By a strange twist of timing I am looking at three sides of a question the government has just decided for me. With Wild Together, two children in mainstream school and two years of training to become an AI and Machine Learning engineer ahead of me, I looked at the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, disappointed, but not surprised.
On the 29th April 2026 the act received Royal Assent. It changes how children in this country can be educated in several ways, two of them really matter. First, parents who educate their children at home will now have to register with their local authority, the responsibility was previously theirs and theirs alone, the state now wants oversight of it.
Second, academies, which had up until now been free to set their own curriculum, must teach the national curriculum like everyone else. In practice most of them did, because their teachers were trained on it and the exams demanded it, but the freedom to differ was there, not any more.
In both cases the relationship between parent and state has been redrawn, from a permissive assumption that parents know their children best, to a legislative one that the state does. Perhaps the government are right, but before we accept that, it is worth asking what problem this actually solves, and what it leaves untouched.
For over one hundred years the education system in the UK and most of the developed world was designed to produce competence in a stable society. Initially into agriculture or manual industry, then the late 20th century added professional and knowledge work. The pace of change was slow enough to adapt, adding subjects like economics, media and business studies. The rapid developments in the 21st century now make that system unfit for purpose.
In January 2025 the government published its AI Opportunities Action Plan, a commitment to £39bn in investment and a target to transform the UK economy through AI by 2030, getting 10 million workers upskilled. The 2026, One Year On report has just been published, 38 of 50 actions delivered, the ambition is real, and the pace is serious.
On the 27th April 2026, two days before the Children’s Wellbeing act received royal assent, the government released an announcement backing, through its sovereign AI fund a new British AI company called Ineffable Intelligence, building algorithms that can learn for themselves and uncover new knowledge - rather than simply copying what humans already know. The government are very proud of this UK company, the technology secretary, Liz Kendall said:
‘This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors, underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn’t just an AI taker but an AI maker.’
So, which one is true? The government cannot both know what is better for children’s education and be driving change that will fundamentally alter the entire economy of the UK.
The fact that these two announcements were two days apart highlights the complete disconnect at the heart of this.
It’s not that the government isn’t thinking about AI in education, but it is looking in the wrong direction. It is planning scholarships in higher education and the Learning Levy for those already in work, but almost nothing to prepare today’s children for tomorrow’s world.
The companies that the UK government is investing in, or that they are hoping will invest in the UK, have long-term plans for investment and a strategy (as the future is so uncertain they will undoubtedly change as technology does) but the point is, they have a plan. Politics does not think in 10- or 20-year plans to any meaningful degree, it used to think in election cycles, but currently even 5 years seems like too long a horizon.
10 million UK workers are to be upskilled, but the 10 million children currently in education? Tighter adherence to a curriculum that has not fundamentally changed in 20 years.
The King’s Speech was delivered on the 13th May 2026, setting out the agenda for parliament, AI was mentioned once. There is an education bill, its stated aim is that ‘every child deserves the chance to succeed to the best of his or her ability.’ There is no indication on what ‘success’ looks like.
So to return to the question. What problem does this solve? It is not clear. The home ed register may catch some genuine harm at the margin, although the safeguarding case is not clear and the existing legal framework was already there. The academies provision tidies up administrative untidiness that mostly didn’t exist in practice. What does it leave untouched? Almost everything that matters.
It leaves untouched the question of what an education is supposed to do in a country whose government has openly committed to transforming the entire economy by 2030 along lines that even its own investments cannot predict. It leaves untouched the gap between what the state knows and what it is now requiring schools to teach. It leaves untouched the question of why, in a moment where uncertainty is the defining condition, the response is to centralise and constrain rather than to permit difference.
This is the part that ought to alarm anyone watching closely, the honest response to genuine uncertainty is not to tighten control, it is to widen the field. Let parents try things, let small schools try things, let home educators, Forest Schools, free schools, micro-academies, individual teachers try things.
When you do not know what will work, it does not make sense to cling tighter to rules and increase oversight. Much as in the technology world, we need innovation and the ability to think, to experiment, to produce children who can adapt, who can make sense of a world whose rules are being rewritten daily.
What we are getting instead is the opposite. A curriculum, now made compulsory across academies that previously had room to differ. A home education sector that ran on parental responsibility, now placed under state oversight. The space for divergence is closing at exactly the moment when divergence is the only sane response to what is coming.
I write this as someone helping my wife set up a business using folklore and nature to teach, as a parent of children currently in mainstream education, and as someone who is about to start an AI engineering apprenticeship in a few weeks. I am about to spend two years retraining myself for the world the government says is coming. I wrote previously about some of the things we can teach as parents, but I look at the curriculum my own children are being taught and I cannot find the world I am training into anywhere in it.
The people who might have done something different, the small operators, the home educators, the Forest School teachers, the parents who took their children out because they could see what the system was missing, are now being registered, constrained and brought into line.
Nobody knows what to teach a child whose working life will begin in 2035. That is the point. In that uncertainty, freedom is not a luxury or an ideological preference. It is the only honest answer. A state that cannot say what the future looks like has no business deciding what your children learn about it.