It’s time to pick GCSE options for my eldest, we get a form through from the school to make some initial choices. We spend some time looking at the videos explaining the subjects, the smiling teachers all making their pitch for their subject, explaining what the potential career options are. At this point my heart sinks a little. How can I help him make a decision on what subjects to spend the next 3 years studying when it’s not clear what jobs will be available at the end? We discuss the possibilities and the things he might be into, I keep my fears to myself for the time being, I don’t want a nihilistic 13 year old, they’re difficult enough as they are.
The curriculum
Before I get going, I realise that a curriculum, especially a national one takes time to write, consult on and implement. I’m not expecting any government to be able to meet the pace of change we are seeing at the moment or fully understand the implications. I’m not sure anyone can.
The problem
The problem is that most of the jobs for school leavers are being automated or replaced. The entry level jobs that you can start with little skill are going or gone. Junior data entry is disappearing. Basic accounting roles are increasingly automated. Marketing apprentices compete with software that never sleeps. First-line IT support is shrinking.
IT Support was where I started, helping an IT manager for a small company in my home town. From there I studied and got my first job in London working for a financial services company and worked my way up, as I learnt new skills I started taking on a bit more responsibility and took the next step. That initial step is now gone. That first rung on the career ladder is being removed by AI.
The missing rung
Without that path in, how do today’s school leavers get a start in IT when the helpdesk is now automated? What if you can’t do an unpaid internship in London because you’re from Wolverhampton and your parents can’t afford to fund it? What if you don’t have family friends at the firm? With that first rung gone, it will need money, connections, or both that most families don’t have. The stock responses - learn a skill, invest more in education - don’t answer the harder questions: what skill, for what future?
None of this means we should stop teaching, but the role of education is changing and it’s not just the state’s responsibility to educate our children, we parents have an even greater role to play. So, what can we teach in a world of such uncertainty?
Skills for life
How to learn – the skill that underpins all others. How do we break down complicated subjects? How do we know where to start or how to approach a new task?
Critical Thinking – with the volume of information available on the internet, and now with AI able to serve up the entire canon of human thought, it’s never been more important to be able to think critically, to ask questions, evaluate a claim or spot a fallacy.
AI literacy – anyone on the planet can get AI to write, code and think for them, and most people will. The skill is not prompt engineering, it is being able to use AI to help you think better, to test out ideas against almost every discovery we have made, to refine your thought - at anything, it doesn’t have to be intellectual, I have used LLMs to help me understand how engines work, how to make a Legolas costume (not for me) or what kind of exercise plan to adopt and then use it further to refine the plan or the knowledge.
Household finance – we will almost certainly not know what our children do for a living, but we know they’ll have a household to run. The basics - budgeting, understanding debt, knowing what tax is and how it works, having some idea of how to save for a future that feels increasingly hard to picture - are the same regardless of what the economy looks like. This is not financial advice. It’s literacy. And it’s scandalous that we don’t already teach it.
Basic economics – not theory, not textbooks, but the mechanisms that govern the world your child will live in. Why do prices go up? What is inflation actually doing to your money? Why does it matter what GDP per capita is, as opposed to GDP? What happens to wages when ten people are chasing one job? Understanding these things won’t protect you from them, but it means you can see what’s happening and why, rather than just feeling the effects and reaching for whoever’s offering the simplest explanation.
Tolerance for uncertainty – this is so important now, not only with the pace of change with AI, but climate change, politics, war, and a million other things outside our control. Understanding what you can and can’t control can help our children (and us) sit more calmly in a turbulent, ever-changing world.
The great wide world
The challenges and opportunities that nature presents have not changed in thousands of years. We have, we spend less time outside, the time we do spend is structured – clubs or organised activities. Time spent outside for children, unsupervised and unstructured will equip them with skills like patience and problem solving.
Nature is the original uncertainty. It doesn’t care what you planned, it doesn’t respond to your preferences, and it cannot be scrolled past. Children who spend time in it learn something no classroom can teach: that the world is indifferent, sometimes dangerous, learning to accept and embrace that is the point.
What does the future hold?
As we press send on the GCSE options, just before he drifts off thinking about something else, the feeling of uncertainty at what life holds hit us both. The world that those qualifications are designed to prepare him for may not exist, but what we will make sure is that whatever the future holds, he can adapt to it. That was not on the form.