Education is in crisis. It has been for a long time.
Per pupil funding continues to decline in real terms, children and young people face an unprecedented mental health crisis with emotional based school non-attendence becoming a national problem, school buildings are falling apart and incapable of coping with a worsening climate, we are struggling to recruit and retain teachers, and the social contract that offers well paid work for a good education has been broken.
The last few years have brought a succession of policy announcements, research projects, taskforces and most recently, new announcements about ‘a major shakeup’ to the entire Special Educational Needs system, all positioned as solutions to the crises we have outlined. The SEN system has had more media air-time in the past year than we’ve seen in the preceding decade. This largely draws on the experiences of children and families as they navigate a system that in practice, is predicated on families battling against a complex bureaucratic system in order to gain legal and financial protections for their children. This all within a crumbling system that doesn’t work for them or the professionals that work within it.
Regardless of the latest policy announcement, directive, budget decision, or composition of the newest expert group, one thing has steadfastly remained entirely predictable – the response of our professional bodies who repeatedly strike a tone whereby they cautiously welcome these new developments, despite the fact things keep getting worse.
We are going to refer to this phenomenon as the ‘cautious optimism’ paradox, whereby, no matter how bad things get, many of those that work within liberal institutions tend towards optimism about proposed changes.
Broadly, we want to reflect on why we shouldn’t be cautiously optimistic, why the time and structural arrangements for cautious optimism have long disappeared, and what not being cautiously optimistic can offer.
What’s so funny about peace, love, and ‘cautious optimism’?
Imagine your boss delivers a rousing speech about a workplace restructure. They’re going to do more with less. Efficiencies will be made and quality of outcomes will increase. You’ll love it! Your motivation will increase, team bonding will be strengthened, and they’ll even arrange subscriptions to the latest mindfulness app. Besides, these are vital changes to protect us from job losses and this is definitely not being raised as a veiled threat to justify change. Beyond the articulation of the vague vision you don’t hear any mention of additional funding to achieve these aspirations. There’s no workforce plan as far as you can see. There’s no reference to organisational rules and policies that will need to change and certainly no obvious explanation of how implementation will happen… are you feeling cautiously optimistic reading that?
Have you instead been through this process several times before, with each instance salami slicing away a bit more of your professional autonomy, or your workplace rights, or the time you have to spend at leisure or with family? Are your stress levels spiking because it’s a workplace scenario that’s pretty close to home?
At the micro level we know that, if a colleague described how they were ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the proposed changes, we’d rightly be asking, ‘Cautiously optimistic about what!?’. We might ask them, if there is no plausible pathway from the current situation to the promised outcome, whether their optimism is cautious or merely deluded?
At the macro level, we see the template above again and again. With alarming predictability, vague promises and aspirations from the government are met with cautious optimism from our professional psychological bodies. From our own bubble of educational psychology we’ve seen cautious optimism be deployed in response to:
- ‘funding to train more EPs’ (even though it’s the same number that it has been for several years)
- better and more child centred statutory educational protection (even though it sits alongside billions in reduced higher needs spending)
- More recently the ‘Experts at Hand’ model to support EPs and other specialist services to work more preventatively (even though EPs are overwhelmed with statutory report writing).
So…why? We might hypothesise that these organisations want to appear constructive and avoid being dismissed as oppositional. The incentive might be characterised as wanting to ‘keep a seat at the table’ with the government.
The argument set out by ‘cautious optimists’ is that this is an entirely reasonable stance to take because constructive engagement matters, but… There are a few critical considerations we need to make here. Firstly, there is no empirical evidence that constructive engagement with government has benefitted the public at large over the last ~20 years In fact, it is quite the opposite as things just keep getting worse and the ‘cautiously optimistic’ approach becomes part of the process of decline.
Constructive engagement might have appeared like the reasonable option when institutions broadly functioned (though we’d argue there was never a time that they weren’t engaged in some form of oppression or other), but in 2026 these institutions are becoming increasingly authoritarian, oppressive (to the point of dehumanisation for certain populations), and nationalistic. We could soon be expecting them to be led by a Reform government. Are we going to be ‘cautiously optimistic’ about that?
