Inside the publishing industrial complex
Every few years, the curriculum changes.
New specifications are announced, old resources become obsolete, training is scheduled, textbooks are rewritten, and teachers quietly begin the work of rebuilding. The language is always familiar: rigour, standards, relevance, evidence, improvement.
But behind the rhetoric lies a quieter reality. Curriculum reform does not simply alter what pupils learn; it refreshes an entire economic ecosystem. Exam boards, publishers, training providers and digital platforms all respond to the new settlement. Schools pay. Teachers rebuild. The system moves on.
The scale of the system is often underappreciated. AQA, a registered charity, reports roughly £280 million in annual income, largely from exam fees and services. Pearson, which owns Edexcel, generates over £1.5 billion in revenue from its assessment division. Cambridge University Press & Assessment reports turnover exceeding £1 billion.
These are not marginal institutions. They sit at the centre of a system that is both educational and economic.
One may seek to discredit economic factors by highlighting a distinction between “for-profit” and “non-profit” organisations. But this distinction obscures more than it reveals. Even where profits are not distributed to shareholders, surplus is still absorbed into salaries, pensions, infrastructure, product development and organisational growth. The absence of shareholders does not mean the absence of incentive.
Reform does not just change what is taught. It refreshes markets.
It would be too crude to imagine this as a conspiracy. The reality is more ordinary—and more revealing. These organisations operate within the same policy ecosystem. The Department for Education sets priorities. Regulators such as Ofqual consult. Exam boards respond. Publishers anticipate demand. International bodies like the International Baccalaureate redesign their programmes periodically.
This is not hidden. It is how the system functions. - a relatively tight institutional world in which the same kinds of actors repeatedly define problems, design solutions and supply the means to implement them.
What makes this system work, however, is not just money. It is labour.
Every reform cycle requires teachers to rewrite schemes of work, recreate lessons, relearn assessment frameworks and retrain students. This labour is largely unpaid, rarely acknowledged and structurally expected. Teachers become, in effect, the invisible workforce of curriculum renewal.
In this respect their work begins to resemble Winston Smith’s desk at the Ministry of Truth: when yesterday’s settled version arrives back for correction, and the machinery must be brought into alignment with the newest directive. The work is urgent and exacting, yet oddly weightless. Nothing fundamental has changed; nevertheless, everything must be rewritten.
The problem with expensive time-consuming piecemeal tinkering is sharpened when we consider the bigger picture: how little of what is taught in educational settings is retained in the long term. Bryan Caplan argues that much school knowledge is forgotten, even as qualifications retain their value. If this is even partly true, then reform does not solve the problem of forgetting. It merely changes what teachers must make pupils temporarily remember. The system demands enormous effort for outcomes that are often short-lived.
None of this means education lacks value. On the contrary, its most important effects are often intangible. A good lesson can spark curiosity, build confidence, or change how a student sees the world. These are difficult to measure, slow to emerge and resistant to standardised assessment.
Yet the system increasingly focuses on what can be quantified: grades, progress scores, data points.
We reform what we can measure, and neglect what actually endures.
There is also a more uncomfortable truth—one that helps explain why constant tinkering is tolerated in the first place. Schools are not only institutions of learning; they are part of the infrastructure of modern society. They supervise children, enable dual-income households, stabilise the labour market and process entire cohorts of young people.
One adult with thirty children is not just a pedagogical arrangement. It is a social and economic necessity.
This matters because it explains why reform can proliferate without destabilising the system. The core function of schooling does not break when the curriculum changes. The school day still runs. Children are still supervised. The system continues to function.
Because that underlying role is secure, the surface can be endlessly adjusted.
Reform signals seriousness. It suggests responsiveness and improvement. But it also risks becoming performative: the machinery must appear to improve, even when its underlying purpose remains unchanged.
Teachers sit at the centre of all of this. They implement reform, absorb workload and maintain continuity for students. Yet they have limited influence over the direction or frequency of change, and no share in the system’s financial flows.
They are the shock absorbers of the education system—expected to carry the impact of change without altering its direction.
Curriculum reform is not inherently misguided. Change can be necessary. But the current model raises serious questions. How much reform is genuinely educational, and how much is structural? Who benefits from constant change? What is the cumulative cost to teacher labour? And are we optimising for learning, or for measurable outputs?
Until these questions are confronted, the cycle will continue.
New specifications. New resources. New training.
And the same hidden cost.