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Three trends shaping education in 2026

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‘School Time’, c. 1874, Winslow Homer. Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington

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.

The effects of AI on human cognition and connection

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Source: djovan on pixabay

ChatGPT is one of the world’s 10 most-visited websites and people are increasingly turning to AI to think, write, summarise, plan, counsel and even connect in a social sense. This month the OECD released its Introducing the OECD AI Capability Indicators Report, mapping current AI capabilities against the human capabilities of: language; social interaction; problem solving; creativity; metacognition and critical thinking; robotic intelligence; knowledge, learning and memory; vision; manipulation; and robotic intelligence. The report notes that AI currently lacks advanced reasoning and ethical reasoning capabilities. It adds that AI has weak social perception and struggles to infer social interactions, adjust for the emotional weight of a situation, or wrestle with ambiguity.

Reflecting on the professional moments I experienced this week, those in which I felt most fulfilled were human moments of connection, often filled with emotion and ambiguity. Sitting with parents in conversation about what it means to support young people to flourish in adolescence, at our ‘Thriving in the Middle School’ parent event. Touring an old scholar through the school and hearing her stories of her 1970s education and what continues to resonate for her 50 years later. Announcing the school’s new student leaders and feeling the palpable nervousness and excitement in the auditorium, and the subsequent pride and joy of those elected to leadership positions. Collaboratively solving the newspaper crossword in the staff room with colleagues. Watching students shine in the drama production. These are human experiences that technology cannot replicate.

The increasing use of AI Large Language Models (LLMs) is influencing our capacity for lateral thought, problem solving, creativity and human connection.

During my PhD research I could access publications online, but I needed to read them, synthesise them and analyse them myself. I could get help transcribing interviews, but I needed to sit with my participants, immerse myself in the data, draw out themes over time, and write my way into knowledge and understanding.

As I write this blog post, I am integrating knowledge and exploring ideas. I am thinking and writing my perspective into being in an organic way that engages me in cognition, reflection and construction of argument. I am utilising and connecting my cognitive architecture. If I had produced this post using AI to write it, I would benefit from the outcome, but not the process. There may be less friction between reader and written piece, as LLMs apply consistency of tone, genre and word choice based on programmed patterns. The piece may well have been more logically structured, with sub-headings, bullet points and a predictable cadence of language. It may use a number of em dashes, a favourite punctuation mark of ChatGPT writing. (On a side note, I am disappointed that the em dash has become a ‘tell’ of AI writing as it is one of my favourite punctuation marks after the interrobang, and ChatGPT’s use of it emerges from the credible human authorship, including academic sources, on which the LLM is trained). My piece may have been affected by AI’s cultural and linguistic biases (largely US-centric and masculine), and ‘hallucinations’, in which it makes up information and references.

How does our relationship with reading, writing and thinking change when we can paste swathes of content into a LLM and ask it to provide a neat summary? Or to ‘write a X in the style of Y person’ or to ‘generate an academic report on X topic using Y resources’?

If we get someone else, or AI, to do our reading or writing, we do less thinking. This recent research by a team at MIT explores the ‘cognitive cost’ or ‘cognitive debt’ of using AI to outsource our thinking. While ChatGPT outperforms students on many writing tasks including essay writing, this study found that students who used ChatGPT produced essays similar to one another. Human assessors described the AI-assisted essays as lengthy, academic-sounding and accurate, but “soulless”. The standard ideas, formulaic approaches and reoccurring statements reflected an AI homogeneity of argument and ‘echo chamber’ of ideas that lacked individuality and uniqueness. The research found that AI assistance reduced cognitive load and reduced cognitive friction. This made the task easier, potentially freeing up cognitive resources to allow the brain to reallocate effort toward executive functions. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost as users defaulted to the easy option of the task being finished with minimal effort, rather than critically evaluating the AI-generated output or value-adding their own content. Those who engaged the most brain connectivity and activation, around memory and creative thinking, were in the group who used their ‘brain only’ to write the essay .

We need to consider what we are willing to outsource to technology, and for what purpose. Is our desired result an outcome or a process? Producing or thinking? Output or connection? ‘Done’ or continuously improving? How might AI free us to do more that is human without narrowing our capacity for thought and connection?

As we continue to explore how AI and technologies might replicate human capabilities, we need to lean in to our humanity and into what relational human connection and critical thought can continue to offer us. Our shared humanity and our capacity for cognition, emotion, connection, and ethical engagement remains paramount.

Three trends shaping education in 2025

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Image created using ChatGPT.

Looking back on any year reveals triumphs and celebrations as well as challenges and low points. 2024 has been a year that saw an uplifting Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, and leaps in space exploration, but also ongoing cost-of-living crises, worrying levels of mental health, cybercrime, geopolitical conflict, and extreme weather events. Personally, I experienced an incredible Aboriginal cultural immersion experience in North East Arnhem Land, published 11 episodes of The Edu Salon podcast, co-authored a lead article for Australian Educational Leader with Patrick Duignan on reimagining educational leadership, and received two awards: as an Excellence Awardee for Principal of the Year in the Australian Education Awards, and the Australian Council for Educational Leaders South Australia Media Award.

