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Guest Author: Jack George

Jack George is Assistant Head at Aiglon College in Switzerland primarily in charge of curriculum and pupil progress across the Middle School. On X: https://x.com/jcgedu

Predicted Pedagogical Trends for the 2025/26 Academic Year

Now is the most exciting time to work in education. Huge change is on the horizon and, while I am neither an oracle nor necessarily an expert in this field, I am excited by the emerging trends ahead. Below are some thoughts on new doors that I believe will be opened primarily in the international and independent education spaces this academic year. Evidently some are realistic and some are far fetched, some may be considered as fads and others sustainable. I’ll leave you to decide which is which…

The Rise of Vibe Coding

In the age of AI coding is no longer an exercise in precision but rather an exercise in vision. In essence, vibe coding is an approach to programming driven by mood, aesthetics and personal expression with code as the creative medium. Whereas previously students chipped away at learning syntax and then solving fiddly problems when it went wrong, the skillset has shifted and large language models can now handle the majority of that labour while freeing students up to think creatively. Computing curricula and assessment will continue to march towards rewarding those who can imagine and, in turn, bring to life the most meaningful, original and culturally relevant experiences to be embraced by the wider world. In other words, there will be a move towards primarily valuing coders as creative directors rather than mathematicians or technicians. This encourages far more cross-curricula freedom in that vibe coding allows the creation of a vehicle through which students can incoporate skills acquired from other subjects so as to work towards a crescendo of individual creativity. Going forward it will be our job as educators to strengthen the rails upon which this can happen.

Cognitive Similarity for Inclusive Teaching

From my research I am confident that our industry is moving away from the often well intentioned assumption that SEN provision is an interventionist, siloed, parallel track that skirts around the everyday classroom. Although it may seem obvious, we are finding that the ways in which students learn are in fact more similar than they are different given that they all undergo the same core processes. Rather than falling back on a patchwork of tailored interventions for individual students, schools will explicitly move towards embracing what brings minds together, rather than what sets them apart. Professional development sessions will begin to explore the foundations of pedagogy against the backdrop of modern research through revisiting explicit instruction, structured routines and retrieval practice so as to activate universal mechanisms and therefore encourage genuine hard thinking and deep learning. I believe that classrooms that reduce sensory and cognitive overload will continue to dominate in campus development plans and instructional sensitivity will reign supreme. These strategies aren’t SEN-friendly but, instead, they’re simply part of an effective general teaching arsenal. This shift doesn’t mean ignoring individual needs but it does infer that staff embrace the requirement for the foundations of pedagogy to be watertight before layering on individual support. As schools strive for individuality in increasingly competitive markets, inclusive teaching will become something to shout about when implemented effectively.

Leadership for Agentic AI

AI agents are autonomous systems capable of acting towards goals, making decisions and adapting behaviour independent of their human instructor. I am of the opinion that widespread adoption of agents is just around the corner and that this will give a similar jolt to our industry to that of ChatGPT just a few years ago. In any case, I would be willing to bet that our primary students’ world will be transformed by agentic AI by the time they reach university. The difference between leading a human versus an AI agent is that there is no need for motivation of others, managing interpersonal conflicts or, debatably, sense making. Instead, our students will need to frame goals in a way that an AI agent can understand followed by auditing its reasoning, interpreting and manipulating its machine logic and then balancing decisions between their human gut instinct and AI efficiency. Students will then set these agents off to complete tasks while getting on with other things and checking back periodically as variables change. Transformational leadership of AI agents and humans will be equally as essential as it is distinctive in our landscape and, therefore, students will require the skills to differentiate between these two domains. I predict that this year schools will begin to build and market frameworks for leadership behaviours associated with agentic AI so as to create a conceptual landing pad for its adoption by professionals of the future.

Alternative Assessment Pathways

This year I believe that we will see more schools reveal their alternative assessment pathways as the revolution against traditional summative examinations continues to gain traction. Educational leaders across our industry are calling for the change required to represent students in three dimensions both internally and externally. I believe that those brave enough to celebrate the acquisition of discrete human competencies alongside solid, foundational knowledge in an order that suits the learner will be the winners as we embrace a future not yet defined. The viva voce will continue to experience significant revival, as well as free choice of medium when the time comes for students to demonstrate learning. Learner portfolios will also gain traction and schools will use these to celebrate students as humans to parents, universities, and their competitors. Many schools have already announced their alternative pathways and I am confident that within the next year or two we will begin to see existing frameworks being adopted by similar schools so as to work towards standardisation and increased alignment of these frameworks for students going forward. Finally, I predict that more universities will validate these alternative, often competency-based frameworks in order to smooth the transition into higher education. This has already begun at institutions such as the University of Melbourne, Australia.

The Power of Home

The term character education is being used indiscriminately at the moment by schools around the world and I have a suspicion that we aren’t on the same page in terms of what it actually is. However, one thing we can agree upon is that service learning plays a considerable part in modern character education given the competencies that it stands to instil. Glocal Citizenship is a term coined by Estelle Baroung Hughes and I think the concept will become part of industry parlance this year. Global citizenship on the other hand has become a dusty ornament on the mission statement mantlepiece due to its confusion of articulation with genuine action. True global citizenship is not about single stories that can often encourage stereotypes and performance of empathy but, instead, it is a pursuit of understanding through complex and sustained human experience. Before reaching outward to the wider world and jumping on a plane to a faraway land, students must truly understand the nuances of their immediate environment and those who thrive within it. Regardless of whether the location of a school is home to a student or not, glocal citizenship will ground them in communal, cultural and linguistic roots so as to provide belonging, agency and personal meaning. Glocal citizenship is a term that we will adopt because it produces humans who know where they came from, are respectful of where they are currently and, perhaps most importantly, who are passionate about where humanity can go.

As I say, these are some predictions based on my research over the last few months. I can only claim to be an Assistant Head with a genuine passion for pedagogy, assessment and character education. Nothing more. Either way, I think it will be a very exciting year for our industry and I look forward to seeing how it plays out. 

I’ll repost this on LinkedIn in a year and we can discuss what came true and what didn’t.