Schools are Brilliant. They May Just Be Answering the Wrong Question.

“A sixth form student I met recently told me, with no particular drama, that he’d taught himself to prompt AI using YouTube tutorials, then built his own practice app – as a non-coder, by the way – to develop the essay writing skills he needs for his Economics and Business A-Levels. He knows the essays are coming in the exam hall. He’ll write them. But he’s also completely clear that when he starts his own business, he will never write one again. He wasn’t being dismissive of his teachers. He wasn’t trying to cheat. He was just being honest about the gap between what school requires and what he believes his actual future looks like. And the unsettling thing is that he’s probably right. That gap is what this article is about. How AI is changing the purpose of schools We have built extraordinarily sophisticated systems for moving knowledge from one head to another. Curricula, qualifications, inspection frameworks, league tables – the whole architecture of modern schooling is oriented around a single goal. To ensure that young people know things and can prove it. For most of the last century, that was a reasonable priority. Knowledge was scarce. Access to expertise was unequal. Schools levelled that. AI has not just disrupted that model. It has retired the problem the model was designed to solve. Why knowledge is no longer enough A student with a phone and a decent prompt can now access subject-specific insight that would have taken a research trip a decade ago. It’s not just information either but synthesised, contextualised, explained-at-their-level answers. The knowledge pipeline that school was built to provide is no longer schools’ to monopolise. That is not a crisis. It is a clarification. Because if we are honest and this is where the sector needs to find some courage, a significant portion of what fills the school day was never really about developing young people. It was about sorting them. Grading, ranking, credentialling. AI has exposed the hollowness of assessments that a language model can pass without having learned anything at all, and the appropriate response is not to ban the tools. It is to ask what we were actually measuring. Some schools have been asking that question for a while. In the UK Bedales school, grew frustrated with GCSEs they felt rewarded rote learning and exam technique over genuine understanding. Their response was to create Bedales Assessed Courses , assessed throughout rather than in a final exam, giving teachers the freedom to shape curriculum around current events and students’ interests. They are now moving toward a model where students take only two GCSEs, Maths and English, with the rest replaced by their own assessed courses. Before AI, that look bold. Now, it looks like foresight. Gert Biesta spent years making the case that education has three jobs: qualification, socialisation, and what he called subjectification – the cultivation of a person as a free, irreducible individual who can act in the world. His concern, long before anyone had heard of a large language model, was that schools had become so fixated on the first that they’d quietly abandoned the other two. AI Generated Images created with Google Gemini Nano Banana 2 What schools still uniquely provide in the age of AI AI does not socialise young people. It cannot help a teenager learn to hold a position under pressure, navigate a room where people disagree, or discover who they are in relation to other people who are genuinely different from them. Those things require encounter . They require friction. They (almost) always require other humans. Schools, when they are working well, provide exactly that and no algorithm is coming for it. But here is the provocation: if schools don’t actively choose to prioritise those things, they will keep drifting toward what is measurable, defensible, and inspectable. And the students, like that sixth former, will simply route around them. Something else is shifting, and school leaders would do well to pay attention. How parents are reshaping education outside school Parents are no longer passive. They are curating their children’s education with confidence, sometimes informed, sometimes not, that the system is still pretending isn’t happening. Tutors, platforms, enrichment programmes, AI tools at home all show that families are picking and mixing their own version of education, selecting what they trust and quietly sidelining what they don’t. This is not a fringe movement. It is a structural change driven by access, scepticism, and a growing sense that the institution does not always know best. A parent told me recently that her son’s school was “fine”. Not failing, just not enough on its own. So, she built a parallel curriculum around it: a science tutor on Tuesdays, economics documentaries at weekends, and AI tools to help him explore topics beyond the classroom. She wasn’t hostile to the school. She just believed learning no longer had to come from one place alone. I hear versions of that story constantly. It reflects the instinct behind the Pick ’n’ Mix philosophy explored in the forthcoming book of the same name: that education has always been most powerful when it is assembled rather than simply received. The difference now is that parents have the tools, access, and confidence to do more of that assembling themselves. The schools that will thrive are not the ones that react to this with defensiveness. They are the ones that become so clear about what they uniquely offer – the irreplaceable, relational, humanising work – that families want to be part of it, not just adjacent to it. AI Generated Images created with Google Gemini Nano Banana 2 Why critical thinking matters more than content recall And then there is the question of thinking. If knowledge is everywhere, the skill that matters is knowing what to do with it. Critical thinking – genuine critical thinking, not the version that appears as a bullet point in a curriculum framework and then disappears – has never been more important. The students who will navigate this world well are not the ones who can retrieve information. They are the ones who can interrogate it, challenge it, sit with uncertainty, and form a view worth defending. That requires a different kind of teaching. It requires teachers who are trusted to go beyond the specification, to design experiences where the process is the point. It requires school cultures that reward curiosity over compliance. And it requires leaders willing to say clearly that a school which only prepares students to pass exams is no longer doing enough. How school leaders can respond to rapid AI change The hardest parts of all this are pace and scale. Education systems are designed for continuity. Curriculum reform moves in years. Culture shifts in decades. AI is moving on a completely different clock, and the gap between institutional response time and technological reality is not closing; it is widening. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to lead differently. The leaders who will serve their communities well in this moment are not the ones with the best AI policy document. They are the ones who are genuinely curious, honest about uncertainty, and who treat their schools as learning organisations in the truest sense by experimenting, reflecting, and adapting. What school leaders should prioritise now Audit what you’re actually assessing: If your assessments can be passed by AI without genuine learning, they are no longer fit for purpose. Start the conversation now, even if the system hasn’t caught up yet. Make critical thinking structural, not decorative: It shouldn’t appear in a vision statement and disappear in a timetable. Build it into how lessons are designed, not just what they’re called. Talk to your parents, really talk to them: Find out what they’re supplementing, what they don’t trust, and why. That intelligence is more valuable than any survey. Give teachers permission to experiment: The schools adapting best are not following a policy; they are creating cultures where trying things and reflecting honestly is normal professional practice. Stop waiting for certainty: There is no stable destination to plan toward. The skill is learning to lead well in motion. That sixth former will be fine. He’s already adapting. The question is whether the institutions meant to serve him are adapting fast enough to deserve his trust. AI is changing the face of learning. Some of what is changing is genuinely exciting. Some of it should make us uncomfortable. The job is to hold both of those things at once and to make deliberate choices about what school is actually for, before that question gets answered for us by default. In a fast-changing educational landscape, innovation is abundant. New frameworks emerge, initiatives multiply, and schools move quickly to keep pace with a shifting world. Yet the greatest risk is not a lack of ideas, it is a lack of coherence. Without clarity of purpose and alignment of systems, even the strongest innovations fragment, compete, and dilute impact. By Ben Whitaker Ben Whitaker is co-founder of Edufuturists , a community and content hub committed to shaping the future of education, and works as an educational consultant supporting schools and trusts to think differently. He serves as a school governor and released his first book, The Ideas Guy , in 2025. Ben speaks and writes on AI, inclusion, and education innovation. The post Schools are Brilliant. They May Just Be Answering the Wrong Question. appeared first on ISC Research .

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