As I reflect on education across 2024, three key trends have risen to the surface in my work as principal, and in the work of schools: personalised learning, GenAI, and holistic wellbeing. None of these topics are new, but they are at the forefront of current educational thinking and practice. As we enter 2025 this week, these foci will continue to shape education.

Personalised Learning

Best practice, research-informed methods of instruction are key to how we design learning and teaching in schools. Schools continue to develop ways in which students’ diverse needs and identities are served, including through engaging student voice and choice, via quality differentiation, by using technologies to enhance and personalise learning, and by tailoring pathways to individuals where appropriate. Within the intentional frameworks of learning and teaching in schools, students are increasing positioned as agents of their own learning. They set goals, influence their own learning, and shape their own learning pathways. While in school, students are studying vocational courses, earning micro credentials, undertaking early university courses, and running their own businesses. At my school, in 2024 we introduced a seed fund and mentorship program to support students pursuing their own social enterprises.

The worlds of education and work will need to continue to develop personalised learning opportunities, with a focus on diversity, adaptiveness, a global mindset, and less hierarchical structures. Generation Alpha—born 2010-2024—have information not only at their fingertips but also digitally integrated into their lives. They experience emerging technologies, fast-paced change, global influences and remote learning. Their digital experiences are personalised by algorithms and so they are accustomed to digital experiences curated to them personally. They connect, collaborate, and create online. They are innovators, entrepreneurs, technology enthusiasts. They are concerned by ethical issues such as equity and sustainability. My own children are Gen Alpha and they are questioning the value of traditional work and life pathways. They hope for life, learning and work to be self-directed, flexible, inclusive and gratifying.

Learning will continue to be personalised, as well as gamified, ‘stacked’ through a range of microlearning opportunities, and lifelong. Schools will continue to reflect on the purpose of teachers as experts who broker learning experiences for students, and schools as hubs of learning opportunities that allow each learner to thrive.

Generative AI

2024 has been a year of the rise and rise of generative AI as collaborator in learning and teaching, with tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini becoming mainstream. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, and extended realities, continue to be tools with which educators develop awareness and intentional deployment.

AI can be a useful accelerant for research, thinking and writing, reducing the time it takes to complete tasks. Using AI as a collaborator and productivity booster can support the work of those in schools. AI can, for example, be used for generating quizzes, transcribing meeting minutes, writing sample test questions, analysing curriculum documents, summarising information, explaining key concepts, drafting communications and generating exemplar responses.

Students can use AI in a range of ways, ensuring that they reference and attribute it appropriately. They might use AI to conduct initial research on a topic, search for useful resources, create digestible summaries of complex information, brainstorm ideas for creative tasks, translate language, generate practice questions, or create study schedules.

Of course, any technology must be used responsibly, ethically, safely, and with a healthy level of scepticism. Critical questions include asking ourselves and our students about biases inherent in AI models, what is excluded by an AI model, assumptions embedded in an AI ‘voice’, and how we might verify the accuracy and validity of the information provided.

Generative AI will continue to shape education as we collaborate with it and develop our use of it as a tool to enhance learning, teaching and leading. Yet teaching and leading are not purely transactional processes that can be replaced by artificial intelligence. Technologies cannot replace authentic voice, teachers that see and know their students, compassionate leadership, or nuanced and context-embedded decision making.

Holistic Wellbeing

Schools are places of human connection and complexity. In my chapter for the 2019 book Flip the System Australia: What Matters in Education, I wrote that “education is not an algorithm but a human endeavour”, a line which seems more poignant now that our lives are increasingly shaped by algorithms, from the route we take to a destination, to the music to which we listen, to what we see on the internet or social media. In 2024, wellbeing has continued to emerge as something with which schools and education systems constantly grapple. Challenges include student absenteeism, student mental health, teacher recruitment and retention, and teacher and school leader wellbeing.

We need to feel safe and well if we are to learn, and so learning for students is about more than intentional teaching; it is facilitated by positive relationships and learning environments in which learning is valued, progress is expected, and mistakes are seen as opportunities to grow. For students, responsive pastoral care programs and robust pastoral structures provide a holding environment in which every child is known and noticed.

For educators, schools are considering what can be automated or relinquished from staff workloads, and how staff can be empowered to shape practices and policies. In 2024, my school worked with staff to create flexible working guidelines, enabling flexible working where possible, based on role and individual circumstance. Schools are additionally working to develop cultures for staff of safety, community, growth and being supported in their professional and personal lives, as well as the fulfilling shared purpose of educating young people and partnering with families.

Schools need to continue to provide opportunities for meaningful human connection. We need to continue to see education as a human endeavour, about people, belonging and community. In 2024, there were people in my school community who faced hardship and sorrow. It is these moments—often quiet and unseen—that remind us that the greatest privilege of leading is not in celebrating accolades or public successes, but in walking alongside others in private moments of grief and sadness. It is in these moments that the school as community comes to the fore and we most lean in to our humanity in order to support one another.

It is vital that schools create cultures of high care, high challenge and high trust for all in our school communities, including students, staff and families. I would add that these environments need to be high observation, in which we see, hear, know and support each individual. Key parts of education work are noticing, listening, empathising, and offering care. One thing we can all focus on in 2025 is paying attention to our daily interactions and being truly present with those in our community.