2025 has been marked by geopolitical upheaval, accelerating climate impacts, and rapid technological change, with wars, political transitions, and record-breaking natural disasters shaping the global backdrop for schooling. In Australia, wider international conflicts have played out locally in the most devastating of ways, reminding us that global instability is never abstract for school communities. Professionally, my year has been anchored in culture building, strategic clarity and community connection. In my work this year as a principal, board member, and listener in education communities, I have been struck by how often the same tensions surface, regardless of context.

At the end of 2024, I reflected that personalised learning, GenAI, and holistic wellbeing were three foci of schools and education systems. Now, at the end of 2025, these trends still ring true, but the emphasis has shifted and the tensions educators are navigating have become sharper. This year, what I have noticed is a recalibration of priorities and a fine-tuning of how these are enacted. Schools are embracing AI and technology while leaning more deliberately into human experiences, strengthening care and belonging as protective factors for all in their communities, and confronting workforce challenges as questions of continuity and sustainability.

Balancing technology and humanity

In 2025, artificial intelligence has become increasingly embedded into our personal and professional lives. Used well, technologies can accelerate and sharpen thinking, and take on lower order tasks to free human cognition for higher-order work. Young people are using AI in a wide range of ways, including to assist with homework, writing, study and content creation. In some cases, they are turning to AI chatbots for mental health advice or emotional support, raising concerns about the quality, safety, and appropriateness of such use. Teachers are using AI for curriculum and assessment design, administration support, learner inclusion through accessibility tools, and to accelerate planning and feedback. Parents are using AI to write communications, including to schools. In July and November, the TES reported a rise in AI-generated parent complaints in UK schools, adding workload and procedural complexity for educators.

At the same time, there are counter moves that increasingly encourage presence, dialogue, and relationality. One policy attempt to redraw digital boundaries is Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) Framework which now requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from holding accounts. School phone bans, screen reduction policies, and technology-free spaces are becoming more common as ways to privilege presence and relationships. The risks and limitations of AI have resulted in a resurgence of oral assessments, viva voce examinations, dialogic classroom practices, and deliberate attention to social interaction in classrooms and playgrounds.

Schools are articulating clear principles regarding what we automate, what we protect, and what guardrails we put in place to ensure that technologies support learning and wellbeing without undermining attention, learning, and agency.

Schools as ecosystems of care and belonging

In 2025, we have moved beyond seeing wellbeing as an individual trait or responsibility, toward understanding it as an outcome of conditions such as relationships, routines, safety, belonging, and trust. While schools are primarily places of learning, they are increasingly understood as ecosystems where learning, mental health, identity, and community intersect. The wellbeing of those in schools is shaped by how the environment ‘holds’ people, especially when the world beyond the school gates feels unstable.

This shift extends beyond children and young people to include the adults in school communities. Staff wellbeing is being reframed as a collective responsibility, shaped by leadership practices, relational trust, and organisational design, encompassing more than wellbeing programs or stand-alone initiatives. Parents and alumni are also part of the human ecology of schools, and their experiences and wellbeing feed back into the health of the wider community.

As the World Happiness Report shows, belonging is a protective factor across the lifespan, grounded in our connection to others and to community. Increasingly, schools are positioning themselves as places that wrap around children, families, and staff, providing continuity and care in times of social complexity. Care, in this sense, is part of the architecture of learning and growth – an enabling condition for both academic and holistic success. In practice, this has meant schools investing more intentionally in relational and wellbeing roles, community partnerships, and consistent routines that ground and support.

Education workforce challenges

Education workforce challenges have continued to be a persistent theme across 2025, with reporting consistently pointing to teacher shortages, workload pressure, and the declining attractiveness of teaching as a long-term career. Early-career attrition remains an ongoing concern. Teachers and school leaders report feeling overloaded and fatigued, with expanding expectations around rising student complexity, increased administration, compliance, documentation, and parent communication, all cited as pressures on the education workforce. The emotional intensity and ‘invisible labour’ of principalship has been explored by Jane Wilkinson and colleagues, such as in this recent report on emotional labour in increasingly diverse and often volatile school settings.

Emerging solutions have focused largely on system design, such as reducing administrative burden, expanding mentoring and induction for early-career teachers, and attempting to improve workforce planning.

Schools have been rethinking leadership distribution, how to support professional growth, and what a focus on retention, as well as recruitment, might look like. They have been considering how to design work that people can sustain, by clarifying purpose and protecting time. For example, schools are exploring how timetabling might address workload and provide teaching staff with balance, and how assessments might be reduced and reporting requirements refined. Schools are also reviewing meeting practices, protecting collaboration time, enhancing role clarity, making professional expectations clear, and reviewing staff wellbeing supports. Critically, they are considering what can be de-implemented, and focusing on fewer initiatives. Doing fewer things better helps to enable strategic coherence, galvanise shared purpose, and lessen feelings of overwhelm.

To 2026

As 2025 has unfolded and 2026 waits to unfurl, these three trends point to questions about the purpose of schooling: What are schools for, what do we value in education, and how do we iterate school environments to serve our communities with care and coherence?

As we move into 2026, those working in schools are returning time and again to strategy and intent. Schools are increasingly attuned to unintended consequences and misalignments that might disrupt their purpose or fracture their community. The choices schools make—about technology, care and work—are shaping not only learning outcomes, but the kind of communities schools are, and continue to become. While aiming for continuous improvement, those of us working in schools will continue to iterate and adjust course to tune the balance between technology and humanity, efficiency and care, innovation and sustainability.