“He knows changes aren’t permanent, but change is.” Some song lyrics can grab us as soon as we hear them, and this line from Rush’s Tom Sawyer did just that. Even as a teenager I got it, but now as an adult it has become even more profound. Now, having been in teaching for 20 years these lyrics have come to represent one of the greatest frustrations of my professional life. The days are the same, still 24 hours long with 6 of them dedicated to helping shape (educationally, and increasingly socially) the young people in our care. This is the same time I had as a child, sat in a classroom in the frozen north (Manchester) watching and listening as my teachers scrawled across their squeaky chalkboards. That was many decades ago. My teachers wouldn’t recognise my job. In the same length of a day we’ve squeezed in all the new technologies (computers didn’t even exist “back in the day”), new subjects (I certainly never learned a second language in primary school), health topics once unthought of (puberty, mental health, safety…), not to mention the ever changing, expanding and evolving English and Math’s subjects. Sadly, we also have to pick up the tab for teaching the types of social behaviours, manners and expectations that society now deems the duty of schools. A friend of mine blamed his teacher for not teaching his child to read the time (I remained quiet), a commentator on the news blamed education for falling short on racial history topics, while another friend of mine moaned the school hadn’t taught her child to catch a ball. Not everything in life has yet, thankfully, been designated a School Only topic, it is, though, perceived that way by some. I’m lucky, I have parents teaching their kids to tell the time, about Jewish history, about the World Wars, the love of family reading time, about multiculturalism and acceptance, about the wonder of science and nature, about conservation and the climate. They’re doing this at home, going into more depth than at all possible in a time ravaged classroom. And although they’re being done at home, it isn’t work – it’s love, nurture and an understanding that the time we all take to invest in our children will pay dividends to the world as a whole. Education has changed and we all have to change with it, as the changes will just keep coming, relentlessly.