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.
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.
