Education guru Sir Anthony Seldon talks to Sarah Tucker about managing AI in schools...
Some coincidences feel more like architecture than accident.
Sir Anthony Seldon’s son now teaches at Isaac Newton Academy in Ilford, a school preparing pupils for a world shaped by artificial intelligence and rapid technological change.
The same district, on the borders of London and Essex, was home to the former Gearies Boys Secondary School, where my father, Norman Tucker, served as deputy head.
Different era, different tools, same essential questions: How do you educate young people for a future you cannot fully predict, and who takes responsibility when policy is outrun by the pace of change?
Sir Anthony Seldon
I grew up among teachers. Kitchens doubled as staff rooms; professional debates played out over the washing-up. It left me with a lasting conviction that teaching is one of the most valuable professions in society, and one of the most consistently undervalued.
Governments frequently say they value education; their actions often suggest otherwise.
Sir Anthony Seldon has spent a lifetime examining the gap between statement and substance.
A historian of education and politics, former Master of Wellington College and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, and a persistent public voice on schooling, leadership and wellbeing, he has observed education from almost every available vantage point – but always through a holistic lens.
This is our third interview. On both previous occasions we started not with a question, but with a short meditation and breathwork. Given that the location for the second meeting was the luxurious Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, it all felt quietly subversive.
But it also worked. One suspects that if more interviews began this way, answers might become more honest and coherent, rather than merely faster and faster.
Seldon is, in fact, a brilliant speaker: fluent, compelling and precise. In an educational sector crowded with prolific talkers, he is notable for the integrity of his thinking.
Sir Anthony Seldon
“Education is essentially about human flourishing, not just knowledge transmission,” he asserts.
It’s a principle that frames his response to artificial intelligence. Systems that can outperform students in essays and exams do not, in his view, herald the end of education.
Instead, they expose assumptions that have gone largely unchallenged: that performance equals understanding, and that assessment provides the true measure of learning.
On exams he is nuanced, rather than doctrinaire. The difficulty, he says, is not with testing itself, but with its gravitational pull.
Subjects without a clear exam endpoint are harder to teach, and in areas such as religious education or wellbeing, teachers struggle to sustain pupil engagement once students realise that there is no examination at the end.
“Too often exams have become not the means to an end, but the end itself,” says Sir Anthony.
AI makes this kind of distortion harder to ignore. Not only through exams, but coursework too, assessment has long functioned as a proxy for learning. When coursework can be generated at speed, that function falters, provoking a more basic question: What, exactly, is education trying to achieve?
Assessment, in Seldon’s view, should reflect the whole person: “the hand and heart, not just the head”. And here technology could help, he says, by enabling ongoing feedback during learning that is less stressful than high-stakes testing, especially for students prone to anxiety.
Of key concern are those subjects which resist easy measurement, and which have thus been the first to disappear as systems narrow their definition of success.
Drama, for example, is not something marginal, avers Seldon, but is central to what education once did well.
“Drama builds confidence, gives young people a sense of place and identity, and trains them to inhabit perspectives other than their own.”
These are not decorative skills, he says, but capacities that matter most when outcomes are uncertain and the pressure is real.
For Seldon, this emphasis on imagination is strategic. As AI accelerates cognitive output, the distinctive human contribution shifts.
Secure identities, moral judgement, confidence and empathy under pressure are not easily automated. Yet inculcation of these qualities has been steadily squeezed out by curricula designed more for efficiency than resilience.
It is, admits Seldon, “very hard to establish causality”, when considering the links between technology use and mental wellbeing. Even so, he is worried by the direction of travel.
“If you take people away from natural, healthy, caring relationships and replace these things with technology, it’s harder for them to form a secure personality. We are moving into territory that is deeply dangerous if we don’t get it right.”
It is for this reason, argues Seldon, that schools must deliberately preserve non-digital spaces – reading and reflection, physical exercise, time in nature – along with opportunities for direct human responsibility.
These are not optional extras, he insists, but the basis of psychological security.
Sir Anthony Seldon
In 2023, Sir Anthony co-founded AI in Education with Alex Russell, CEO of the multi-academy Bourne Education Trust, to help schools work together for solutions to these perplexing concerns. He is sceptical that leadership will come from government.
This is simply institutional realism. Historically, the most meaningful change in education has often emerged at the coalface, long before it resurfaces as policy in the corridors of power.
“The real work in education still happens quietly in the classroom,” says Sir Anthony. “Change will come from the teachers, not from the top.”
Which brings us back to Ilford. My father never pondered AI ethics, nor spoke in terms of human flourishing. But he understood that education was about forming people, not processing them.
Today that same instinct is still at work in those schools – state and independent alike – that buck the trend of mechanical measurement with strong wellbeing or holistic programmes and an emphasis on drama and sport.
Not all of them have specialist designations: in Surrey, Ewell Castle, Glyn School (also in Ewell) and Royal Grammar School (RGS) Guildford all score highly when judged by these broader criteria. And Greycourt School, near Richmond, is notable for its integration of yoga into the Year Nine curriculum without making it a philosophical statement.
But the road ahead is long.
Studies show that teachers are more likely to be cited as role models than are influencers, parents or peers. And yet, laments Seldon, successive governments have managed them like overheads, rather than invest in them as talent.
“No venture capitalist would attempt to build a high-growth company while systematically deskilling its people,” he observes. “Yet the world of education operates on essentially that basis. Future historians will look back at us and ask: Where were the grown-ups?”
Will educators, policymakers and leaders step up to help young people move thoughtfully into the age of AI, eschewing slow regulation and the aversion of risk?
Sir Anthony is optimistic.
“I think humans will win,” he asserts. “Not because governments find the vision, but because teachers – using different tools – simply refuse to mistake capability for wisdom.”
Visit: ai-in-education.co.uk
