Tag Archives: future of education

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.

Education: Does the future look bright?

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Source: @Riki32 pixabay

In education, we often look to the future, while also being told our schools are stuck in the past.

While there are innovative learning spaces in many schools, classrooms may look similar to the onlooker over time—often with a version of desks, chairs, writable and projectable surfaces, and students of the same age learning in the same space—but the learning and teaching that goes on is not the one-size-fits-all chalk-and-talk of old. There is, of course, an important place for teacher knowledge and for explicit instruction. A classroom observer might not see, looking in, what students are doing, and what platforms they are using to learn. They might not see, unless they speak to the students, that the content is being accessed via a ranges of modes and supports such as video instruction, collaborative online spaces, cloud documents, assistive and adaptive technologies, multimodal resources, tiered tasks, student choice, and self-paced learning modules. They are unlikely to see the depth of the teacher’s knowledge of the diverse learning, social and emotional needs of each learner, and the ways in which the teacher is generating a range of data on student learning, and subtly adjusting environment, content, and learning process and product, in order to support the success of each child. They may not observe the layers of student goal-setting, self-reflection, and action on ongoing feedback.

While schools may have moved further in their practice than some commentators would argue, schools exist within the current instability and volatility of the world, along with the rapidly changing nature of work. At a time of systemic exhaustion and tidal uncertainty, it is sometimes challenging to find hope, optimism, and a sense of excitement about the future. The global geopolitical economic outlook is distressing, and plagued by rising inequality, conflict, widening polarisation, pandemics, climate crises, constraints on national resources, and a gender gap predicted to take another 132 years to close.

Organisations around the world are describing future trajectories that blend hazard with opportunity. The CSIRO (Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), for example, recently identified seven megatrends:

  • A volatile changing climate with economic and social costs.
  • An increased focus on cleaner and greener energy sources.
  • A ‘burning platform’ of escalating health challenges including an ageing population and growing burden of chronic and infectious diseases, and psychological distress.
  • Geopolitical tensions and uncertainty.
  • Growing economic digitisation of work and the economy.
  • An explosion in the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
  • A strong consumer and citizen push for the need for public trust in governments and governance.

The World Economic Forum has reported that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities, with gender, socio-economic status, location and ethnicity influencing students’ access to education.

What are educators, schools, and the education system to do, to ensure that students are being prepared for their futures in such times?

The WEF report identifies areas for opportunity in education, including:

  • Alternative and additional ways of assessing and tracking student learning.
  • Learning integrated with employers and industry.
  • Flexible credentialling and development of skills wallets or passports.
  • Harnessing sophisticated technologies for learning such as AI and other computer-assisted-instruction systems.
  • Investment in teachers’ learning and time.

Schools are experimenting with many of these things, such as alternative ways to record evidence of student learning, and to track, monitor and build portfolios and ‘learner profiles’ of student success. Content is being offered in increasingly innovative and flexible ways, including microcredentialing and courses focused on wellbeing, social justice, service, character, and learner capabilities, as well as traditional knowledges. As an example, this term in some of the Future Ready courses at my school, Year 6s are designing solutions to a health and wellbeing issue based on immersion in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Year 7s are designing a future school, Year 8s are writing a ‘Close the Gap’ campaign pledge, Year 9s are engaging in a global gamified sustainability challenge, and Year 10s are completing a self-chosen microcredential as well as a choice between earning their Provide First Aid certification or pitching their ‘side hustle’ business idea in an entrepreneurship course.

Student voices, as well as teacher, parent and community voices, are key as we think about shaping education. Schools are trialling approaches that serve the needs of their communities, such as flexible and alternate timetable arrangements, flexible working arrangements for staff, flexible learning options for students, hybrid teaching and learning environments, flexible pathways through and beyond school, and delivery of courses across schools and organisations.

One of the OECD’s ‘four scenarios for future schooling’ envisions schools as learning hubs that strengthen personalised learning pathways as part of an ecosystem of networked education spaces, with strong partnerships with external institutions, such as museums, libraries, residential centres, and technological hubs. As someone who has worked in independent schools for over 20 years, I see our responsibility as to cultivate a collaborative and networked education world, sharing with one another, and with educators more broadly, the work and innovation in which we engage. Platforms like my blog, books and podcast are attempts to share and collaborate with others in the education space. While the marketing firehose and facilities arms race can position schools as competitors, we will build a better education system if we see one another as partners and networked collaborators. We are better together, for the future of our students and the planet. We can enact the kinds of opportunities, relationships, and voice we would like to see in the world for our students, who are the people who will positively influence the future world.