20 Minutes Past The Hour, Page 7: Inside The UK’s Scripted Teaching Takeover

EXETER, England — Science teacher “PF” had been in the classroom for over 25 years when administrators announced a new rule: everyone would teach the same lessons, the same way, at the same time.

Reflecting on that experience in a recent study authored by Dr. Victoria Wong of the University of Exeter, PF explained there were two possible approaches to implementing curriculum change: “One is you spend a lot of time with the science department tooling them up, discussing things, getting a mutual support environment going, or you just tell them what to do.”

PF said their school chose the second, and ultimately left teaching.

Wong’s study of 15 highly experienced science teachers in England reveals policies requiring teachers to deliver identical lessons at identical times, stripping away the professional judgment and creativity that many say makes teaching effective. The findings, published in The Curriculum Journal, suggest these conformity policies are deeply demotivating teachers and may be fueling the ongoing retention crisis.

The Extreme End Of ‘Consistency’

Teachers reported colleagues in other schools saying they “couldn’t put that in” or “wouldn’t be allowed to put that in” when learning new teaching ideas during professional development. The reason? They must use prescribed PowerPoints and booklets.

“Sadly, to the extent of ‘at 20 past the hour, we’ve all got to be on page seven of the booklet,'” one participating teacher reported, describing policies at other institutions.

Another teacher, identified as “PL” in the study, described a future that “makes my blood run cold”: schools trending toward “everybody delivering exactly the same PowerPoint at exactly the same time.”

Multiple teachers across different schools reported increased pressure to conform to centrally planned lessons, with some facing disciplinary action if they deviated from prescribed materials. The policies range from mandated lesson structures requiring specific activities at specific times to prescribed curricula where teachers have no input into what they teach or how they teach it.

When Teaching Feels Like A Script

For teachers who’ve spent decades honing their craft, the conformity requirements feel dehumanizing.

“You need to have a level of ownership somehow in what you’re telling the children,” said “CPA,” one of the study participants. “Otherwise, you could be replaced by an avatar.”

“PMA” contrasted scripted teaching with what they believe teaching should be: “A human being talking to human beings, which is what it always ought to be.”

The 15 teachers interviewed, all with at least 25 years of classroom experience, strongly rejected the idea of teaching as a technical task that can be standardized. Instead, they described teaching as relational and creative, requiring professional judgment about the specific students in front of them.

Yet many described working in or knowing of schools that treat teaching as deliverable through scripts and slides, with the teacher simply as a conduit rather than a professional.

What Gets Lost: Engagement And Expertise In The Classroom

Teachers in the study described creative approaches that engaged both them and their students. PMD recently redesigned physics lessons around “Barbie the parachutist and Barbie the bungee jumper.”

“There’s nothing more motivating than parachuting lots of Barbie dolls off the top of the science building and videoing them and they love that,” PMD explained. “We still get all the curriculum in, but they’re enthused.”

“CF” described using storytelling, whiteboards, and tiddlywinks to teach lower-achieving students about electrons. For students who struggle with writing, these hands-on approaches made abstract concepts concrete.

In schools with strict conformity policies, teachers said such creative lessons become impossible. When every teacher must follow the same PowerPoint slides in the same order, there’s no room for parachuting Barbies or kinesthetic modeling.

PMA explained their teaching philosophy: “My aim in all my lessons has been to interest me, because if I’m not interested, why should anybody else be? If you’re lucky, that comes across.”

When teachers lose the ability to teach topics that interest them in ways that match their strengths, both teacher and student motivation suffer.

The Myth of One ‘Best Way’ to Teach

School leaders often justify conformity policies by arguing there must be a “best way” to teach each concept, and once identified, everyone should use it.

PL, who described facing pressure to accept this logic, pushed back: “I don’t think there is a best way. I think that’s a false assumption. I think what’s best for one class with one teacher is very, very different to what’s best for another class with another teacher.”

The same teacher might legitimately use different approaches for different classes, PL noted, but “I don’t get invited to justify it.”

This exclusion of experienced teachers from curriculum decisions represents a significant shift. Research from the 1980s found that headteachers typically left curriculum and pedagogy decisions to department heads, recognizing their subject expertise. The current study shows that dynamic has reversed in many schools, with curriculum and teaching methods now dictated by school leadership or even academy trust directors overseeing multiple schools.

Some decisions, participating teachers reported, came from administrators who they said had never taught science, applying generic teaching strategies across all subjects without recognizing that effective approaches often differ between subjects.

The belief that research can definitively identify “what works” drives many of these policies. But teaching is relational, the teachers argued. What works depends on the teacher, the students, the context, and countless other variables that can’t be controlled or standardized.

The Teaching Inspection Pressure in the UK

Teachers pointed to England’s school inspection system, Ofsted, as contributing to conformity pressure. When inspectors ask how schools ensure “consistency across your team,” BA noted, some school leaders interpret this as requiring identical resources and delivery.

The confusion between consistency of quality and conformity of practice appears widespread. Schools seeking to demonstrate quality assurance to inspectors often default to requiring all teachers to use identical materials.