On the contrary, where we have seen real benefits for children, families, and public sector workers is where actual conflict has broken out in the form of strike-action and other resistance from trade unions, child protests, and public demonstrations.
Over the past ten years many of the issues that EPs care about have worsened. Children’s mental health has declined, school exclusion remains high (particularly for the most marginalised), teachers leave their profession in droves, and authoritarian behavioural approaches in schools have become normalised and even celebrated.
There has to be a point where we assess whether our strategies for influencing government are effective. When outcomes are declining, and proposals are inadequate, is ‘cautious optimism’ us sacrificing influence for access and status?
This isn’t us arguing for an end to professional relationships with the government. It is us arguing that we should measure success in terms of how well policy allows us to realise our theoretical and practice based ethics. Not treat the maintenance of those relationships as evidence of success in and of itself.
The other reason why we think ‘cautious optimism’ is often the default is that professional bodies can avoid making any type of falsifiable statement or prediction. Cautious optimism commits us to nothing. The policy’s a success… we were optimistic. The policy failed… we were cautious. Politically this is safe, because there’s no meaningful analysis, but it does create a credibility problem. If every policy announcement is met with cautious optimism, members of our professional bodies have a right to question the nature and extent of any analysis or evaluation.
You can only make change if you see things as they are… or, making the case that realism is not negativity
We’d like to argue that a new type of optimism is needed, and it needs situating within a broader critical analysis of reality – what Antonio Gramsci called ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. By employing intellectual rigour in our critical analysis we are able to gain an accurate understanding of the problems we face, to see things as they are. For Gramsci, optimism is still needed, but as ‘optimism of the will’, a faith in human agency to address social problems once we have accurately identified them.
In our professional work we would identify strengths and skills, yes, but we would also hypothesise about the problem situation by developing an understanding of the processes, mechanisms, and systems involved. If we were merely ‘cautiously optimistic’ there would be no pathway for positive change for the children and families we worked with and the result would be a practice that worsened their situation.
We don’t see why responses to policy announcements should be any different. If a policy is announced without sufficient recognition of the structural barriers to its success, or conditions required for its success, then saying so isn’t pessimistic or negative. There is, to our minds, something contradictory about a profession grounded in evidence-based assessment and formulation, engaging in forms of public discourse that avoid clear conclusions or analysis.
Cautious optimism has a multiplier effect on policy makers via a feedback loop. If policy proposals have obvious weaknesses, (e.g. funding, resourcing, workforce planning, issues of equitability and justice), but professional bodies publicly welcome proposals, while hedging their bets and remaining cautiously optimistic, policy makers receive the message that the idea is broadly credible.
Cautious optimism becomes another obstacle to reform because it does not encourage a realistic conversation about what it would actually take to achieve said policy and the iterations that the policy might go through. Rather policy makers, with the tacit approval of cautiously optimistic professional organisations, simply focus on how to implement the proposal as it already exists.
Material change cannot be achieved by simply having positive aspirations about a desired future state.
What not being cautiously optimistic has to offer
Our title to this article is a play on the legendary inscription at the entrance to Hell in Dante’s ‘Inferno’. But hope is not something we’d suggest you abandon.
A more hopeful stance needs us to recognise that vague optimism weakens our ability not only to advocate for meaningful change, but even to see what that change might look like. The alternative to ‘cautious optimism’ is not cynicism, it’s seeing things as they actually are and taking a position of critical hope.
Critical hope is a stance grounded in reality and a critical understanding that in the current situation, something is missing and “Webb claims…’Hope’s positive glow offers here no comforting refuge but rather stimulates a restless protest against present suffering’” (Webb 2007, pg. 71, as cited in Ojala, 2017). Seeing the world as it is and recognising what society is like right now is our framing, and we propose that this stance has much to offer.
1. Accurate formulations
Psychologists espouse the importance of deep, holistic formulations over surface-level descriptions of a problem. By abandoning cautious optimism space is created to do a number of revolutionary things:
- Say what the actual problem is
- Be clear about the mechanisms driving the problem
- Be unambiguous about what conditions need to change to ensure progress.
