A lot of parents are sensing something urgent right now. That the gap between school and the world their kids are growing up in has suddenly become very large. Uncomfortably so.
But I also think a lot of parents are having a hard time pulling all the threads together to work out why that gap feels so vast, and what the impact on their children might end up being if they just ignore it.
So in this episode, I’m going to put all of that into clear, plain language. Because, actually, there have been a number of major things converging over the past few years that have disrupted formal education forever.
I’ll talk through:
📱 How smartphones, social media and short-form content have completely changed the classroom experience (socially, attentionally, and emotionally)
👩🏫 The different ways the teacher crisis is affecting both the adults in those roles and the children in their care, and why that’s only going to get worse
🤖 The parts of the AI, employment, and career story that should worry parents of school-aged children the most (including a quick re-visit and scorecard of the predictions I made around this a year ago)
📉 Which workplace skills are objectively falling in value, which ones are rising, and the extremely uncomfortable problem this creates for school
🔍 What multiple bodies of expert research show as being most practised and prioritised in classrooms right now, as of this year, and how significantly at-odds that is with the real world
🎓 What's happening to new graduates trying to enter the workforce as of 2026
💥 Plus a huge number of interesting statistics, research findings and connections that show just how quickly the adult-life-preparation ground has shifted beneath our children
This is not an episode arguing that children do not need education, challenge, knowledge, or learning, and I won’t waste any time rehashing the old argument that school was built for a different era or that it often works against what we now understand about child development. Those things are certainly true. But they’re not the most urgent part of the conversation anymore.
This is an episode asking whether the current school model is still capable of even coming close to delivering those things in a world that has changed more dramatically, more quickly, than it can possibly keep up with.
This truly does feel like is one of most urgent, important episodes I’ve ever made, so I’d be SO grateful if you’d share it with anyone else you know who might be feeling this gap too.
These private episodes go even deeper, backed by research, the science of how children learn and grow, and more than a decade of lived home educating experience. Each one is designed to help you rethink, reframe, and recalibrate the way you're walking this path, giving you the confidence to live the version of life you want. The Collection is 80 episodes strong and counting, with over 50 hours of listening available right now.
As a subscriber, you'll also get immediate access to my self-paced course, expert-led masterclasses recordings, five downloadable guides, our school exemption documents, and more 💛
Show Notes
You'll find all my weekly episodes right here (as of today, there's over 30 hours of listening that's not available anywhere else).
To access those, and get new ones every single week, you can join my complete Collection right here.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.104.9.2633
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-16.html
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
https://www.ascl.org.uk/News/Blog/November-2025/The-Teacher-Wellbeing-Index-2025
https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/
https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Challenger-Report-May-2026.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-voluntary-buyouts-ai-224eee4489cbc227244558ff02f5919a
https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
Transcript
INTRO
Helloooo and welcome to the Life Without School podcast, here to help you and your children live the life you want to, not just the one you’re told you should.
I’m Issy, a writer and home educating dad from New Zealand.
You can find my work at starkravingdadblog.com - all of my posts, podcast episodes and more, all designed to encourage, support and reassure anyone walking this road less travelled.
Thank you so much for tuning in to listen today. Alright, let’s get into this episode.
/INTRO
Hello, hello - I wasn’t planning on doing this episode for another month or so yet, but it just feels too urgent not to. So I’ve spent the past few weeks working extra hard to get this in your hands. It’s something that I think a lot of parents are feeling right now, but are struggling to put into words. Struggling to really see the whole picture. Struggling to put it all together coherently. So, that’s what I want to help do here today.
And the problem I’m talking about is the rapidly growing disconnect between the way school is preparing and developing children, and the world we’re all seeing when we look around.
I’m not going to spend this episode rehashing the old argument that school was built for a different era, or that it often works against what we now understand about child development. Those things are certainly true. But they’re not the most urgent part of the conversation anymore.
What I want to talk about today is how, in very recent years, we’ve had a perfect storm of things coming together that have made school more negatively impactful on children’s futures than it’s ever been.
Childhood has changed, the social world has changed, the attention environment has changed, the economy has changed, the future of work has changed to such an extent that it’s pretty much beyond recognition compared to previous generations. While on the other side school hasn’t really changed at all.
And yet here we are, still asking children to show up and sit in a classroom every day as though none of all this hugely significant change has happened.
Our children, now, are paying a higher price for that than they ever have. And that price is escalating as every year passes.
So what I’m going to do today is pull all these recent things together to show you just how wide, how quickly, that gap has grown and become. I’ll go through three major changes we’ve had in the world around us, and the very specific ways those changes have made school increasingly untenable for most children. And yes, I really mean that. My personal belief is that school, in its current shape and form, is becoming redundant. Which I do not say lightly, and I will work hard today to show you why I believe it’s true.
I think that by the time we're done here today, you'll find it very hard to look at our formal education system the same way ever again. And if you’ve had a nagging feeling about that disconnect between school life, and real life, I think this episode will give you the very reasons why.
Just before we start, I want to make sure you know that even though there’s only 30 public episodes of this podcast, I’ve actually been pumping them out every single week for the last year and a half now. We’re well past 100 episodes in total, with new ones dropping every week. So if you hadn’t heard about those, and you want to sign up for them, make sure you get over to my website and give me your email address. I’ll link to the right spot in the show notes, but you can get there by going to www.starkravingdadblog.com any time.
Right - it is time to get into what I think is a very important, and very urgent, conversation. So let’s do this.
