This month's blog comes from Jessica Howe, Programme Manager. Jessica transitioned into the charity sector from a background in teaching and community engagement. In her spare time, she gardens, reads dystopian fiction, and tries, like the rest of us, to spend less time on her phone.
At the start of this year's programme at Kearsley Academy, a Year 10 pupil called Jamie wrote a short reflection after his first coach training session:
"I found this lesson fun, but quite tricky as I am uncomfortable speaking."
Ten weeks later, at the end of the programme, I asked him what he had taken away from coaching a Year 7 pupil in maths.
"It is a great opportunity to develop more skills and challenge yourself. I have developed my leadership skills and have helped my coachee improve with maths, which also improved our communication skills."
Jamie didn't develop those skills in a lesson about communication. He developed them by sitting across a table from an eleven-year-old, once a week for ten weeks, and working out together how to explain fractions.
No phone between them. No notifications. Just two human beings, a problem, and time.
I've been thinking a lot about why that hour seems to matter so much - not just to Jamie, but to the dozens of pupils I've worked with this year. And I've come to believe that what's happening in those sessions is quietly one of the most modern things a school can offer.
Not because it uses new technology. But because it protects something we are in danger of losing.
The question isn't just what we're protecting children from
In 2024, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, arguing that a play-based childhood has been replaced by a phone-based one, with consequences for adolescent mental health. The book has been widely debated - researchers such as Candice Odgers have challenged the strength of some of Haidt's causal claims - but the behavioural shift is harder to dispute. Ofcom's 2024 Children's Media Literacy research found that 96% of 12-to-15-year-olds in the UK now own a smartphone, along with 24% of children aged five to seven: a fourfold rise in that younger group in four years.
In the UK, the grassroots movement Smartphone Free Childhood, founded by Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough, has gathered over 85,000 parents committing to delay giving their children smartphones. Something has clearly shifted in the conversation about what childhood should look like.
Much of that conversation has focused, understandably, on protection - what we are shielding children from.
But that framing feels incomplete. There is another question we are not asking enough:
What are young people no longer getting the chance to practise?
The future is not asking for more information
Alongside the smartphone conversation sits another defining story of this decade: the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, reiterated at its Four Futures for Jobs dialogue at Davos in January 2026, is strikingly consistent on what the AI-era labour market will demand. Analytical thinking. Resilience and flexibility. Creative thinking. Leadership and social influence. Empathy. Communication. The WEF explicitly distinguishes "digital and technical" skills from "human and adaptive" skills - and it is the second group that is growing fastest.
This isn't a fringe finding. The OECD's Learning Compass 2030, one of the most influential international frameworks for future-ready education, names three equally weighted categories of skill: cognitive and metacognitive, social and emotional, and practical and physical. It places "co-agency" - the work of students, teachers and peers co-constructing learning together - at the heart of the framework. In other words, the global consensus on what education should be preparing young people for isn't only information and technical fluency. It is the ability to think, learn, and work with other people.
Put the two stories next to each other and a paradox emerges. At precisely the moment when both labour markets and international education frameworks are pricing relational and communicative skills higher than ever, research suggests that young people growing up today have fewer opportunities for the kind of sustained, undistracted, face-to-face interaction in which those skills are built.
For disadvantaged pupils this matters especially. The Social Mobility Commission's April 2026 think-piece on GCSE English and maths noted a stark and stagnant attainment gap: in 2024/25, only 44% of pupils eligible for Free School Meals achieved a grade 4 in both English and maths at sixteen, compared with 72% of their more affluent peers. These young people risk losing out twice - on the existing attainment gap, and on the human-centred skills the post-AI economy will increasingly reward.
We often talk about digital natives as if fluency with technology automatically prepares young people for the future. But the future is not asking them to be better at using tools.
It is asking them to be better at the things tools cannot do.
Noticing another person. Adapting in real time. Building trust. Holding attention. Thinking together.
These are not abstract qualities. They are practised behaviours. And like any skill, they develop - or they don't - depending on whether we create the conditions for them.
What an hour of coaching actually builds
Peer coaching is, at its simplest, an hour a week of structured, face-to-face conversation with someone slightly older who believes in you. There is nothing flashy about it. No app. No algorithm. No content to consume. Just two people at a table, working on a problem together.
And when you watch closely what develops in those hours, it is exactly the set of skills we claim to value.
Katie, a Year 10 coach at Kearsley, noticed early on that her Year 7 coachee Esmae found reading standard black-on-white text difficult. Without being asked, Katie began preparing all her resources on yellow paper. That is empathy made practical. You cannot do it unless you are paying attention to another person.
Arfah, coaching a Year 7 boy who wasn't engaging with worksheets, quietly shifted her approach by the third session, moving to games and open challenges. That is the kind of responsive, creative thinking the WEF lists under resilience and adaptability.
And Marie, asked in her end-of-programme interview what had changed most for her, said: "Speaking, confidence in speaking to the Year 7s. I feel a lot more confident speaking to anyone in the school." That is leadership, built slowly through the repeated experience of showing up for another person.
These skills do not emerge through instruction alone. They are built through sustained relational practice - the kind of practice that is becoming less common.
Towards a "being human" curriculum
When we talk about a future-ready curriculum, the focus is often on what we should add: AI literacy, coding, financial education. All of which have value.
But there is a risk that, in constantly adding, we overlook something more fundamental. The question isn't only what new knowledge young people need. It is what kind of humans we are helping them become.
If AI continues to take on more of the tasks that fill our working lives, the real opportunity isn't simply to do the same things more efficiently. It is to ask what that frees us up to do.
More music. More literature. More conversation. More time spent creating, reflecting, connecting.
And yet, in a system shaped by productivity and measurement, there is a danger we optimise away precisely those things - because they are harder to quantify, harder to standardise, harder to scale. We risk producing young people who are highly efficient, highly connected, and deeply under-practised in being human.
What might it look like to take that seriously? To design not just a knowledge curriculum, but a being-human curriculum - one that deliberately protects time for attention, conversation, and relationship-building? The OECD Learning Compass 2030 has, in effect, already sketched the outlines of one. What might be missing is the conviction to treat its social and emotional strand as equal in weight to its cognitive one, rather than as an optional extra.
A quiet act of resistance
I don't think schools can solve the smartphone question alone. And I'm wary of any argument that quietly shifts responsibility onto teachers or pupils.
But I do think there is something important in what happens in that coaching hour.
It is simple. It is low-tech. It is easy to overlook. And yet it creates something increasingly rare: sustained, real, human attention.
In a world shaped by algorithms designed to fragment attention, there is something quietly radical about two young people sitting down together, focusing on the same problem, and refusing - for an hour - to be pulled elsewhere.
Not as a soft extra. Not as a nice-to-have. But as the foundation for everything else.
Because if the future is going to value anything more highly, it may be this: the ability to be present with another human being, to think with them, and to help them move forward.
And it turns out that might be one of the most future-ready things we have to offer.
Names have been changed to protect anonymity
References and further reading
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press.
Odgers, C. L. (2024). "The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?" Nature, 628, 29–30.
Ofcom (2024). Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2024.
Smartphone Free Childhood. smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk
World Economic Forum (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025.
World Economic Forum (2026). Four Futures for Jobs in the New Economy: AI and Talent in 2030.
OECD (2019). OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030: Conceptual Learning Framework - Learning Compass 2030. OECD Publishing, Paris.
Social Mobility Commission (15 April 2026). New think-piece on how to improve English and maths GCSE resits.