2. Conditional support
Offering conditional support for government, organisational, or policy proposals only when certain criteria are met, offers professional bodies an opportunity to restore their credibility. Using precise language to respond to proposals means testable claims can be made, grounded in a material analysis of the current situation, rather than responses that simply offer emotional reassurance.
3. Modelling intellectual honesty
In our work as psychologists we often encourage reflective conversations, emotional honesty, accurate assessment, and evidence-based thinking. Therefore, if professional bodies fail to model these things, there’s a contradiction between rhetoric and reality. Abandoning cautious optimism allows us to respect professionals, and the public, enough to be honest about conditions rather than attempting to manage morale through ‘optimism’.
4. Avoiding learned helplessness
Our concern is that the trend towards optimism ultimately leads to resignation that things are unchangeable (perhaps the most cynical and pessimistic framing!). This leads to a lowering of expectations, a celebration of symbolic gestures, and tiny movements being evaluated as ‘transformational’. Cautious optimism leads us to forget what meaningful change would actually look like. Accurately describing the scale of the problem means we can also articulate the scale of the change required.
5. Accountability
Psychologists and their professional bodies should be accountable.
Expressing ‘cautious optimism’ is an emotional stance that tells us only how the organisation feels. It tells us nothing about the analysis that has been undertaken regarding the strength of a policy. A more accountable approach to a policy announcement might offer answers to questions such as:
- What assumptions is this policy initiative making?
- Are these assumptions supported by evidence?
- What conditions are required for success?
Not only does this enhance professional accountability, it presents future learning opportunities.
Our view is that it is the role of our professional bodies to analyse and formulate, not reassure. This means dropping the question ‘how optimistic are we about this?’ and replacing it with ‘what is our best formulation of this policy based on the available evidence?’
The affect of Cautious Optimism
We’d like to conclude on a provocation and suggest that the allure of cautious optimism isn’t its analytic depth (it has none), its predictive power (it has none), or its capabilities to engender change (it has none). It is deployed because it works at the level of affect. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel like things are getting better, like we are on the same team as whoever is in charge, like they’ve listened to what we have to say.
By contrast, there is the ‘frequently critical colleague’ in a team meeting (there’s always one… maybe you’ve been in meetings with one of us?!) who says things are getting worse. No matter how accurate or incisive their analysis… How does that make you feel? Not so good. Negative in your affect. A bit sad. A bit down. So we ignore, we disavow, we downplay.
Maybe reflection at the level of how we feel is a good starting point on the road to rejecting ‘cautious optimism’. Maybe we should be guided more by evidence and impact, and less by our emotions. Maybe in the long term this will allow us to really hold the government and our organisations to account and pursue actual change and maybe in turn this will allow us to feel a sense of more fundamental optimism, an optimism with foundation. An optimism with substance. An optimism grounded in progressive material change.
References
Antonini, F. (2019). Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: Gramsci’s Political Thought in the Last Miscellaneous Notebooks. Rethinking Marxism, 31(1), 42–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2019.1577616
Booth, S., & Lucas, R. (2026, September 10). Expert staff shortages are key threat to £1.8 billion SEND reform plans. Schools Week. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/expert-staff-shortages-are-key-threat-to-1-8bn-send-reform-plans/
Ojala, M. (2017). Hope and anticipation in education for a sustainable future. Futures, 94, pp. 76-84.
Octigan, S. (2026, June 17). SEND Reforms: The Schools White Paper. The AEP. https://www.aep.org.uk/articles/blog-send-reforms-schools-white-paper-dr-sean-octigan
Optimism: The Centre for Optimism (nd). Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will. https://www.centreforoptimism.com/pessimism-of-the-intellect-optimism-of-the-will
Roberts, J. (2026, Feb 16). DfE commits £26 million to recruit more educational psychologists. Tes Magazine. https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/dfe-funding-to-train-more-educational-psychologists-for-schools
Stacey, Q., & Quinn, B. (2026, February 26) Fewer children in England to get EHCPs by 2035 under Send overhaul. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/23/fewer-children-england-ehcp-care-plans-send-overhaul