Thing one: social, attention, and regulation dynamics
The place we have to start is with technology - not AI, not workplace or economy stuff, we’ll get to that later - but smartphones, social media, and content. I promise I won’t turn this into a screen bashing episode, or even a screen episode generally, but to work through all the different dynamics at play we do have to start here. Because the impact that world has had on our children, particularly in relation to their experience of school, is absolutely off the charts. Before I show you what I mean, let me just quickly establish the extent of this. Just so you know it is not some minority of kids being affected.
In the UK, a 2026 Ofcom report found that more than half of 10-year-olds already own a mobile phone. By 11, that jumps to 83%. And of those children who own a mobile phone, almost all of them - 96% - have a smartphone rather than a basic phone.
In the United States, the numbers are slightly lower at those exact ages, but they’re still very, very high. Common Sense Media found that around a third of 10-year-olds had their own smartphone, rising to over half by age 11, and then more than two-thirds by age 12.
And, of course, we know that for teenagers phone ownership is almost universal now.
None of this, by the way, is accounting for kids using their parent’s phone, or a family iPad, or anything like that. This is just purely personal ownership.
And actually, if you set smartphones aside, and just talk about tablets, it’s even worse. By the age of 2, 40% of children have a tablet now. And by 4 years old, that number is almost 60%.
We also know - and we’ve had study after study coming out over the past few years where this has been looked at and measured - that 8-12 year olds are spending almost 6 hours a day using screens for leisure. That’s not counting any time they use screens at school, for their school work, and it’s not counting any time they use it for research or homework outside school hours. This is pure personal use, with the vast majority of that being entertainment.
Teenagers are at almost 9 hours a day, and about half of them now say they are online - and I quote directly from the surveys here - ‘almost constantly’. 10 years ago, that line read about 1 in 5 teenagers. It’s now half of them.
And just to really underline the point here, 85% of 10-12 year olds have access to one or more of either YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram or Snapchat, despite the fact that most of these platforms supposedly have minimum age requirements. The vast majority regularly use Youtube, including Youtube shorts, and about half use Tiktok. Short form video being the ultimate dopamine feed. Remember, I’m talking about 10-12 year olds here. When you look at the teenage years, those percentages jump way up.
So just so we are very, very clear, this is not some fringe problem involving a small group of children. This is childhood now. If you do not own a phone, if you do not have access to social media, if you are not consuming screeds of short form video, if you are not online for many, many hours every day, you are now in the minority.
And out of this experience that has become central to childhood, we have three important areas of life and development being impacted in major ways - ways I will first describe, and then connect to the classroom.
So those three things are social, attention, and regulation.
First thing, social.
The social world your child is growing up in now is almost nothing like the one you grew up in, and I don't think most adults have fully clocked how different it actually is.
When you and I were at school, whatever happened in the playground generally stayed in the playground. Whatever happened in the classroom generally stayed there. A bad moment, an argument, something embarrassing - it happened in that one physical space, among the handful of kids who happened to also be standing there, and when you went home it stopped. It didn't follow you. There was no audience beyond who was physically there. And, sure, there might have been ongoing teasing about it, maybe word got spread around the classroom, or if it was bad enough, the whole school. But it was still relatively contained. It was awful, I’m not taking away from that, but compared to these days it was contained.
That era is gone.
Every social moment now carries the possibility of an audience that was not actually there. An embarrassing moment isn't just witnessed by the handful of kids standing nearby anymore, it's filmed, and it gets shared, and once it exists out there on the internet…well, it probably exists forever. It’s searchable. It’s re-watchable. It’s shareable. It can be copied, and re-uploaded, and re-shared, and commented on.
And this is happening to kids every day, believe me. The statistics on cyber bullying, on social media bullying, are absolutely horrendous.
In the UK, about 40% of children aged 8 to 17 have experienced bullying recently, with 84% saying it happened through a device.
In the United States, Pew research found that almost 50% had experienced at least one form of cyberbullying recently. And to define cyber bullying, here, we’re not talking about someone being a bit rude in a comment. We’re talking about seriously offensive name-calling, false rumours being started, physical threats, unwanted explicit images being sent to you, people constantly checking where you are and who you’re with - in a controlling and invasive way - and explicit images of YOU being shared without consent.
That is what we mean by cyber bullying. So even before we widen the net to include every lower-level nasty comment, every pile-on, every group chat exclusion, every humiliating joke, every screenshot that makes you feel stupid being passed around, every little social jab that doesn’t meet the technical threshold of a cyber-bullying survey category, the numbers are already horrendous.
And we know one of the main reasons they’re so high is because it’s very easy to bully someone from behind a screen. The term keyboard warrior exists for a reason. It’s a whole other thing to do it face to face.
Which is something that parents, according to the data, definitely haven’t come to grips with yet. Because recent studies tell us that most parents assume that if their child isn't being bullied at school, they're probably pretty safe. That the classroom, or the playground, or the bus ride home is the potential danger zone, and home is the safe space. Naturally - because that’s how it’s always been. But those same studies - including a huge study tracking almost 30,000 teenagers - show us that almost three quarters of teens who are cyberbullied are targeted by someone who had never bullied them in person at all.
So parents can’t just look at what’s happening face to face and assume they can see the whole social picture anymore. A child might not be getting shoved around. They might not be openly mocked in the playground. They might not even be targeted in person by the same child hurting them online.
Instead, it follows them home, into their kitchen, into their lounge, into their bedroom, it’s right there before they go to sleep, and it's waiting right there for them again the second they open their eyes the next morning.
That is not the social environment we grew up in. And when I get through these three dynamics separately, I will explain why adding this to a typical school environment is like pouring fuel on a burning flame.
