A conversation with Scottish educator and NoTosh founder Ewan McIntosh
Here’s a provocation to open with: the most important thing we can teach young people right now has nothing to do with AI, nothing to do with digital literacy, and nothing to do with the jobs of tomorrow. It’s an ancient skill. And most schools aren’t teaching it deliberately at all. What might that be?
That’s just one of the threads that emerged when I connected recently with my good friend and colleague, Ewan McIntosh – founder of NoTosh (Scots for “no nonsense”). Ewan is an educator, design thinker, and one of the sharper minds I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for nearly two decades. Ewan works with schools and governments across more than 70 countries, and right now he’s deep in a project trying to change how government itself operates in Scotland – not just education, but health, justice, children and families. The education lens, it turns out, is a lens for everything.
“School Is Child-Minding for the Intellectual”
Ewan’s central argument is one that policy-makers routinely sidestep: the most challenged learners in our systems aren’t struggling because of an education problem. They’re struggling because of a life problem – and we keep trying to fix it with curriculum.
The student who’s late to school? Mum left at 5am for her cleaning shift. The one who hasn’t done their homework? They were feeding their younger siblings the night before because dad was on his second job. School, Ewan points out bluntly, is designed for families who work nine to five. For everyone else, it compounds the disadvantage. “The most challenged learners end up doubly challenged and doubly penalised,” Ewan says. “They’re acting as pseudo-parents, essentially, for siblings – as well as trying to do school.”
The solution isn’t more literacy intervention. It might be universal income. It might be affordable childcare. It’s almost certainly something that crosses the artificial boundaries between government departments. And that’s the whole point: when you start with the human, the problem rarely respects the budget lines we’ve drawn around it.
The Real Barrier to Learner Agency Isn’t Students – It’s Teacher Confidence
One of the most honest things Ewan said in our conversation was; “the greatest barrier to giving students more ownership of their learning is often the teacher’s own uncertainty about whether students can handle it.“
This isn’t a criticism. It’s a diagnosis. When we talk about learner agency, educators often hear “individualise 180 lessons a week” – which is both exhausting and missing the point entirely. Agency isn’t about personalisation at that scale. It’s about students understanding why they’re learning, having some say in how, and being trusted with genuine responsibility for their own thinking.
The schools Ewan sees doing this well – many of them IB schools – have built a skills framework into the bedrock of daily practice. In Scotland, a framework of 12 “Metaskills” offers an evergreen framework across three domains: self-management, social intelligence, and innovation. Skills like focusing, adapting, showing integrity, curiosity, sense-making, creativity.
“These skills don’t go down with changes in the world around us,” Ewan says. “They need to be amplified.” The uncomfortable truth is that most curriculum frameworks already have these skills baked in somewhere. New Zealand’s key competencies have been there for two decades. The problem isn’t the framework. It’s that we never made the practice routine.
Why Your School Improvement Plan Is Probably Just a Catalogue
Ewan draws a sharp distinction between a catalogue of good intentions and an actual strategy. Most school plans, he argues, are the former: lists of activities, all of which feel worthwhile, none of which are fully resourced, and few of which ever become genuine institutional habit. Strategy, by contrast, requires choice. It requires saying: not this, not now.
“You’re not usually choosing between a good idea and a bad idea,” he says. “You’re choosing between lots of pretty good, all right ideas that can’t really all be done well at once.” His advice to school leaders navigating top-down mandates. Ewan advocates that you start by asking which of your current practices are actually embedded as habit, not just priority. Because a priority is something you’re still figuring out. A habit is something that happens whether or not the deputy principal is watching.
Most schools, he suggests, are overloaded with level-two thinking – ambitious new practices that require disproportionate effort – and underinvested in getting level-one right: the things that just are the way we do things here. The good news is that clarity doesn’t shrink creativity. It enables it.
AI Won’t Deskill Teachers.
Ewan is refreshingly un-anxious about AI in education – but he’s precise about why. The value of AI in curriculum planning, he argues, isn’t that it replaces teacher expertise. It’s that no one’s memory is good enough to hold all of what we know makes good teaching, and bring it to bear in the moment, every time. AI can be the thing that reminds you of the strategy you got bored with three years ago – the one that would be perfect for this class, who’ve never seen it.
He’s particularly interested in tools like Toddle, which allow schools to upload their learning frameworks – their values, their meta-skills, their pedagogical commitments – so that every lesson plan generated is quietly shaped by the school’s actual priorities, not just generic best practice. “Instead of a deputy head going around doing lesson observations and giving comments, the technology is doing that leading by reminding for you,” he says. “That’s a very good return on investment.”
But the warning is there too: if you take what the AI gives you without thinking, “it’ll feel flat.” The tool amplifies what the teacher brings. It can’t replace the bringing.
The Skill That Will Matter Most in the Next Five Years
And here’s where Ewan lands – with a word that surprised me by how much weight it carries.
Discernment.
Not digital literacy. Not critical thinking (though that’s in there). Not AI fluency. Discernment: the capacity to work out whether something is worth your attention. To hold something you dislike hearing long enough to ask whether it contains any truth. To filter the flood.
It matters for students navigating social media. It matters for teachers navigating research that masquerades as research. It matters for school leaders choosing between a thousand things that all sound worthwhile. “The biggest trap in schools,” he says, “is that almost everything sounds worthwhile. That’s exactly why focus is so hard.” In a world drowning in signal dressed as noise, and noise dressed as signal, discernment isn’t a soft skill. It’s survival infrastructure.
By the end of our conversation, I’d coined a new job title: Chief Discernment Officer. Ewan liked it. I think every school needs one.
Listen to the full conversation with Ewan McIntosh in this episode of Conversations on the Future of Education. And if you’re in Auckland – Ewan is appearing at a free event on Thursday 30 April at Stonefields School at an event organised by the Stonefields Collaborative Trust – see details here and book to attend
