Masters Capstone Research · 2026
What is School
Actually For?
A Mixed Methods Study of Purpose Across the English Secondary School System
Schools touch 93% of the population. They are the highest-leverage institution a government has for systemic change. Yet despite decades of reform — academisation, new curricula, inspection frameworks — nobody has stopped to ask what schools currently believe their purpose is. This project did.
The Problem
There is a polycrisis. Young people are leaving school facing mental health challenges, financial precarity, a changing labour market, and a housing crisis they feel unprepared for. One million young people in the UK are currently NEET — not in education, employment, or training.
Each recent reform has been, in the words of Sam Freedman, “surface area turbulence” — incremental tinkering that never interrogates the underlying purpose. As Donella Meadows argued, to change a system, you have to change its purpose. That has never been attempted.
Background
English state education has undergone three seismic shifts: universal compulsory schooling in 1918, free secondary education for all in 1944, and the introduction of the National Curriculum, Ofsted, and league tables in 1988. Since then, reform has been continuous but shallow — what Morris and Perry call privileging the what over the why.
The result is a system where, as Biesta argues, we have come to value what can be measured rather than measure what we value. Academic qualification dominates. Socialisation happens implicitly. Subjectification — the development of genuine agency and independent thought — is an afterthought.
And by claiming neutrality, schools reproduce the very inequalities they could disrupt. As Bourdieu showed, a politically neutral institution is never truly neutral — it simply preserves the status quo.
What I Did
This project analysed how school purpose is currently constructed across two registers simultaneously — what schools say they are for, and what young people experienced them as being for.
Mission statements
300 school mission statements were collected from a stratified sample of academies, local authority maintained schools, free schools, and colleges across England. Inductive semantic frame analysis was used to identify seven purpose frames from the language schools use — without imposing a predetermined framework onto the data.
Survey
26 recent school leavers completed a survey capturing their lived experience of school purpose — what they thought school was trying to achieve, whether it succeeded, what they wished they had been taught, and what they think school should be for.
What Schools Say They’re For
The dominant frame across 300 mission statements was being equipped for the future — present in 78% of statements and the most dominant frame across every school type and deprivation band. Academic achievement and excellence formed a consistent secondary cluster. Wellbeing featured but was rarely central.
Equality and social citizenry were mentioned by just over half of schools — but were rarely important or dominant. No school articulated purpose primarily around disrupting inequity.
Purpose varied significantly by school type and faith status, but was strikingly uniform across deprivation levels. Schools serving the most and least deprived communities used broadly the same language. Mapping onto Biesta’s framework: qualification dominates, socialisation is implied, and subjectification is almost entirely absent.
What School Leavers Say School Was For
Respondents consistently described their school as oriented toward grades, qualifications, and university progression — reinforced by the survey’s Likert data, where academic achievement scored highest of all five dimensions.
Five respondents described school’s purpose as being primarily about Ofsted ratings and league tables — institutional self-interest that appears nowhere in any mission statement. Schools claim to be for students. Some students experienced them as being for themselves.
The most consistent gap between what school did and what respondents wanted was real-world preparation: financial literacy, independent living skills, and pathways beyond university — none of which feature in any mission statement in the sample.
Eleven of 26 respondents said school did not give everyone a fair chance, citing neurodiversity, race, socioeconomic background, and mental health as sources of unfairness — consistent with the Equality frame scoring second lowest across all mission statements.
The Gap
Both sources converge on achievement and future preparation as the dominant purpose orientation — but diverge significantly on what that actually means. Schools declare equipping in broad, aspirational terms. Young people experienced it as grades and a single pathway to university.
The most significant finding is not what differs between the two sources — it is what is absent from both. Equity-disrupting purpose does not feature meaningfully in what schools say they are for, or in what young people experienced. This is not a gap between aspiration and delivery. It is an absence of aspiration.
What This Means
Reform efforts that address only one register — changing mission statement language, or tweaking inspection criteria, or improving student support — are unlikely to produce coherent change, because they are not addressing the same problem.
The diagnostic this project has conducted reveals a system where declared values, lived experience, and accountability metrics point in meaningfully different directions. Purposive reform requires all three to be understood and addressed together.
This project provides a replicable method for that diagnosis. It should be a proof of concept for a national-scale exercise — one that precedes major reform rather than follows it.
What Should Come Next
Contextually differentiated purpose reform. Espoused purpose is uniform across deprivation contexts. A single national purpose framework cannot serve communities with fundamentally different starting points.
Enacted purpose as the missing strand. This project captured what schools say and what leavers experienced. What headteachers, governors, and inspection data reveal about what schools actually do remains to be examined.
Diagnosis before reform. The central argument of this project is simple: you cannot change what you have not first understood. Before the next round of structural reform, English state education needs a systematic, evidence-based account of what its schools currently believe they are for.
“If education has the ability to transform an individual’s life, school must have the capacity to transform society — but only when its purpose is clear, collaboratively produced, and meaningfully embedded.”
About me
Hi, I’m Cecilia (she/her). I’ve just finished my Masters of Arts and Science in Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods from the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). The work above constitutes my Capstone — my final research project at LIS. I sought to synthesise all the learnings from our previous modules in data science, experiments, complexity theory, what makes us human, philosophy of interdisciplinarity, and more, into one little come and get me plea for those wanting a multi-faceted, problem-solving, analytical but creative, list-loving, fresh faced graduate on their team.
If you want to get in touch, please contact me at ceciliawalexander@gmail.com. Alternatively, if you want me to be notified if you’re curious but not yet ready to email me, here’s my LinkedIn.
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