So second thing, attention.
Picture the average social media feed that is video centric, which is by far and away the most common content being consumed by kids and teenagers. Most of them, as we’ve just seen. Not some of them. Most of them. Short clips, one after another, each one different from the last, each one engineered - on purpose, by companies with almost unimaginable resources - to do one job: keep that brain hooked for one more swipe.
New stimulus, new reward. New stimulus, new reward. Over and over, faster than any book, any conversation, almost anything in the real world could ever hope to match.
And we’re no longer stabbing in the dark about what this may be doing to attention.
Developmental research is very clear that the brain systems responsible for sustained focus, impulse control, self-regulation, and behavioural control are still maturing right through childhood and adolescence. Which means this age group is not just using these platforms heavily, they’re using them during the years their attention systems are still being built. The years where they are most vulnerable.
And across a growing body of research, heavier or more compulsive use of short-form video is being linked, again and again, to poorer attention, weaker self-control, weaker executive control, more inattentive behaviour, more academic procrastination, and worse learning outcomes.
Now, I want to be careful here. Not every child who watches short videos is doomed. That’s not what I’m saying. And the research we have here, so far, is young - in research terms, it is early days. But that’s also part of the point. We don’t fully know, or understand, the impact of all this. Yet, we’ve allowed these platforms, and this style of content consumption, to become a normal part of childhood.
And, regardless of how early on this is in the formal research, the logic itself is very hard to ignore. When a developing brain is repeatedly trained on fast novelty, rapid reward, and constant context-switching, we shouldn’t be surprised when slower, deeper, less instantly rewarding forms of attention start to feel almost impossible by comparison.
Third thing, regulation.
A nervous system can only build the capacity to handle discomfort by actually experiencing it. Having to sit with it. Boredom. Frustration. Waiting. Disappointment. All those normal discomforts of being human.
We need to get in plenty of reps with those things to build the muscle of coping with them.
You can’t do that by avoiding them every time they appear. You build those muscles by going through them, enough times, with enough support, that your system learns it can handle those feelings. That you will find a way through them, and out the other side.
And that is exactly the kind of friction this digital environment is built - and very cleverly designed - to remove.
The moment a child feels bored, there is a simple tap or swipe or click that will solve it. The moment they feel a slight flicker of discomfort, there is an exit built directly into the device sitting near them.
And again, we have research here, and if you are the parent of a neurodivergent child, stay with me here because I’m going to add some further context around that in a moment. Studies on young children have found that using devices to calm children is associated with higher emotional reactivity over time, partly because it displaces the moments where children actually get to learn emotion-regulation strategies. Other research has found a kind of loop, where more tablet use is associated with more anger and frustration later, which then predicts more tablet use again, and so on. That was a 2024 JAMA Pediatrics tablet study, where use at age 3.5 was associated with more anger and frustration by age 4.5, and that anger and frustration then predicted more tablet use by age 5.5.
In other words, the device doesn’t just entertain the child. It can become their primary regulation tool. Which can be a vicious cycle.
Because when that happens too often, the child misses out on getting those reps. They don’t get enough practice being bored, or frustrated, or not instantly rescued from whatever is vaguely uncomfortable.
Now, like I said, I want to differentiate this with the regulation a lot of neurodivergent kids use devices for, because there are some genuinely positive experiences there. For some kids, a screen can give them predictability, control, comfort, and a way to come back down when everything around them has started feeling like it’s all too much. I’m absolutely not dismissing that here, so please don’t think I am. I’m not saying no child should ever use a device as a regulation tool.
What I’m talking about is something quite different.
I’m talking about the device becoming the default escape from every ordinary discomfort, for pretty much every child, ever. Every moment of boredom. Every flicker of frustration. Every bit of waiting. Every bit of in between time. Every moment where the child might otherwise have had a chance, with support, to build the muscle of staying with an uncomfortable feeling and coming out the other side.
There’s a huge difference between using a device intentionally to help a child recover from genuine overwhelm, and handing over a device so often that the child never gets enough practice recovering without it.
Never before in our human developmental history have we had such easy, immediate access to a thing that will solve our boredom, or frustration, or restlessness, or discomfort the very second those feelings appear.
Ok, so we have these three dynamics that have fundamentally changed - Social. Attention. Regulation.
Three of the most important systems a child needs to get through a day well, all three completely upended, all three under more pressure than they've ever been under in the history of childhood.
Now, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a child.
I want you to picture a scenario with me. Close your eyes, if you can. Imagine a 12 year old waking up in the morning.
Before breakfast, before they've even properly rubbed the sleep out of their eyes, there's a screen in their hand. And remember, don’t fall for the trap of believing that’s just some children, a minority of children. We have the data. It is the majority of children. You cannot squeeze between 6 and 9 hours of non-school device use out of a day unless you have your eyes on it first thing in the morning, and then again later in the evening. The data does not lie. Oh, and by the way, the data on childhood sleep loss sits right alongside this. Teenagers now have the lowest rates of getting even seven hours of sleep across an entire 32-year dataset we have to work with.
So we have our sleepy child, - sleepy, because they were awake late on their phone - waking up, flicking open their phone or iPad. Straight to some messages and then some short form video. Fifteen seconds, new clip, new stimulus, new reward, swipe, swipe, swipe - their brain's already three or four of 10 or 12 dopamine hits deep before they've even made it to the breakfast table. Somewhere in that same feed, or in the group chat sitting there, is last night's unfinished business, right. Someone who was left out. Someone who got a bad photo of them passed around. Someone who had 100 more cruel comments left about them while they were asleep, because someone decided they’d make a funny video about them and it went viral. Whatever it is, it’s all right there, first thing, in their face, before they've even had a chance to breath. There's no morning anymore where a kid just gets to wake up and take it slow.
