What should education deliver in the age of AI?

27 August 2026

Learning.First: What should education deliver in the age of AI?

With AI redrawing the workplace and traditional career ladders, students are moving from school and university into a career landscape that is unrecognisable to their parents.

The question that keeps Emily Porter awake is not whether schools will adapt, but who will design what replaces the old model. “We know the classroom experience is changing and we need to navigate that shift responsibly,” says the Group Chief Learning Officer at the International Schools Partnership (ISP), one of the world’s largest school groups. “So who is building the schools of the future? Are we going to leave that to technology companies to define for us, or are we, as educators, going to be at the forefront of it?”

“Who is building the schools of the future?”

She is not neutral on the answer. Porter has spent nearly 30 years in education; teacher, curriculum writer, then fifteen years leading the learning strategy for large school groups and is now accountable for what happens in classrooms across 120 schools in 26 countries.

“My concern is that we become the passive receivers of all this technology,” she says. “Our motivation is to create a safer, better, more purposeful learning experience that we can actually evidence. If educators with real teachers and real students aren’t the ones designing this, we’re all at risk that it goes badly, or worse, it becomes a barrier to learning.”

That view shapes a clear group position on screens. ISP judges every tool against what it calls “Screen Value” rather than screen time: a device earns its place in a lesson, only if it supports learning. “I have a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old. I don’t want my own children on a screen for the sake of being on a screen,” Porter says. Across those 26 countries she encounters parents at both extremes, some anxious their child will be left behind without early exposure to AI, others removing devices from the house altogether. “Both of those parents are in our schools. We have to have a defensible approach for both of them.”

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EdTech that is built for purpose, not bought

Most school groups answer the AI question by buying white-labelled products. ISP built their own. Porter’s team fields dozens of approaches from EdTech companies every week and has assessed hundreds of products; the conclusion was that very few were made by teachers, for teachers and students. “There is a huge amount of money going into tools that teachers and students ultimately don’t benefit from, and almost no data showing they improve learning,” she says. So, ISP asked its own teachers and leaders instead.

Currently, ISP has over 17,000 teachers across its network, and many of those teachers came back to us with 45 use cases – the barriers they hit daily, with lesson planning at the top of the list – and those became the specification.

Three years on, the group’s lesson design tool has already been rolled out across 120 schools and continues to be refined through 11 of their LabSchools and tested across 24 different curricula and dozens of languages. None of it is white-labelled, and none of it is for sale.

“A single standalone school would struggle to do this work, in terms of the assessment of the market, building the tools, testing at this scale,” she says. “That is what families gain when they choose a school within ISP’s network: education experts designing learning on their child’s behalf, that an independent school would probably lack the resources to do alone.”

Two design decisions matter more to parents than any of it. The first is that ISP’s student-facing AI is built never to hand over an answer. “ISP’s AI Tutor is Socratic,” Porter explains. “It asks you the next question. It’s doing what a very good teacher does – it scaffolds your learning and supports students towards understanding, without giving them the answer.”

The second is safeguarding. Students are not sent out to open chatbots; everything sits inside ISP’s own system, so student data stays with the school rather than being fed into a public platform. The AI Tutor is also trained to notice when a child’s disposition changes; frustration, distress, and disclosure – escalating it to the school’s safeguarding lead. “The narrative has to be that use of technology supports learning in the safest way,” she says.

The evidence problem

“We are rigorous about evidencing student progression and supporting our teachers with frameworks to do that.”

“Other groups are marketing AI and technology through the use of headsets and the VR glasses at schools. I want to encourage teachers and parents to demand more for their students and children, these tools are fun and can enhance an experience, but what evidence do we have that they actually help children learn better?”, questions Porter.

ISP is now tracking whether teachers who use ISP’s AI planning tool produce measurably higher-impact lessons, and whether that shows up in student progress data over time.

