Latest insights

England’s education system is showing signs of structural fatigue. For decades the same policy tools have been used to address persistent problems such as the attainment gap and the growing difficulty of recruiting and retaining teachers.

Agentic AI shines where work is structured, multi-step, and slightly tedious, the kind of work that drains expensive human attention. The goal isn’t to replace judgement. It’s to industrialise the first draft, then let humans do what humans do best: decide.

For the last couple of years, most people’s experience of AI has looked like this, you ask a question, the chatbot answers, you ask a follow-up, it answers again. Useful, occasionally brilliant, sometimes hilariously overconfident, but fundamentally conversational.