Whether Ofsted actually requires such conformity remains unclear. The study documents teacher perceptions rather than verified mandates, but these perceptions among school leaders drive policy decisions that deeply impact classroom teachers.

Exodus of Classroom Experience

The study documented three teachers who left either their school or the profession entirely due to conformity policies. PF was one. “I found it very difficult for a number of years because I could see better ways of doing things. I’m not very good at being told what I have to do if I think there’s a better way.”

Several other teachers indicated they would not stay in schools that imposed similar restrictions, describing themselves as “lucky” to work in institutions where they maintained professional autonomy.

CF, whose school allowed significant teacher freedom, expressed amazement at the restrictions colleagues faced elsewhere. Despite having “three lesson observations this term” and acknowledging “a lot of checking up,” CF and other experienced teachers at the school resisted mandated practices like required retrieval practice in the first 10 minutes of every lesson.

That school, CF noted, bucks national trends: “It’s not generally what you’re seeing nationally with teacher recruitment; we are fully staffed in physics teachers, chemistry teachers, biology teachers.”

A connection between teacher autonomy and retention appears in the data. While the study shows correlation rather than direct causation, the pattern holds: schools that trust teachers retain them. Schools that script their every move lose them.

The Next Generation Never Learns to Teach

Beyond driving experienced teachers away, conformity policies create another problem: new teachers never learn to design effective lessons.

When beginning teachers work in highly prescriptive schools, they learn to deliver someone else’s lessons but not to create their own. They never develop the professional judgment that comes from planning, trying, adjusting, and trying again.

“BA,” a department head anticipating retirements, recognized this problem: “You forget, actually, how [planning] is a massive thing for them to get their head around.”

“CK” described trying to encourage teachers to adapt central resources for their students, comparing prescribed lessons to karaoke: “We’ve produced a really good song, but me singing is not going to be the same as Ed Sheeran singing one of his hits.”

But in schools where adaptation isn’t allowed or encouraged, teachers never develop the confidence or skills to go off-script. The profession gradually loses the expertise needed to design effective teaching. Eventually, schools are left with no choice but to buy scripted curricula because no one on staff knows how to create lessons anymore.

The cycle perpetuates itself: conformity policies lead to deskilled teachers, which leads to more need for prescribed curricula, which leads to more conformity.

Why This Matters Beyond England

Although this study focused on science teachers in England, the findings reach further. The U.S. faces similar teacher retention challenges, and the underlying motivation theory applies across subjects and countries.

According to self-determination theory, people need three things to maintain intrinsic motivation: autonomy (independence to make decisions), competence (feeling capable and effective), and relatedness (connection to others). When any of these needs is threatened, motivation plummets.

Conformity policies undermine all three. They remove autonomy by dictating exactly what teachers do. They prevent teachers from demonstrating competence by removing opportunities for professional judgment. And they can damage relationships with students when teachers can’t adapt lessons to student needs.

Dr. Wong argues that while the research focused on experienced science teachers, the motivation theory suggests the demotivating effects of restrictive policies likely extend to less experienced teachers and those teaching other subjects.

The Real Cost of Time-Saving

Supporters of centralized curricula point to legitimate benefits. Collaborative planning saves time compared to every teacher creating lessons independently. Shared resources can give teachers access to high-quality materials.

Teachers in the study acknowledged these advantages. They valued working together to create department-wide curricula that saved time and ensured coverage of required content.

The difference, teachers emphasized, was whether they had input in creating those resources and freedom to adapt them for their students. Collaborative creation builds skills and ownership. Being handed a script and told to follow it does neither.

“The message is that we are giving you a template,” CK explained about their school’s approach. “You’ve got to decide whether that is appropriate for the pupils you have in front of you. And absolutely, they can modify it.”

But PF contrasted this developmental approach with the shortcut: it takes less time to tell someone what to do than to “spend a lot of time with the science department tooling them up, discussing things, getting a mutual support environment going.”

The time-saving is real. But so is the cost. When schools take the shortcut, they lose experienced teachers who refuse to be told what to do. They create new teachers who never learn to think for themselves. And they sacrifice the engaging, effective lessons that come from experienced professionals adapting to their students.

A Crisis Getting Worse

England is experiencing a teacher retention crisis, with fewer than 60 percent of teachers still in the profession 10 years after qualifying. For physics teachers specifically, about half leave within five years. Government recruitment targets for physics teachers have been missed every year for a decade.

Limited autonomy significantly reduces physics teacher job satisfaction, previous research has found. This study provides insight into one source of that limited autonomy: school and academy trust policies requiring conformity.

Wong notes that policies reducing teacher motivation should be of serious concern during a retention crisis. When schools can’t staff positions with subject specialists, students suffer. Some English schools now have no physics specialist teachers at all, which research suggests leads to fewer students choosing to study the subject after age 16.

The bottom line: at 20 minutes past the hour, on page seven of the booklet, schools may be efficiently delivering lessons. But they’re losing the teachers who made teaching an art rather than a script.

Twenty-five years of experience suggested to PF that there was a better way. The school said: page seven at 20 minutes past the hour. PF walked away.