Public First conducted a public opinion research project for Kialo on critical thinking and oracy to discover whether there is public appetite for changes to the education system that would place greater emphasis on these skills.

There is widespread support among parents for schools to allocate more teaching time to improving critical thinking and communication skills in children. Parents want teachers to incorporate these skills into existing subjects to balance teaching subject-based content with skills like critical thinking and communication, however they generally don’t know what teaching and assessing these skills would look like.

Our key findings were:

• Government budget cuts in staffing and education is widely considered one of the most important issues currently affecting schools. This was followed by bullying and children’s mental health in schools (33%), attracting high quality teaching staff into the profession (24%), and the absence of real-life skills (23%).
• Parents believe that teaching skills like critical thinking is just as important as teaching subject-based content. We found that 61% of parents believe that they are just as important, with 23% reporting that teaching subjects like maths, science and English is more important. However, only 12% of respondents believe that skills like creativity, critical thinking and teamwork are more important than teaching subjects-based content.
• There is widespread support for teaching communication skills but parents lack awareness of the associated terminology. 60% said they believe improving children’s communication skills is one of the most important things that schools should provide, but only 16% said they could explain what “oracy” was, while 58% said they had never heard the term. On the other hand, 17% said they could explain “tutorialism” – a fake term – and another 28% said they had heard of it.
• A majority of parents believe the purpose of schools is to equip children with practical training so they can succeed in the “real world.” Parents agree that the most important things for schools to provide are communication skills (60%), confidence (59%), and preparation for the world of work (56%).
• Private schools are perceived to perform better across every category, however parents generally do not believe that children who are privately educated are any better prepared for life after school than children who are state educated. Parents with children in state school would rather send their children to private school if they could afford it (47%, with 20% saying they definitely would send them to private school).
• Parents widely agree that children need dedicated teaching in critical thinking skills at all levels of schooling, alongside traditional subjects, but that not enough time is allocated for it. Nearly two-thirds of parents (62%) believe there should be dedicated time to teaching critical thinking during subject lessons more than once a week, with 17% saying critical thinking skills should be taught in every lesson. However, nearly two-thirds of parents (65%) feel that teachers are unable to facilitate discussion and debate because they are required to cover so much subject-based content.
• There are many perceived advantages of incorporating critical thinking into school curriculums, in particular improving decision-making (61%), developing more well-rounded children (52%), improving communication and debating skills (52%), and helping children in the working world (52%). Despite these benefits, parents are relatively unsure what teaching critical thinking actually looks like (20%) and are concerned that teachers are currently not prepared to teach critical thinking (31%).

Methodology

Public First ran a nationally representative poll of 1,004 parents of school-aged children in England in January 2024 to understand the scale of people’s opinions towards the current state of education in the UK and, more specifically, their views on critical thinking.

We also ran four focus groups on Thursday 11th and Thursday 18th January. All participants in these groups were parents with children in state school.

Read the full report here.