Re Education : Issue #27 - Education Predictions 2026

The "Consequences" of 2025

Jan 15, 2026

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Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

Introduction

2025 reminded me of a game of “Consequences” – remember that ? A series of simple questions written down (who ? / did what? / with what ?/ and the consequence was…?), then the paper folded over and passed to the next player to answer the next question “blind”. Cue weird or funny, depending on how well you knew the players.

So, you might get : Who ? Jimmy and Grace / Did what ? Made a Sunday roast / With what ? An electric drill and some rubber gloves/ And the consequence was ?…A small riot in Jakarta etc. etc.

Sitting here in 2026 comparing what might have been predicted for global education pre-January 20^th 2025, with what subsequently emerged, seems nothing less than the product of a bizarre global game of consequences.

Who ? Northern governments / Did what? Deliberately abandoned global education / With what ? – a woodchipper and some weapons / And the consequence was ?…a gaslighted generation.

We will be living with the consequences of 2025 for many years to come.

Trying to make sense looking backwards is hard enough, but to look forwards when things seem constantly changeable is even more demanding. So, my thanks to the 27 global educators who have offered up their predictions for global education in 2026 - which, in case this all feels a bit down, does include reasons for optimism. This is issue #27, so here’s twenty-seven for twenty-six.

Drawn from philanthropy, development agencies, research and the practitioner communities, these predictions are small “amuse-bouche”, snapshots of the thinking and collected wisdom of those who engage regularly with the struggles and dilemmas facing our sector, from the classroom to the Ministry and beyond.

Contributors include : Paul Atherton, Caitlin Baron, Mohamed Barrie, Chris Berry, Alison Buckler, Lee Crawfurd, Luis Crouch, Parthajeet Das, Akuja de Garang, Pauline Essah, Baela Jamil, Ahmed Junina, Asyia Kazmi, Lucy Lake, Javed Malik, Jane Mann, Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly, Mo Olateju, Brad Olsen, Margo O’Sullivan, Harry Patrinos, Ben Piper, Vikas Pota, Anna Roberts, Liz Robinson, Kayode Sanni and Paul Skidmore.

Unsurprisingly, given the events of 2025, almost everyone mentions shortages of funding. AI is also ubiquitous. Foundational learning and governments “doing it for themselves” (aka the Annie Lennox method) made frequent appearances.

Just as interesting as their predictions are our educators’ suggestions for reading / podcasts / films that all educators should know. The “Sold a Story” podcast is the only one to get more than one recommendation – and rightly. The Fresh Ed podcast hosted by Will Brehm also gets a double nod as does the film the First Grader. There’s a list of book and film recommendations to keep you busy through the rest of the year.

Of course, this represents just some of the collected wisdom in our sector. If YOU have ideas and want to add to the sum of predictions in our sector, leave a comment below (if there are enough I’ll publish), or add your thoughts to the LinkedIn posts which advertise this month’s newsletter.

Happy New Year to all my readers, whatever the consequences !

Andy Brock, January 2026

(A tip for those reading this on email or mobile phone – you may want to switch to a laptop / desktop to read each response more clearly).

Give YOUR 2026 Predictions

News

Good news that 168 new doctors graduated in Gaza. Bad news that children continue to be killed even after the ceasefire. Education is not being restored (see report in Voices from the Rear).

Finally, a lot of attention is shifting to the crisis in Sudan. Susannah Birkwood has a comprehensive piece in Devex which includes this question :

“Can the U.K.’s aid system — built for large-scale delivery chains and heavy compliance — actually deliver on its localization and gender commitments in a crisis like Sudan?”

Others who are shining the spotlight include Plan International and Save the Children, the latter highlighting that 6.5m children have been displaced and 13 million children are out of school.

Is there “good news” about US government funding of international education in 2026 ? That’s the theme of an article by Gabriella Jóźwiak in Devex which, however, notes that USAID did not spend $860m of its $920m education budget in 2025 including $152m cut from GPE and ECW. Optimism comes primarily from a House of Representatives’ appropriations bill released last July setting the Basic Education Fund at $737.6 million. Mirage or reality ?

An interesting development in Geneva - the establishment of the Foundation for GPE. It’s not GPE, but founded to support GPE. Kira Boe, one of the Board members, says :

Its purpose is to mobilize new and diverse resources, build strategic partnerships with private and philanthropic actors, and champion innovative approaches so that every child can access quality education.

Development

Quite a lot has been written recently about the decline of reading caused by increasing social media use and the implications this has for our cognitive abilities and learning. For example, this article on the post-literate society by James Marriot and this one on why education can never be fun by Daisy Christodolou.

One of the best recent ones is by Ian Leslie, an excellent writer, called The Stamina Gap. It’s largely about education, and “cognitive endurance”, the powers of concentration that focused study provides – and how that is unevenly distributed, (citing several studies, some from India). He also suggests this disadvantage can be mitigated and that AI can actually help. Recommended read.

A widely read article on the travails of UK higher education (UK university degree no longer ‘passport to social mobility’, says King’s vice-chancellor | Students | The Guardian) but, with resonance for many education systems expanding university access. Not only has “diploma inflation” meant that a degree is no longer a “passport to social mobility”, but poor economic growth coupled with tuition fees has depressed private returns (though still positive, because fees would be twice as high if they’d just kept pace with inflation). For institutions, failing students, especially international ones, is not an option - their fees prop the whole system up. Lessons here – and not good ones – for everyone.

