What if the biggest problem facing education today isn’t declining test scores, new technologies, or even curriculum reform?
What if the real problem is that we’ve stopped being ambitious enough for our young people?
That thought stayed with me long after finishing a recent podcast conversation with my friend and colleague, Professor Stephen Heppell.
Stephen has spent decades exploring the future of learning – as a teacher, researcher, and founder of Ultralab in the UK, one of the most influential learning technology research labs in Europe. Our paths first crossed more than twenty five years ago when I was involved in setting up CORE Education, and ever since then our conversations have had a habit of stretching my thinking in unexpected ways. This conversation was no exception.
We began the conversation by reminiscing about our shared history working in educational innovation, but it quickly turned into a wide-ranging exploration of how education systems respond to change – and why they so often struggle to do so.
What struck me most was where we eventually landed, the idea that, in many ways, schooling today reflects a profound lack of ambition for the capabilities of young people.
Education’s missed moment
Stephen began our conversation by reflecting on how education systems have historically shifted in response to big societal changes.
- The rise of Sunday schools when the church wanted people to read the Bible.
- Compulsory primary education during the Industrial Revolution.
- Compulsory secondary schooling after World War II, when societies realised they needed a more educated population.
Each of these moments, he claims, represented a significant leap in how societies thought about learning.
But when the next transformative shift arrived – the digital age and the internet in the 1990s – Stephen argues education largely missed it. Instead of reimagining learning for a world where knowledge is abundant and connected, systems responded defensively. Curricula narrowed. Standardised testing expanded. Schools doubled down on control and compliance rather than curiosity and creativity.
It’s a pattern that feels strangely familiar today as we grapple with AI and rapid technological change.
Protecting the past rather than preparing for the future
Stephen made a point that resonated strongly with me. Much of our current policy debate in education seems driven by a desire to protect the system we already have, rather than asking how learning should evolve in a radically different world.
When knowledge is freely available and AI can generate explanations, examples, and assessments in seconds, the traditional model of schooling – where teachers distribute small pieces of knowledge to students sitting in rows – begins to feel increasingly out of step with reality.
And young people know it.
One of the most striking observations Stephen shared was the growing disengagement from schooling internationally. Students are “calling the bluff,” he suggested. They still show up – because they’re good people and want to do the right thing – but many are quietly voting with their feet.
The world outside school looks very different from the one they experience inside it.
The danger of lowering our ambition
Part of the problem lies in the way we measure success.
Too often our public conversations focus narrowly on test scores or international rankings. These metrics matter, of course, but they tell only a small part of the story. They don’t measure curiosity. They don’t measure agency. They don’t measure whether young people leave school believing they can shape the world.
And sometimes they tell a troubling story of students who perform well academically who often become less likely to pursue those subjects later in life.
In other words, we may be measuring success in ways that inadvertently extinguish the very passion we hope to cultivate.
When we trust young people
The most hopeful part of our conversation came when Stephen described examples of what happens when students are genuinely given agency.
In one project, students were asked to design their own “classroom of the future” using nothing more than cardboard. What they created – quiet learning spaces, collaborative areas, presentation walls – revealed a sophisticated understanding of how learning works.
But the most interesting result wasn’t the design. It was what happened to the students themselves.
- They arrived earlier.
- They stayed longer.
- Their engagement increased.
- And their learning improved.
When students imagined the future of learning, they weren’t just designing classrooms — they were rehearsing the future.
“There is no ‘they’”
Towards the end of our conversation I asked Stephen what message he would give policymakers thinking about the future of education.
His response was simple, and powerful – Be more ambitious for our children.
Again and again he has seen what happens when young people are trusted with big challenges. When we “terrify ourselves with the tasks we give them,” he said, they invariably astonish us with what they achieve.
But his final comment may have been the most important of all: Don’t wait for “them” to fix education.
There is no “they”, he says, “It’s us”.
For school leaders, teachers, parents and communities, the invitation is clear. The future of education won’t arrive through policy announcements alone. It will emerge through the countless decisions educators make every day about how learning happens in their classrooms and schools.
And perhaps the most important of those decisions is this: Will we design education around compliance – or around possibility?
Listen to our conversation below.
You can access all previous conversations on Youtube