By the time they're out the door and on the bus, their nervous system has already done more swiping, more scrolling, more bracing, more social comparing than it knows what to do with. And whatever feelings came with any of that - embarrassment, jealousy, being left out, seeing something they shouldn't have - is now sticking to them like a residue they can’t wipe off. And it’s accumulating.
Now imagine our 12 year old is walking through the school gates.
Picture them sitting down at their desk. Facing the front. Tired. Overstimulated. Listening to their teacher talk for twenty minutes, about a topic they didn't choose, at a speed they can’t control, with no actual payoff on what happens next for the first nineteen of those minutes. There’s no tap, no swipe. No new stimulus. No dopamine hit. Just one slow, steady stream of information, expected to land on a brain that, less than an hour ago, was getting rewarded literally every few seconds.
And remember, underneath all of that, this child is carrying that residue of whatever social stuff has played out.
Now our child is opening a workbook. A project. An assignment. A test. They will need to sustain their attention for a fairly long period of time to get done what they need to get done. They will feel frustration, they will feel boredom, they will feel restless, and there will be no immediate rescue from that. But they won’t have the tools to manage those feelings, because they get almost no practice at it.
You might say, well, hang on - isn’t this exactly where they get the practice? Isn’t school where they build those muscles? Isn’t the classroom the place where they learn to sit with boredom, and frustration, and waiting, and discomfort?
And I get that that sounds like it makes sense.
But the kind of practice a child gets is just as important as the amount.
A child does not automatically build regulation just because they are repeatedly placed in a dysregulating environment. That’s not how it works. Regulation is built when discomfort is experienced in hand with support, in hand with safety, in hand with meaning, and agency, and a form of recovery that allows the nervous system to actually integrate the experience.
Otherwise, the child is not actually building new capacity. They are just enduring something.
I like to think of this like strength training. Reps only build muscle when the weight is appropriate, right - plus, when the form is good enough, and the body has time to recover. If you load someone up with a weight they can’t manage, force them through the movement, correct them publicly when they fail, and then make them do it again the next day while their muscles are still aching, you haven’t made them stronger. You’ve just made them dread working out.
And that’s the problem with the classroom as a regulation-building environment.
The child is not choosing the task. They are not choosing the pace they get to work through it at. They are not choosing the topic. They usually don’t have much control over the environment, or the timing, or the way the work is presented. They are surrounded by peers, which means every struggle carries a social layer. And, hey, you might even be videod during one of those struggles, yay.
So yes, the classroom can provide boredom, frustration, waiting, discomfort.
But providing all that is not the same thing as building the capacity to deal with it.
For a lot of children, what school teaches is not actually regulation. It teaches suppression. And I’m quite sure many of you listening will know exactly what I mean when I say that. I certainly do.
Sit on the feeling. Hide the feeling. Don’t move. Don’t react. Don’t ask too much. Don’t fall behind. Don’t make it obvious that you’re struggling. Just manage and endure and survive.
And then, the second they get a chance, find an out. Which, now, is right there. The tap, the swipe, the scroll, the game, the message, the video. So what’s really happening is an unhealthy cycle of escaping.
This is the child we're asking to sit and focus and listen and learn. Using a nervous system that's already had its reward circuitry maxed out before nine in the morning. An attention system being asked to do the single hardest thing it can do based on what it’s used to doing. And a regulation system with nothing left in the tank, carrying constant social interaction and weight and threat.
Three key systems. All under load. All at once. In a way children have never had to experience before.
This is not an episode about mental health, but is it any wonder those rates are through the roof right now?
So, I want to be very clear before I move to our next point that I’m not sitting here saying ‘screens are bad’, ‘all technology is bad’. That’s not what I’m saying at all. This podcast only exists because of all this technology. My children are all building things, and designing things, and recording things, and baking things, and whatever - with the help of technology. A lot of you listening will be using technology in really intentional ways, and will not be sitting in those negative datasets alongside the majority.
The point I am making is that there is a very serious mismatch between an education system that was designed on the assumption of sustained, voluntary attention, and the world children now live in, which is actively and deliberately working against that. And, as we get further and further into smaller, more accessible devices, and wearables, and AI, and all that stuff, that mismatch is only going to grow.
Because our education model assumes that children will arrive regulated, ready, able to sit still and absorb information for hours on end, and then it layers on more pressure from there - more evaluation, more comparison, more performance under observation. There is no slack in the system for a child who's arriving already stretched thin before the first bell even rings.
QUICK BREAK
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I had an email from Jessica recently about the Collection, that really made me smile, so I want to share that quickly. She said:
“Thanks for all your content, it is SO helpful to me. You seem to strike that perfect balance between freedom and structure. I find that so difficult myself, so everything you share is just such a goldmine. I recently became a paying subscriber and, well, it's like running around in a candy store, stuffing my face.“
That is so, so good. Thanks Jessica, I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself in there. Right, let’s get back to this episode shall we?
/END BREAK
Thing two: Teachers
The second thing I want to talk about is the people a schooled child spends a lot of their day with. Their teachers.
Teaching is now one of the most burned out professions. If not the most. RAND surveys of thousands of teachers, across 2025 and 2026, found that over half say they are burned out. Over half. And that same survey says that teachers were far more likely than other working adults to report poor wellbeing across every measure. A pattern that has been consistent for a few years now.
