My collaborators, Daniel Halliday (University of Melbourne), Vafa Ghazavi (University of Sydney), and I were recently awarded a PPE Research Consortium Grant for our project Addressing the Arms Race in Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Solutions. Here’s a public-facing blub we put together for the project:
As families and students try to stay ahead of one another, investments in education keep intensifying—more tutoring, more pressure, more time, more cost—yet learning and wellbeing don’t necessarily improve. This is the educational arms race: a cycle of escalating effort where everyone keeps raising the stakes, but no one gets ahead.
What drives these dynamics, and why are they so hard to stop? Arms races are a form of competition where there is a tendency towards escalation: participants’ efforts tend to cancel each other out, leaving everyone working harder for the same relative position. Rather than giving up, participants keep pushing to overcome each other, burning time and resources in the process. In education, this creates a treadmill that is difficult for any individual family, school, or government to step off unilaterally.
This project will map out why educational arms races take hold, why they persist and escalate over time, and what they mean for fairness and equal opportunity in education. It will then translate these insights into practical policy guidance, identifying which reforms are likely to fuel further escalation and which might genuinely help.
Beyond academic publications, the project will produce a policy white paper that explains the problem in accessible terms and proposes clear principles for decision-makers. By providing the first comprehensive account of how educational arms races work, why they are so difficult to reverse, and what can be done about them, the project aims to sharpen public debate and support better-informed decision-making around education.
The project starts in January 2027. More details soon.