavy lifting when exam season arrives.
The system sees the wrong things
Some of this is about how schools see children, not just what they teach them. Primary teachers tend to know a child’s wider strengths because they spend the day with one class. Secondary schools lose that view almost by design, encountering pupils through the narrow lens of whichever subject is in front of them. That shift coincides with a measurable drop in self-efficacy and psychological safety during the transition to Year 7, which is exactly the point children most need to feel they are more than a set of predicted grades.
None of this is something a school can fix by itself. Schools have been asked to absorb the work of social workers, counsellors and youth services without the staffing or budget that would make that sustainable, while the public services that should sit around the family are overstretched and too often working in isolation from the school. Fixing this is a shared responsibility between schools, parents, employers and health services. This certainly isn’t a checklist that any single institution can tick off alone.
When the rubber hits the road
There is an economic version of this argument too. Businesses need people who can pass exams, but they need teamwork, communication and problem-solving just as much. A curriculum built with the local labour market in mind tends to produce both academic results and employable adults as a byproduct of getting the bigger goal right.
The economist John Kay made a related point in his book Obliquity. He argues that complex goals are often reached more reliably by approaching them indirectly than by aiming at them head-on. A system obsessed with the colours of exam grades misses how the values, contrasts and shades contribute to a masterful painting.
So what’s enriching?
A young person should leave school certain of their strengths, clear on what they’re good at, and equipped with the cognitive resources to make good decisions under pressure. That’s not a description of an exam result. It’s a description of a person and, right now, the system is still designed to produce the former and hope that the latter will follow.
Whether enrichment benchmarks shift that is an open question. But one thing that I am sure of is that young people who are healthy in mind and body, and able to earn a living, will continue to build lives around their passions, which may or may not include football.
These “enrichment” activities will never be viewed as bolt-ons to lives worth living.
We have English and Maths for that.