Sarah Brown, ISP’s Head of Learning.First™, ISP’s proprietary approach to learning, explains, “We are rigorous about evidencing student progression and supporting our teachers with frameworks to do that. We complete hundreds of learning visits each year, and the data is really compelling, but the overriding takeaway is the partnership between student and teacher that improves learning outcomes and leaves no student behind.”

Over the past seven years, ISP schools have widened their lead over external exam benchmarks every year. Eight of the ten major exam types ISP students sit improved against benchmarks, irrespective of school or country. “Attainment on the day matters, but that progress gap is widening, and that’s the honest measure of the value that an ISP school is delivering over others,” says Nick Campbell, Group Head of Academic Achievement.

Eight out of ten major exam types ISP students sit improved against benchmarks

Life skills that will set students apart

The educational premium, Porter argues, has shifted decisively from what a child knows to what a child can do with what they know.

“If knowledge is democratised and everybody has access to it through AI, what are we here for?” she says. “What used to be called soft skills have become the essential life skills. Flexibility, adaptability, being multilingual, being able to move between cultures, being resilient, because in the near future, you’ll have 15 or 20 jobs and you’ll have to learn, unlearn and relearn the whole way through.”

Good grades remain essential, but skills such as resilience, adaptability and digital literacy are what will let students navigate an evolving employment sector, according to Camilla Woodhouse, ISP’s Head of Life Competencies.

“We can’t expect children to learn these through osmosis,” she says. “Schools need to teach them explicitly within the curriculum and through extracurricular activities. It’s soft skills and the big Cs — creativity, communication and critical thinking, that will take students where they want and need to go.”

The harder question is whether any school can prove it. Three and a half years ago ISP began a research programme with Camtree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange at Hughes Hall, the University of Cambridge, asking whether life skills can be taught, learned and, the part almost no one attempts, assessed. Eight reports have been published so far, with a second study running across eleven schools in every ISP region.

The output is a rubric now used across the group’s schools. “Our research shows that when life skills are taught in lessons, students benefit both academically and in terms of personal development,” Woodhouse explains. “Using ISP’s AI lesson design tool, we’re now weaving life skills into everyday learning from the beginning of a child’s education, with teachers using bespoke technology to assess their mastery.”

“In the near future, you’ll have 15 or 20 jobs and you’ll have to learn, unlearn and relearn the whole way through.”

The good struggle

At the core of the ISP experience across all subjects is the concept of “the good struggle”, the process of grappling with a new language or maths challenge that pushes pupils beyond their comfort zones and ultimately helps them develop persistence, resilience and deep understanding. “In a time when some are outsourcing everything to AI and algorithms, learning is still the very essence of our humanity. The optimum learning state is when students and teachers are both engaged and challenged,” Brown says. “If students are appropriately challenged, they reach their full potential.”

“Using ISP’s AI lesson design tool, we’re now weaving life skills into everyday learning from the beginning of a child’s education, with teachers using bespoke technology to assess their mastery.”

But just because a child is putting up their hand or answering questions correctly does not mean they’re in a good struggle. Sometimes they are simply treading water.

A good struggle looks and feels different for each person, Brown says, and only the student really knows which state they are in. “We encourage our teachers to break the fourth wall that exists in classrooms. Ask children if they’re tired, if they’re struggling. Ask them how they learn best and reflect with them at the end of a lesson. Explain why a topic is important, even if the answer is simply because it crops up in exam papers.”

While teachers might initially fear this two-way engagement – what if the feedback is negative? – pupils invariably find it far more motivating, Brown says. When learning is a partnership between student and teacher, students become more receptive to challenge.

“Students don’t tend to criticise the teacher; they want to understand what they’re learning, why it matters and know that their teacher is on their side,” she explains. “Tuning into their brains and their bodies is a skill they take with them when they leave school. If you’re able to self-monitor and optimise your own learning and recognise and support when others are in a bad struggle, that’s a superpower. It’s how students develop empathy and become good leaders. That’s the difference between a child who simply completes their education, and one who’s equipped to keep learning, adapting and understanding others for the rest of their life”.

