Teach Until They Can’t Get It Wrong

This is a follow-up to the talk I gave at ResearchEd Bournemouth yesterday. My thanks to all those who came along, asked thoughtful questions, and shared such good spirits on a Saturday morning. I thought it might be useful to capture the themes we explored together – about depth, permanence, and what it truly means to learn – in a short blog post.

In schools across Britain, a quiet tragedy unfolds daily. Pupils answer questions correctly. Teachers smile. Books are marked. Lessons move on.

The problem?

Most of those pupils will soon forget what they assumed they had learned. The mistake is familiar: we confuse performance with learning, and rehearsal with reliability. But performance is fleeting, and we must go far beyond this, to a mature grasp of an idea, before moving on.

Modern schooling is riddled with premature satisfaction. Too often, the benchmark for mastery is a single correct answer, offered once, with recency and cue, under ideal conditions, and swiftly forgotten. This is an all-too-common mistake. Schools should not aim for pupils to get things right. They should aim for pupils to not be able to get things wrong.

This is not a pedant’s quibble. It is the difference between performance and reliability, between pupils who stumble across the right answer and those who carry it with them, robust and stress-tested, wherever they go. The latter is what matters because we know fragile knowledge buckles under pressure. A multiplication fact, for example, known only in quiet, familiar moments is no help to the pupil later navigating a complex problem. Fluency, by contrast, is what remains when attention is elsewhere. As I have often written, fluency is the ability to perform without the need to attend. It is knowledge so well embedded that it withstands distraction.

To achieve such fluency, and ultimately elite performance, teachers must resist the temptation to move on quickly.

Real learning is rarely convenient. It is layered. It is effortful. It is slow. But it is lasting.

Learning occurs over time and pupils pass through phases of enlightenment. From awareness through inflexibility and flexibility, then on to automaticity, fluency, connectivity, and finally maturity, each phase strengthens the learner’s grasp until the knowledge is no longer at risk.

It begins with the naïve encounter: the first exposure to an idea, often forgotten within hours unless it is nurtured.  We do this through storytelling, bringing about an awareness of the new idea by building a bridge from the ideas pupils already know: patterns start to emerge, interest is piqued, and surprise glimmers. But this is just the beginning.

Then comes acquisition, where pupils rehearse, recall, and rework. This is where too many curricula race ahead. A few correct answers are mistaken for mastery. The class moves on, leaving knowledge unformed. But if we linger, if we rehearse with care, pupils begin to accumulate control. Representations sharpen. Misconceptions fade. Performance becomes stable under ideal conditions.

Then, with further deliberate practice, comes fluency. Pupils respond correctly, even under strain, which is why a state of fluency is liberating: it creates space in the mind for further learning.

Beyond fluency lies a maturity of understanding. Pupils make connections and become empowered to generate new ideas, applying their knowledge in unfamiliar contexts.

This progression is not fanciful. It is achievable. But it demands time, precision, and the courage to stick with an idea in the face of a scheme of work that urges us to move on. Unfortunately, too much schooling is designed around coverage, not competence. Teachers are judged on the pace at which they progress through content, rather than the security of what they leave behind. The result is predictable: inflated grades, deflated understanding, and pupils ill-equipped for anything beyond the next test.

We should reject this urgency and instead aspire for all pupils to acquire a level of elite performance with every idea they grapple with.

I know this term unsettles some educators. “Elite” sounds exclusionary. But that is to misunderstand my meaning. Elite performance is not about privilege. It is not fixed or innate. It is simply the level of reliability appropriate to the idea in question.

For a five-year-old learning to count in twos, reliable recall is elite performance. For a heart surgeon, a 90% success rate would be grounds for litigation. Context matters. Some knowledge, such as times tables, phonics, basic operations, and sentence structure, must be completely or very nearly error-free because so much future learning rests on its security. More peripheral knowledge may tolerate a small error rate. But even here, performance should be deliberate, not accidental.

This is not about perfectionism. It is about respect. Respect for the child’s future. Respect for the ideas themselves. And respect for the craft of teaching.

Modern education policy confuses expectation with pressure. To insist that all children can reach elite performance, given enough time and expert teaching, is deemed unrealistic. In reality, it is the only ethical position. Allowing children to progress with fragile knowledge – because expecting more is considered harsh – is the real cruelty. It ensures they will struggle with every idea that follows.

This is why we should design our curriculum backwards from permanence. Not from the thin satisfaction of a green tick, but from the deep confidence that what has been learned will last. That it will fuel future learning, not impede it.

And the moral case is strongest for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. For these children, school may be the only place where they encounter the language, structures, and ideas that grant access to wider society. If we do not insist on depth, permanence, and reliability, no one else will. To demand less of these pupils is not kindness – it is neglect.

This is why I urge teachers to resist premature satisfaction. To treat a correct answer not as an endpoint, but as an opening. To understand that practice is not punishment – it is preparation. When pupils practise until they cannot get it wrong, they are no longer at the mercy of mood, fatigue, or distraction. They own the knowledge. This should be the goal of our teaching.

Elite performance should not be rare. It should be routine. Not because we demand perfection, but because we understand what real learning requires and we refuse to stop short.

Learning is not limitless because there is infinite content to cover. It is limitless because, when properly formed, the human mind is capable of extraordinary things. But only if we teach with patience, precision, and purpose.

We owe it to our pupils to make elite performance ordinary. Not by lowering the bar, but by ensuring no child is left without the deep, lasting knowledge they need to flourish.