Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

On board this issue: Katharine Radice is a teacher, education consultant and author FROM THE EDITOR “Welcome… KEEP IN TOUCH! Sign up for the weekly TS newsletter at teachwire.net/ newsletter We hear a lot these days about the things that schools ‘should’ be teaching children and young people. Sometimes, these will be specific topics or subjects that don’t yet have a formal place within theNational Curriculum, but arguably should. See financial education, for example –which, depending on how the government responds to the Curriculum andAssessment Review, maywell be appearing inmaths and PSHE schemes of work sooner rather than later. And then there are those suggestions for areas that schools are, in fact, covering already, albeit perhaps not as comprehensively as they’d like to be. The prime example of whichmust surely be ‘critical thinking’. Everyone wants to see school students given a solid grounding in critical thinking. Employers, parents, think tanks, charities, policymakers – they all want today’s students to become savvy navigators of themodern information landscape, able to swiftly distinguish between the real and the fake, and pick up on not just the detail of what they see and hear, but why they’re seeing and hearing it. That’s a noble enough ambition, but one that appears increasingly at odds with the growing expectation that those same young people will be regularly interacting with generativeAI technologies built around large languagemodels. It’s one thing to confront an online information space populated by a succession of helpful, supportive, opinionated, spiteful andmalign humans, where competing claims and counter-claimsmust be carefullyweighed up and interrogated. It’s quite another when the authorial voices of whicheverMicrosoft, Google,Meta, Amazon or Apple services youmight be using confidently tell you things that are verifiably false . Then again, perhaps that’s what’s driving all these urgent calls for students to be well-versed in critical thinking.With hallucinations and factual fever dreams an inevitable by-product of howmodernAI systems function, will we need younger generations to approach the world in a perpetual state of forensic vigilance in order to get anything done and prevent the global economy fromtoppling over? Call it pessimism if youwish, but those are the thoughts that will be at the back ofmymind as Bett 2026 gets underway later thismonth (see p47 for our show preview). Once again, we can expect AI solutions to be taking centre stage, amid promises of swifter student assessments, elegantly streamlined admin and hugely valuable data insights that school leaders could never have accessed otherwise. Which is all well and good. Because if the aim is to get students thinking for themselves, that’s something we can all get on boardwith.Where you loseme – and, I suspectmost people – is when it looks as though themachines are being primed to do our thinking for us. Enjoy the issue, CallumFauser callum.fauser@theteachco.com Aaron Swan is an English teacher Hannah Carter is a headteacher based at The Kemnal Academies Trust Anthony David is an executive headteacher Alice Guile is an art teacher Jose Sala Diaz is a head of media Essential reading: “I can’t do that, Dave” How to ‘AI-proof’ your homework tasks 34 Mixed messages Why teachers should be wary of telling students ‘mistakes don’t matter’ 64 Don’t panic! Strategies for a less stressful Y11 28 03 teachwire.net/secondary