The school system has the same problem as your AI strategy

Our new episode of the Elephants in the Boardroom is out, and it is one we have wanted to put together for a while.

This month, Graeme Codrington sits down with our very own Jude Foulston, Digital Director at TomorrowToday. Jude works with schools and parents around the world, but a lot of what she shares in this episode comes from closer to home.

She talks about the year she pulled her kids out of mainstream school during COVID while she was going through chemo, what they tried in its place, and what eventually brought them back to mainstream.

Graeme and Jude use our team’s TIDES framework to discuss the disruptive trends that schools need to be aware of in order to remain relevant.

Some of what comes up in this episode:

✅ Teachers used to be the ones with all the answers – the deliverers of content. Now that everyone has access to information, the role of educators changes significantly.

✅ A ‘school’ in Barcelona called LearnLife, where, amongst many beautiful moments, Jude watched 4 teenagers work passionately through a maths problem on a whiteboard – no teacher watching over them, no formal assessment as the end product, but rather a deep and personal investment, and joy, that the teens had in solving the problem – together.

✅ How dyslexic thinking gets treated as a weakness when it is often the opposite.

✅ What schools are actually measuring, and what they should be measuring instead.

✅ Why education is not only a ‘school problem’ to solve.

That last point is one to think about. As long as universities ask for certain grades and employers ask for certain degrees, schools will keep teaching to those goalposts. The change has to come from parents and from the people doing the hiring as well.

Earlier in the episode, Graeme and Dean van Leeuwen also dig into what happens when people stop questioning what AI tells them. Graeme walks through the 5T AI Impact Model, the framework we use with clients to cut through the noise and work out where AI is actually creating value in a business.

Future of Education: Preparing Children for a World That Doesn’t Exist Yet with Jude Foulston – Listen now.

At TomorrowToday, these are exactly the kinds of conversations we love helping leaders and organisations work through. The ones that connect what is happening in the wider world to the decisions being made inside boardrooms, classrooms, and around kitchen tables.

If education, AI, or how your organisation is responding to change is something your team has been wrestling with, we would love to be part of that conversation with you. And if you want to talk to Jude directly about anything that came up in the episode, you can find her on LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or contact us here, and we’ll connect you.

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