Only about 1 in 4 teachers now say they plan to stay in the profession as long as they can.
Then add the financial strain, some of which you probably don’t know about. Thirty percent of teachers reported holding a job outside their main teaching role, spending an average of 13 extra hours a week in that second job. The survey doesn’t claim every one of those teachers is doing that purely to make ends meet, but it sits alongside a pretty huge pay gap: teachers reported average base salaries that were around $30,000 less than those of similar working adults.
And then, somehow, teachers still reported spending more than $600 a year of their own money on school supplies. So you have this absurd situation where the people being underpaid by the system are also personally subsidising the classrooms they work inside.
Is it any wonder that in England, unfilled teacher vacancies have been hitting the highest rates we’ve seen since records began. Globally, UNESCO says we need to find another 44 million teachers by 2030 just to meet basic primary and secondary education goals.
What other profession out there has a gap this big between the people it needs and the people it can actually get to fill the roles?
So when we talk about school struggling to meet the needs of children, we also have to talk about the adults inside the system. Because the people being asked to prepare our children for life are often exhausted, underpaid, emotionally stretched, and in many cases already wondering how much longer they can keep going. Already thinking about probably leaving at some point.
So what’s the result of this? Well, schools end up filling the gaps however they can. In the 2024-25 school year, roughly one in eight teaching positions across the US was either unfilled or filled by someone not fully certified for the role. So, inevitably, class sizes go up. Specialist subjects get canned. And the teacher your child started the year with may not be the teacher they finish the year with.
Before we get to what that instability does to children - and we will - I want to spend a brief moment on why teachers are burning out, because I don't think most people have a clear picture of what the job actually looks like right now. It has changed a lot.
When most of us picture a teacher, we picture someone who teaches, right. Someone who plans lessons, marks work, stands at the front of a classroom and helps children learn things. And yes, they still do all of that, of course. But that's only part of the job. And in a lot of cases, now, it’s not even close to the hardest part.
In the UK's 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index, 87% of education staff said they were supporting pupils' emotional regulation on a monthly basis. 57% said they were providing food at least monthly. Almost half said they were buying supplies out of their own pocket. We’ve heard a literal dollar amount against that. And let’s not even talk about the nightmare of having to manage phone and other tech use.
Teachers have become the last line of support for children whose needs are escalating, inside a system where every other support structure - mental health services, social services, and so on - is also stretched to breaking point. In the US, there are somewhere between 11 and 14 child and adolescent psychiatrists for every hundred thousand children, nowhere near enough to meet what's actually needed. The mental health system cannot absorb what's coming. So schools absorb it instead. Which means teachers absorb it. With no additional training, no additional time, and no additional pay.
Nearly half of teachers say these added responsibilities are negatively affecting their own mental health. Which makes complete sense. They signed up to teach. And they are now being asked to be educators, therapists, social workers, and food and supply providers, all at once, inside a system that doesn’t really give them the support and resources they need to do all that.
Now, that’s not a good situation. And I really feel for teachers right now. But you know who this impacts just as much, and maybe even more? The children sitting in those classrooms.
Children, especially young children, are wired to learn through relationship. A calm, consistent, present adult isn't a nice extra to have in a classroom. It should be seen as a developmental requirement. It's how they feel safe enough to take the risks that real learning actually requires.
Developmental science tells us children use the adults around them as what's called a co-regulation resource. A child's nervous system kind of borrows the calm of a regulated adult to find its own balance. This isn't a turn of phrase, it's neurobiological. It's why a distressed toddler stops crying when a calm parent picks them up. It's why a child anxious about something new can settle if they know they have a trusted, relaxed adult nearby. The child's nervous system takes its cues directly from the adult's.
So then what happens when the adult in the room is burned out? Depleted? Running on empty after taking on the emotional weight of thirty children's needs, week after week, with no real support behind them? Which, you’ll remember, is more than half the teaching profession right now. What does that environment feel like to a child's nervous system, even if not a single word is said out loud about it? We know that had a significant impact on a child’s sense of safety. And we know that without a sense of safety, learning is very difficult.
There's also research showing that teacher instability, including turnover and mid-year staff changes, which I mentioned earlier, is linked to worse behavioural outcomes for children, and that losing a stable adult in the classroom disrupts learning for a significant period of time. And that's from one mid-year teacher change, according to the research. We don't yet have research that's fully caught up with what years of chronic instability does. That is, very overstretched classrooms. Underprepared substitutes. Burned out adults. A system permanently stuck in crisis management, which is genuinely what we have right now.
But I can promise you a lot of parents are seeing it. Children are living it. And the data on children's mental health tells its own story underneath all of this.
Now, I want to be very, very clear - and I hope this is already coming across anyway - that this is not a criticism of teachers. Not even close. Teachers, by and large, are people who chose this profession because they care deeply about children. The fact that seventy percent of them are providing emotional support above and beyond their actual role, that close to a third are feeding children out of their own pockets, tells you everything you need to know about who these people are. The system is failing them just as badly as it's failing the children in front of them. They're being asked to do the impossible, with less support than they've ever had, and most of them are still showing up every single day just to try.
But the fact is that good intentions don't change what chronic depletion looks like inside a classroom. A child's nervous system doesn't respond to what a teacher intends, or wants. It responds to what a teacher actually radiates, in the room, throughout the day.
There's one more layer to the teacher point that I want to briefly talk about before we move on. Because when we see statistics showing us the number of teachers leaving the profession, we're not just losing average teachers. The teachers leaving fastest, and that are hardest to replace, are the experienced ones. The ones who've spent years building the kind of deep expertise and relationships that genuinely change a child's experience of school.