“Just because a child is putting up their hand or answering questions correctly does not mean they’re in a good struggle.”

Valuing every language

While many schools are shrinking their foreign language offerings, ISP is expanding its provision with around 95% of its students being multilingual learners. Research from the Bell Foundation, with which ISP works closely, indicates that proficiency in the language of instruction explains several times more variation in educational attainment than gender, ethnicity and eligibility for free school meals combined. “It is one of the strongest predictors we have” says Ruth Radwan, ISP’s Group Head of Multilingualism.

of ISP students are multilingual learners

For decades, international schools sold English, and delivered it, sometimes at the expense of the language the child arrived with.

“Picture a student graduating fluent, confident, exactly what the family wanted, who then applies to a university at home and can’t do it,” Radwan says. “They have conversational Spanish or conversational Vietnamese, but not the academic language to study in it. That opens one door and quietly closed another.” ISP’s approach treats a child’s home language as an asset to build on rather than an obstacle, with a language profile taken for every learner on admission and a tiered support model behind it.

Students in the group’s international and bilingual schools use a digital language platform developed with FlashAcademy™, alongside our ISP AI toolbox that identifies specific language needs across the curriculum. “The tools don’t replace teaching,” Radwan says. “They help students build ownership, stay organised and track their progress.”

The gains are not only linguistic. Research has shown that multilingual workers¹ can earn up to 19% more than monolingual colleagues, and mastering multiple languages improves cognitive function and communication. “The multilingual brain is more flexible; you become a better problem solver and more adaptable,” Radwan continues. “Research by the University of Cambridge² found that young people who self-identify as multilingual tend to score a full grade higher across a wide range of GCSE subjects, including maths, geography and science, regardless of actual fluency.”

Research has shown that multilingual workers can earn up to 19 per cent more than monolingual colleagues

Practising it for real

Life competencies are only developed through repeated opportunities to practise, which is why ISP runs fifteen international programmes open to ages 4 to 18, with each programme mapped to the life skills framework.

Students represent a country at a Model United Nations conference in Geneva. Others have their journalism reviewed and published by the University of Chicago, while other students are handed their own school’s energy data and asked to bring the emissions number down.

“You cannot teach resilience in a lesson on resilience,” Woodhouse says. “You build it by putting children in situations where they are challenged and they have to work out what to do next.”

ISP runs fifteen international programmes

The destination of choice

The group’s aim is that by the time an ISP student leaves school, they will have the confidence to chart their own path. “We develop the skills they need to succeed and the professional guidance to support informed decision-making,” explains Gwawr Tagg, Head of Future Pathways. However, research by OECD² suggests that 50 per cent of young people still aspire to only 10 different types of roles, while a survey by Prospects⁴ found that 96% of students and graduates faced barriers when looking for jobs and apprenticeships.

ISP students are encouraged to question what it is about certain careers that appeals to them and to educate themselves about emerging employment opportunities. By 2027, every graduate will have had a personalised practical experience in the workplace. “We encourage them to try as many things as possible, we want to help them find a pathway that might suit them as well as eliminate those that don’t,” she says.

“The question shouldn’t be, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ It’s, ‘What do you want to do more of?’”

Tagg wants the group placing both bets at once. Employers including Google and Microsoft have already begun dropping degree requirements, and despite a majority of families still following the university-first ambition, there is a growing group of families who aren’t subscribing to that traditional pathway. “The internship should start while you’re still at school with us, not after you’ve spent a hundred thousand pounds on a degree,” she says. “We’re going to companies and asking them directly: why are graduates not working for you? What’s missing? What are you actually looking for?”

The answer that comes back, Porter says, is always the same, and it is not really about employment at all. “Employers say they want people who are adaptable and resilient, who can learn and relearn quickly, who get on with others and understand how their own learning works. But those aren’t job skills. They’re the things that make you a good partner, a good friend, someone who contributes something where they live. A school that gets this right has given a child a better life, not just a better CV.”