The Wars We Don’t See Coming

In geopolitics, it’s often said that generals are always preparing to fight the last war. One of the most infamous examples was the Maginot line in Eastern France: a vast line of fortifications built after World War I to prevent another German invasion of France from the most obvious direction. The only problem was that France built this fortification with the last war in mind, not the next. Germany simply went around it, invading via the Netherlands instead.

Much of our educational strategy risks resembling the same kind of static defence: we design policies to hold back yesterday’s threats, while today confronts us with goalposts that are constantly shifting. Many schools, especially those in which the once solid pillar of tradition no longer bears weight, struggle to read the runes of change. But change is coming. To paraphrase William Gibson, perhaps it’s already here, just not evenly distributed. Unless we accept this uncertainly and ready ourselves to grapple with its implications, we may find ourselves blindsided by crises we didn’t imagine but could have anticipated.

Here are five “wars” I believe we’re not yet seeing clearly enough, but which are already gathering momentum.

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1. The War on Attention

There’s a growing consensus that young people’s capacity to sustain attention is eroding. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has helped bring this into public consciousness, warning of the deleterious effects of smartphones and social media. But while Haidt’s diagnosis has merit, his prescription can veer towards absolutism.

Those of us teaching and learning in technology-rich environments know that the problem isn’t simply screen time, but rather the slow collapse of cognitive bandwidth. When every moment is occupied, and every silence filled with stimuli, deep thought becomes impossible. The very conditions necessary for learning (focus, stillness, reflection…) are being drowned out by a tidal wave of viral clips, inane sound bites, and insubstantial hot takes.

What schools can do:

• Teach metacognition explicitly: help students understand how learning happens, how attention works, and how it can be manipulated
• Prioritise moments of stillness and physical connection: embed social media-free time, quiet reading, and fill breaks with activities that encourage face-to-face interaction
• Model slow thinking: make wait time, reflection, and dialogic teaching part of your pedagogical repertoire. Discourage what in marketing and communication is referred to as low latency responses, where depth and deliberation give way to speed and superficial analysis

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2. The Crisis of Trust

The relationship between schools and their communities is becoming more fragile. In an era of polarisation, online outrage, and misinformation, teachers can feel more scrutinised than supported. Where once it was taken as given that teachers were working in the best interests of children, the parent WhatsApp group now ensures we’re more like to encounter hostility and vexation.

However, the risk is a culture of defensiveness, where innovation stalls, communication becomes transactional, and staff retreat into silence rather than risk the harassment that comes with misinterpretation.

What schools can do:

• Teach civil discourse: equip young people to disagree agreeably, listen actively, avoid fallacies, become aware of their biases, and seek growth rather than easy wins
• Lead with radical transparency: share not just decisions, but the thinking behind them. Leave no room for assumptions or uncharitable interpretations
• Invest in relational capital: prioritise informal contact with staff, students, and parents

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3. The Encroachment of AI

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the way we write, think, and learn. Yet most schools remain stuck in reactive mode: rewriting plagiarism policies, blocking online tools, or ignoring the elephant in the classroom. Despite our apparent best efforts to resist it, a new way of working is emerging that values prompting, synthesis, and collaboration with machines.

The best way to prepare for the advent of AI is not to double down on what machines do best, but to strengthen what makes us most human: creativity, ethics, discernment, and emotional insight. AI may even offer us a gift: freeing time from repetitive administrative burdens so that teachers can do what only humans can: connect, challenge, and care.

I’m reminded of a head I once worked with who became obsessed with making our (private) school more like the competition. But the best way to compete wasn’t imitation, it was differentiation. We didn’t need to be more like them; we needed to be more us.

What schools can do:

• Model active experimentation: explore how AI might reveal, not replace, great teaching
• Build AI fluency into the curriculum: don’t ban it, adopt it thoughtfully
• Audit assessment practices, moving beyond knowledge reproduction toward synthesis, reasoning, voice, and judgement

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4. The Unbundling of Education

The idea that schools are the sole or even primary site of learning has been eroding for some time. The notion that schooling should have to take place in a physical location, delivered by generalists to age-based cohorts, has been questioned in the past, though mostly unconvincingly. The difference is that now AI seems perfectly capable to catalyse this future into existence. The disaggregation that happened to journalism, taxis, and retail is already beginning to happen to education: AI tutors, home-school co-ops, and self-directed learning platforms are gaining traction.

In the UK, where the school system is already stratified by postcode and wealth, we risk a new divide: between those with access to bespoke, AI-enhanced, modular education, and those navigating the legacy system.

What schools can do:

• Partner rather than pander: collaborate with edtech innovators to shape, not resist, change
• Reassert what schools uniquely offer: community, mentorship, a sense of belonging
• Explore hybrid models: project-based, interdisciplinary, portfolio-driven learning

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5. The Future of (Un)Employment

Education has traditionally been underpinned by a familiar covenant: work hard, do well, and you’ll get a good job. But as AI begins to perform increasingly complex tasks perfectly capably in law, finance, journalism, and design, that promise feels less certain.

For over a decade now, since the advent of Web 2.0, we’ve raised an eyebrow at the cliché that we’re preparing children for jobs that haven’t been invented yet. The irony, of course, is that many so-called “21st-century skills” were always just timeless virtues: collaboration, adaptability, discernment. What’s new now is not the skillset, but the context.

Large Language Models and AI agents self-evidently pose a serious challenge to the traditional conveyor belt model of education feeding into employment. But they may also offer a different kind of future: one in which people are freed from the monotony of task-based labour and supported to focus on work that is more relational, creative, and human. Dislocation and reinvention as the two sides of the same coin.

What schools can do:

• Replace certainty with curiosity and bring future-facing questions into careers education: not “What job do you want?” but “What problems do you want to help solve?”
• Emphasise enduring human capabilities: expand the definition of employability to include skills less likely to be automated, such as creativity, ethics, adaptability, collaboration
• Nurture agency: help students become the owner-narrators, not just the products, of their learning journeys

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Leading for the Future

The future, like Gandalf, is never early or late. It arrives precisely when it means to.

Our task as educational leaders is not to divine its arrival but to prepare for its ambiguity; to cultivate curiosity rather than certainty; and to encourage readiness rather than rigidity. Leadership today means creating the space for deeper questions, resisting the temptation to prepare for yesterday’s battles, and designing systems supple enough to bend without breaking.

The future isn’t born fully formed; it grows from the choices we make today.

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“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

— Niels Bohr

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