AI Spy

Maria Barron at the World Bank posts about a new book : “A Comprehensive Guide to Artificial Intelligence and Education in the Global South : A Systems Perspective”. She says :

Addressing the “web of exclusions”: The book tackles the hard questions: tackling the digital divide, gender gaps in STEM, and the risks of algorithmic bias in vulnerable contexts.

Great that it’s open source, download link in the post.

Is there a future for language learning apps with the increasing sophistication of AI ? Duolingo, the well-known app based learning method, tried to get ahead of the game and seem to have fallen at the first step (losing 25% of their customers) according to this interesting article : “The Decline of Duolingo Should Be a Warning of the Failings of AI”

Bassem Nasir and Stephen Bayley have a very readable article on the GPE website called : “Critical Thinking in the age of AI”. It’s as much about strategies to enhance critical thinking as about the interaction with AI. I liked their cheeky foot note : “*Written by humans, with AI as the intern—who works fast but still needed a lot of supervision and our critical thinking.”

Schools in Hong Kong are to get about c.£50,000 funding each to introduce AI in the classroom. To receive the money they have to : “..subscribe to AI-powered software and hardware, but must implement AI-assisted teaching in at least three subjects while developing six teaching examples or resources using the technology.”

Voices from the front

Kudos to Save the Children who have posted a warts-and-all assessment of their sub-par results in the EOF managed Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC). As any leader will tell you, learning from “failure” is as important as learning from “success”. An interesting comment in this post is the desire to talk to more “successful” providers e.g. Rising Academies (see my comment last month). Conversations between providers during the programme did happen - but, perhaps with cards held close to chests ? Competition has its place, but collaboration is a far more powerful learning tool. Does the OBF model lend itself to that ?

T-TEL, the Ghanaian education NGO spun out of an FCDO funded education project, has published its 5^th Annual Director’s Report very attractively presented. The range of support to the Ghana Education Service and Senior High Schools is pretty impressive.

The percentage of Senior High School (SHS) teachers nationally demonstrating adherence to the National Teachers’ Standards has risen by over 34% in just two years (3% to 37%). I was especially struck by this chart showing dramatic and sustained rises in the confidence of almost all groups surveyed. But, despite efforts to diversify, T-TEL remains, as so many NGOs do, heavily dependent on funds from one donor, in this case MasterCard Foundation.

STiR Education has published two impact reports relating to its work in Uganda and Indonesia – finding a 15% increase in literacy outcomes and attributing this to improved teacher motivation. They also calculated that, in Uganda, the return was £3.12 for every pound invested. Impressive, but replicable ?

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

The REAL Centre and the Centre for Lebanese Studies has published a new report entitled “Palestinian Education : Still under Attack”. There is a launch in person and online on January 22nd - register here.

Brad Olsen and Molly Curtiss Wyss of the Brookings Institute have a new blog out “What do governments need to scale ed tech? Contextualization, evidence, and the middle tier.” Like many in the sector they are warning against blind adoption of Ed Tech / AI – but they see the middle tier of education governance playing a critical role – building on another report on the potential for the middle tier to enhance impact, issued last year.

OECD has published the results of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) highlighting the increasing collaboration between teachers in the countries studied ; full report here. There’s also a good podcast looking at other aspects of the results (including that 9/10 teachers are satisfied with their jobs, but more than 20% report a lot of stress) in Top Class.

A new book “Inclusive and Equitable Education for All”, edited by Richard Ingram, is just out. If you have an institutional account get it that way because the “inclusive” part does not include Open Access – yet. When Duncan Green published “How Change Happens” (new edition 2024) he wrote a very interesting blog on how Open Access gave the book a much longer “shelf life” and seemed to do pretty well for the publisher too.

Ben Piper of the Gates Foundation appeared on VoxDev, a Podcast about Development Economics, Series 7 Episode 1 to talk about the latest GEEAP report and how to solve the reading crisis. His conclusion :

The average programme, implemented well, could increase learning by the equivalent of around 6 months or 9 months of school, additional, per year.

Dave Evans highlights a very important paper from Tanzania on “Quantification and the Paradox of Measurement : Translating Children’s Rights in Tanzania”.

This is the paradox of measurement: to make something known it must be countable, but if it has not already been translated into commensurable and quantifiable terms, it is difficult to count and may remain unnoticed and uncounted.

And finally

This is too clever for me, but I loved the premise that well formulated “attack” poetry could get AI models to ignore its safety guardrails and give unsafe answers. The researchers gave AI models prompts dressed in poetic language and a significant number of times the response was “unsafe”. Here’s the link – read and be confused ! – “Hacking the Planet with Florid Verse”.

Over the holidays I watched my all-time favourite film, “My Dinner with Andre” by Louis Malle, for about the seventh time since the 1981 when it was released. It’s not about education, except in the widest possible sense, but about life and living. It’s remarkable and quite unique. If you haven’t seen it, try to. For those who have seen and loved it, you may be interested in this new podcast analysis by David Runciman and Lee Hall (writer / director of the play / film Billy Elliot).

This moving 2 min radio / video, from NZ Breeze Radio’s Jeanette Thomas, is for all those busy parents out there facing a new year. Pause and enjoy. As a parent with an elderly mother, and who has just sent my last born to university - seemingly five minutes after he became a teenager - it’s right on the money.

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