We know that teacher quality is one of the most powerful in-school factors shaping a child's outcomes. Not class size. Not the building, or the environment. Not the resources. The teacher.
A study by Harvard and Columbia economists tracked over a million students from primary school into adulthood, comparing what happened to children placed with higher versus lower performing teachers. Massive study. They found that students placed with stronger teachers were more likely to go on to attend university, more likely to attend a higher ranked one, and more likely to earn more as adults. It's worth saying that this kind of research has its critics, and honestly I would be one of them - attending university, especially higher ranking ones, is not something I believe we should be obsessing over. It’s a thing some young adults should go onto, if they need it. But it shouldn’t be as important as we often make it out. Nor, necessarily, should money.
But the point is that, if we’re talking about the school model, the person who is standing in front of your child, year after year, is not a minor detail. They are one of the most significant factors in how it all plays out.
So here's the compounding problem. When schools lose their more experienced teachers, they almost always replace them with newer, less experienced ones. Those newer teachers then walk straight into the same impossible conditions, overstretched, undersupported, underpaid, and a lot of them leave within a few years too, taking whatever expertise they've managed to build straight out the door with them. It's a downward cycle that feeds itself, and is going to be very hard to turn around.
The number of people entering teacher training has dropped by a third over the last 10 years. That is a huge drop. And the new talent pipeline is shrinking at same time more teachers than ever are leaving.
So this is not some short term blip that is going to wash out, and solve itself. This is a massive issue coming at us, head on, that is going to cause more and more pain over the next 5-10 years.
You know, we talk about the lottery of getting a good, experienced teacher like it's just one of those things, some kids get lucky, some don't. You’ll remember that from your own school days, I’m sure. But that lottery has never had worse odds than it does right now.
And remember, just keep this front of mind all the way through, this isn't happening to a child arriving fresh, ready, regulated, good to go. This is happening to the same child we just spent the last section with.
That child needs a calm, steady, present adult more than almost any generation of children before them. And the system meant to provide that adult is the most burned out, understaffed, and unstable it's ever been.
Thing three: The world of work
Now, if you’ve listened to earlier episodes of this podcast you might remember I did a whole episode on AI and the future of work about a year ago now. If you haven't heard it, it's worth going back to, because it’s still all very relevant, and very important.
But I want to do something really quickly with that episode before we move on. Because there are parts of it that we really need to talk about, but I don’t want to just repeat myself. There are fresh things to talk about in this area.
So, just quickly, as a way to cover the things we need to without getting bogged down, I’m going to score myself based on what I said in that episode. And then we’ll get to the new stuff. Because I don't want to be the guy who throws out big, scary predictions and then just moves on to the next big, scary thing without ever holding myself accountable for whether or not any of it actually happened.
So let's do a quick re-cap, and a check.
Back then, Microsoft had just laid off six thousand people, and I said, and I quote myself here, how long before that's sixty thousand, a hundred thousand, gone from one company. Well, since then, Microsoft has cut a further fifteen thousand roles across multiple rounds. And earlier this year, they offered voluntary buyouts to another almost 9,000 US employees, roughly seven percent of their US workforce. All the while, continuing to pour extraordinary amounts of money into AI infrastructure.
So that’s 24,000 more roles, affected in one company, since that episode aired. It’s not 60,000, it’s not 100,000, but I’m sure we’d all agree that it’s heading in the direction I spoke about back then.
I also talked about Mark Zuckerberg saying Meta expected AI to operate at the level of a mid-level engineer. Since then, Meta has cut another eight thousand or so jobs, and has left thousands of open roles unfilled so they can redirect huge spend toward AI. In a company meeting recently, Zuckerberg told employees the company now has two major cost centres: AI computing infrastructure and people. In other words, the servers, chips, and data centres needed to run AI on one side, and human employees on the other. And, as he said, the more money they pour into one, the less is available for the other.
That's the tradeoff, stated out loud, with the future intention, I think, quite clear.
And what of AI operating like a mid-level engineer - are we there yet?
Well, we have some very reliable benchmark tests we can look at for this. One of the main ones is called SWE-bench, and it tests whether AI can solve real software issues taken from GitHub. So not example puzzles. Real issues, from real codebases, and real companies, where AI has to understand the problem, work its way through the code, make a change, and get the tests to pass.
Back in March 2024, only a couple of years ago, AI was solving about 12% of those tasks. Pretty low number.
By July 2025, AI was hitting around 60%.
And now, it’s pushing comfortably into the 70s, gunning for the 80s.
It’s important to understand that being a good software engineer doesn’t just mean coding - there’s a whole lot of other stuff that’s part of that role - but we are clearly already in the realm of the more low level, and even average developers being outworked by AI.
Another thing from that episode worth checking was what I said about AI agents - so not AI as a clever assistant that helps you draft copy or create an image or whatever, but AI as an actual worker. Software you give a goal to, that then breaks the goal into steps, uses the tools it feels it needs, researches, writes, analyses, and just keeps moving through the work without you. At the time, that felt like the most futuristic part of the whole episode.
Well just 12 months later, it’s definitely not futuristic anymore. A 2025 PwC survey found 79% of senior executives said AI agents were already being used inside their companies. Almost nine in ten said they were planning to increase AI budgets specifically because of agentic AI. And two thirds of the companies already using agents said they were seeing measurable productivity gains from it.
And now, in 2026, this has moved beyond the language of future planning. Research on Microsoft 365 Copilot found that millions of people, across more than a million companies, were already using AI inside real agentic work flows - not just to write things, but to retrieve information, analyse, make decisions, strategise, and move on. Next level stuff.
