We can't expect Ed Sheeran, Marcus Rashford and Jamie Oliver to keep on fixing Britain

There he is, out and about, being a good man again. Ed Sheeran is leading a charge. Last week, he visited schools and youth groups in Coventry, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast to promote music education. His Ed Sheeran Foundation is advocating for the “essential role” of music teachers in young peoples’ lives. He wants to improve access to instruments and lessons for 12,000 children. This goes from grassroots organisations to state education.  

It is a brilliant campaign. Sheeran, time and again, proves himself to be somebody who puts his (considerable) money where his mouth is. He is worthy of support and praise for this. 

It’s not a surprise that state education needs some help. The funding issues are well known. Every school across the country will be able to detail financial gaps that need filling. 

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But the ongoing part that familiar faces play in meeting these needs continues to surface unresolved questions about the entirety of state education funding. And also about what else is missing in wider community support that schools are then, by default, expected to step in to fix. 

Twenty years ago, Jamie Oliver started working to improve school dinners. He was not trying to reset the Earth on its axis. He simply wanted to get healthier meals into schools. Many schools were trying to get the most they could for the least they pay – (it was frequently tied to local authority outsourcing). As a result, they cared less and less about healthy meals.

The campaign, remember, found its lightening rod in Turkey Twizzlers – very little turkey, an awful lot of twizz. Oliver believed that a healthy meal gave the child a better chance of having a healthy mind, and future. He got the Twizzlers off the menu. He said he still gets abuse for it. It became about class – how dare he, a millionaire, stop folk eating what they want, ran the argument.

It’s true that part of the nutritional and obesity issue in Britain comes because those in poorer families many times have no choice but to bulk-buy lower quality, lower nutritional worth foods in order to make meals stretch. But on this occasion the argument falls on a fundamental point. It was schools who were serving the food. Oliver was simply helping to do what those in education management should have done, and became the whipping boy. 

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His Ministry of Food continues, nonetheless. The school part of it sees Oliver’s organisation provide resources to help pupils learn about food and cooking. Should this ability be part of the core curriculum anyway? I’d say yes. And no doubt many schools invest time and effort in it. But many can’t. And so personalities like Oliver step in, and take brickbats for it.

Remember after Marcus Rashford missed a penalty for England in the Euro 2020 final? The then-Tory MP Natalie Elphicke said he should spend more time perfecting his game and less playing politics. Rashford had been instrumental in changing government policy on free school meals. He received an MBE for his charity work. Elphicke, it was later revealed, had a second job that took her away from her core parliamentary one. 

Yet again, it was the person trying to effect positive change, rather than the institutions who oversaw the problems in the first place, who took the criticism.  

There are clear societal problems that have led to shortcomings in schools, and that schools pick up the pieces. At Big Issue we’ve reported on how schools have had to run food banks. 

People like Ed Sheeran are important because they keep focus on vital issues. In this case, Britain HAS to do more to support its creative industries, rather than diminish them; it’s an industry that is worth billions to the exchequer, and it makes our lives better and richer. Successive governments have shown an unwillingness, or an inability, to genuinely value that creativity. 

But we can’t rely on the decency and goodwill of people like Sheeran, or Oliver or Rashford, and the vast interwoven network of volunteers, to fix the entire mess. They can only do so much. 

Perhaps Labour will ask AI to help. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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