Preparing students for an AI-shaped world

This week’s blog is slightly later than usual; I wanted to write it after I’d given a keynote address for the British Chamber of Commerce in Dubai on the impact of AI on education and in the workplace. It was a timely conversation and one that feels increasingly urgent for schools and employers because the future workforce is already sitting in our classrooms and the pace of change is unprecedented.

If we look back at history, it is striking how often schools educate young people without knowing where their talents will ultimately lead. The students in today’s classrooms will become tomorrow’s analysts, engineers, entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals, and leaders. This hits home particularly for QE and AI. Two of the most important figures in the world of AI, Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, who founded DeepMind together, were both students at QE Barnet. I wondered if their teachers back then could have predicted that they would go on to become two of the most consequential figures of our AI century.

The answer is probably not, but the job of the best teachers has always been the same: to prepare students to thrive regardless of how the future unfolds; Artificial Intelligence simply raises the stakes due to the speed at which the change is coming.

While organisations often introduce innovation through top-down strategy, schools experienced AI quite differently. It arrived through students who are curious, resourceful, and always keen to find the most efficient way to solve a problem. Recent research suggests that the vast majority of young people are already using generative AI, with many engaging with it daily. By the time adults began debating whether AI belonged in education, students had already decided that it did.

This has prompted immediate and important questions:

• If AI can generate essays in seconds, what are we really assessing?
• How do we distinguish between the work that is supported by AI, and that which has been substituted by it.
• How can we ensure that learning, not just output, remains the focus?

At the same time, teachers have begun exploring how AI can reduce administrative workload and free up more time for what teaching should really be about; planning excellent lessons and building transformative relationships.

One of the most interesting consequences of AI is that it may push the best schools to become more human, not less

For many years, schools have relied heavily on finished products such as essays, reports, and presentations. But if technology can generate plausible answers, then the output alone becomes a less reliable indicator of understanding.

Instead, we are placing greater emphasis on:

• How students think, not just what they produce
• Their ability to explain, justify and reflect
• Their capacity to apply knowledge in unfamiliar contexts

This should mean more discussion, more questioning, and more authentic problem-solving.

Crucially, it also reinforces the importance of teachers’ expertise and relationships. Teachers know who their students, how they think, where they struggle, and what genuine understanding looks like are best placed to drive pupils to achieve their potential.

For all the hype around AI, not all applications are equally valuable in education. What is genuinely exciting is its potential to tackle one of education’s oldest challenges: personalisation.

Every teacher knows that students learn at different speeds, begin at different starting points and respond to different types of support. We have lots of data to support identification of those differences, but until now, responding to that diversity with even the small class sizes that QE will support is a challenge, for even the best teachers.

AI offers the possibility of immediate, tailored explanations, extension for students ready to go further and improved support for those with inclusion needs through rapidly designed and bespoke resources. It is not a ‘silver bullet’, but it may help us move closer to ensuring that every child receives the challenge and support they need to flourish.

One risk of AI that has resonated strongly with me is that known as “cognitive debt.”, a term coined by researchers who recently published a paper about the impact of over-reliance on AI. It describes what happens when we outsource too much of our thinking to AI tools.

If students rely on AI to do the hard thinking for them, they may, retain less understanding, develop weaker problem-solving skills and miss out on the intellectual struggle that builds deep learning (and which is the absolute core of the QE teaching and learning experience)

Our team are totally focused on the importance of ensuring that children are “comfortably stuck.” Real learning happens through challenge, effort and persistence, not convenience.

The key question for facing educators is how do we use AI to enhance human capability without weakening it?

In the UAE, there has been clear recognition of AI’s importance, and schools have not had the luxury of ignoring it. We must teach students how to use these tools, but to teach them the important skill of discernment, so that they can understand when AI is useful and when it is not, what its limitations and risks are, and, most importantly, the importance of independent thinkers. QE’s mission, to develop confident, able, and Responsible free-thinking scholars, is so well designed to tackle this challenge!

It is impossible to predict exactly how artificial intelligence will reshape the world our students will inherit, but our task is to ensure that as technology becomes more powerful, young people continue to develop the qualities that matter most: curiosity, resilience, judgement and integrity.

Progress continues apace, with the first school signage being installed on the exterior, and the work on the school’s reception coming close to completion. Importantly, this is where the parent café will be, and I can’t wait to share an americano with members of our founding community in there soon.

Until next time, 
Dan Clark