The question companies are asking has moved, in just twelve months, from how can AI help our people, to which parts of the work can AI just do for us.
Which is a big deal for young people, because the work AI is best at replacing are very often the entry-level parts. The kind of tasks a young person used to do while they were learning the ropes inside a business.
Which means the bottom rung can disappear even in companies that never announce a single layoff.
But plenty are announcing layoffs too, which builds on the points I made about that in last year’s episode. In May this year, Challenger, Gray and Christmas, who track this stuff properly, reported that AI had become the single leading reason employers gave for job cuts in the US. In May 2026 alone, just last month as of recording this, AI was cited in more than thirty eight thousand job cuts. For the year so far, AI has already been the reason behind more cuts than the whole of last year combined, quite comfortably. By May, that number was at almost 90,000. Last year, all up, it was about 57,000. In 2023, across the whole year, it was 4,000.
Now, not every single job cut blamed on AI means a piece of software literally sat down in someone's chair. Some of it is restructuring. Some of it is companies redirecting money toward AI instead of people. Some of it is companies wanting to look efficient in front of investors, and so they’re using AI redundancies as a bit of a smokescreen.
But from where a young person is standing, today, trying to enter the workforce, the reason is irrelevant. The result is the same either way. There are fewer human roles. Fewer entry points into the working world.
The thing I was most worried about in that episode wasn't the mass layoffs at the big household names. It was the first rung of the career ladder disappearing, from most businesses. The junior roles. The internships. The entry-level stuff.
On that point, things have moved very quickly, and it's moved in exactly the direction I described.
This year, the World Economic Forum reported that entry-level job postings in the US have fallen by 35% in eighteen months, in large part because AI is already handling many of the foundational tasks those jobs used to exist for. To put that in raw terms, that’s more than 100,000 fewer new monthly job postings compared with January 2023. 100,000 less.
And the New York Fed's own tracker, which has followed graduate employment since 1990, shows unemployment for recent college graduates sitting at 5.7%, with underemployment, meaning graduates stuck in jobs that don't actually need the degree they spent years studying and paying for, over 40%. Just let that sink in a second. Almost half of recent graduates working in roles where they’re not using their degree. And hundreds of thousands of graduates sitting there unable to find work at all. This is graduates. Qualified graduates.
For context, that's a worse unemployment rate than the general population is currently experiencing, which is the opposite of what the story has always been, right. Go to university, get a qualification, get a good job.
Graduates used to beat average unemployment rates. Right now, they're doing worse.
Now, I’m not going back through this stuff to pretend I'm some kind of genius forecaster - I am definitely not that. I'm telling you because I want you to trust that what I'm about to say next isn't more speculation stacked on top of last year's speculation. What I described last year was pretty accurate, and I think that my biggest worry - the entry-level role stuff - has actually moved faster than I thought.
So today, I don't want to retread that whole episode. Go listen to it if you want the full picture of where AI itself is heading, it gets very detailed and it’s all still very relevant. What I want to do today is more specific, and in some ways more urgent, because this isn't about what the world might look like in ten or 20 years.
This is about the impact all of this has on a child in a classroom right now. And the impact it will have on them as they walk out the doors of their school when they’re 17 or 18.
To illustrate that impact, I’m going to show you what's actually rising and falling in importance in the workplace right now. And this is where it gets really uncomfortable if you still believe in the current school model.
Every couple of years, the World Economic Forum publishes its Future of Jobs Report. The 2025 edition pulled together the views of over a thousand major employers, representing more than fourteen million workers across 55 economies and 22 industries. This is no small report. And it asked them directly - what skills are growing in importance, and what skills are declining.
The skills rising fastest are AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, and technological literacy - ok, yep, they’re all obvious, nobody's surprised by any of that. And then right alongside those things are creative thinking. Resilience. Flexibility and adaptability. Curiosity and the commitment to keep learning throughout a career. Ok, that’s all interesting.
But where the list goes from here is where we start to see the biggest disconnect.
The skills with the largest decline in projected future demand - the ones employers across fourteen million workers are saying are becoming less important - are reading, writing, and mathematics in the narrow, produce-the-right-answer sense those words usually mean. And then this one, which is really uncomfortable, dependability and attention to detail.
Dependability and attention to detail. On the declining list.
Now, obviously, this is not employers suddenly saying they don’t need you to be able to to read or write. That would be ridiculous. Those basic fundamentals are always going to be important. What we can see here, reading into the detail, and putting ourselves in the shoes of a hiring manager over the next 5-10 years, is that the old rote information generation accuracy and retrieval skills the world was built on for a very long time are no longer the most valuable. The skills rising fastest are not obedience, routine output, and getting to the expected answer. They are creativity, adaptability, resilience, curiosity, lifelong learning, thinking outside the box, and the ability to work intelligently with powerful technology.
And, to make another prediction here, the gap between those things is going to increase, and it’s going to increase very quickly.
Ok. So now let’s go back inside our classroom. Look at what a child is asked to do, almost every single day, for thirteen years. Sit still. Follow the instructions. Get the answer that matches the answer sheet. Don't deviate from what you've been told to do or there’ll be consequences. Be consistent. Be reliable. Show up in the same way, on the same schedule, every single day.
In other words - be dependable. Pay close attention to detail. And produce the work you’ve been asked to produce.
And if you’re sitting there thinking oh come on, that sounds like a 1950s classroom, schools are way more creative these days, then I want to challenge you on that. Because if you believe it, I’d like to see some data that supports that.
In exchange, I will share some data, right now, that supports my version. Because we have direct evidence of what actually happens inside classrooms in practice. The CLASS tool - the Classroom Assessment Scoring System - is one of the most widely used classroom observation frameworks in the world, used to directly observe and score the quality of teaching interactions across thousands of classrooms. And what it does is measure multiple dimensions of teaching quality.
It doesn’t do it by asking people what they think schools are doing, or polling teachers on what they think. It actually sends trained observers into classrooms to score the quality of real teacher-child interactions across 3 key domains. Emotional Support, Classroom Organisation, and Instructional Support.
And within those domains, the one that consistently scores lowest is called Concept Development, which sits under instructional support. It is defined, in the framework itself, as the teacher's use of discussions and activities to promote higher-order thinking, rather than rote instruction.
The area measuring whether children are being asked to actually think - to analyse, to create, to reason, to connect ideas, to think beyond simply producing the answer - is the one that scores at the bottom of the pile, consistently, in real classrooms, when people go in and measure this.
What classrooms consistently score higher on are emotional support and classroom organisation. So there’s warmth there, positive relationships, routines, good behaviour management, good schedule management, keeping the transitions between subjects and activities smooth, and making sure children are on task. All that is there, all that is done well.
So…sit quietly, switch between things without a fuss, complete the assigned task, and stay on track until an adult tells you what to do next. Like it or not, know of the odd exception to this rule or not, this is what comes through most strongly, most consistently, when we look at real classrooms.
And we don’t have to only rely on this CLASS research to see this.
The OECD’s Global Teaching InSights study filmed maths lessons from around 700 teachers, involving about 17,500 students across eight countries, then scored what actually happened in the classroom.
On a four-point scale, classroom management scored between 3.5 and 3.8. Excellent. Teachers were effective at maintaining order, routines and student participation.
But overall instructional quality scored between 1.7 and 2.2, which the OECD themselves described as low across every participating system.
It showed that students mostly practised procedures, recalled information and adhered to the rules. They very rarely had to explain why something worked, compare different approaches, connect ideas or engage in deeper discussion.
So across two large bodies of research, across many different countries, we see that classrooms are way better at organising students and keeping them on task than they are at teaching them to think deeply.
So we have employers telling us, in very plain language, in surveys representing fourteen million workers, that the skills and behaviours a classroom drills hardest are the ones they need least. And we have direct classroom observation data showing us that the skills they need most - genuine higher-order thinking, creativity, adaptability, outside the box stuff - are the ones getting the least attention in actual teaching practice.
That is no small misalignment. That is the entire premise of what school is for running in the opposite direction to where the world is heading.
And just so we’re clear, those skill needs that are rising - creativity, adaptability, curiosity, the ability to keep learning and responding when everything around you keeps changing - are not just things you can bolt on to a child in their final year of school. They are not a subject you can add to the timetable. They are finely tuned skills, ways of seeing the world, really, ways of living in the world, that are either built or suppressed across years and years of daily experience in either direction.
So whether or not you agree that most children are still asked to sit still, and listen, and do the work they’re told to do, the outcome at the end is the same. Children in the vast majority of classrooms are not being given the kind of developmental practice they really need.
And let’s not forget, the child we’re talking about here is not some hypothetical future student. It's the same child from the start of this episode. The one who walked through that school gate with those key systems already being smashed in so many different ways.
That child is going to walk out of school at seventeen or eighteen into a job market that is already asking, with increasing urgency: can you think in ways that aren't scripted? Can you adapt and respond when the workplace you’re in moves quickly? Can you keep learning when everything around you keeps on changing? Can we trust you to get creative, and solve some really hard problems for us?
And the answer school has spent thirteen years preparing them to give is: well, I can follow instructions, and I can get the right answer when someone tells me what the question is.
And that is what I mean when I say school, now, feels like it’s totally untenable for most children.
Close
Now, before we close here, I want to draw all these threads together. Because I think that, alone, individually, these things are all very recent, and very significant. But it’s when you combine them, very quickly, like we have seen over the past few years, that we really start to get a sense of the problem. The compounding problem.
Here's what's true right now, all at once, simultaneously, for a child.
Their social world has been fundamentally rewired in ways that follow them everywhere, with no off switch and no safe space. Their attention systems are being trained, every single day, to expect something that school can never hope to compete with. Their capacity to sit with discomfort - to actually build the tolerance for frustration and boredom that learning requires - is being steadily undermined by a digital environment that was designed to prevent that practice from happening.
And then that same child walks into a building where the adult meant to help them develop themselves into a capable young person is probably burned out, probably underpaid, probably covering for other people who've already left, and running on empty.
And then, on the other side of all of that, the world they're being prepared for has changed so dramatically, so quickly, that the entire economic premise school was built on - study hard, get good grades, get a good job, climb the ladder - is falling apart. The ladder's bottom rung is being removed right in front of our eyes. The skills school has spent a century drilling are declining in demand. The skills the world ahead of them is going to need most are the ones getting the least attention in actual classrooms.
None of these things caused the others. But all of them are happening at the same time, to the same child. And what that means is the gap between what school was designed to do and what children actually need has never been wider. And the cost of that gap has never been higher.
This is not an argument against education. It's not an argument against learning, or structure, or children developing knowledge and skills and capability. It's an argument against this particular model, at this particular moment in history, for a child living in this particular world.
School, in its current form, was built for a child that no longer exists, growing up into a world that no longer exists, to be prepared for a future that no longer exists.
And the longer we keep asking children to do that, the more of them are going to pay a very high price that none of us should be willing to accept.
