what International Day of Education asks of us
Friday, 24 January, marks International Day of Education. Proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2018, it offers an annual moment to consider what education is for and what it asks of those who provide it. This year’s UNESCO theme is “The power of youth in co-creating education” – an invitation to think about how young people might shape learning rather than simply receive it.
I find myself returning to a question that has surfaced in sector commentary this week: whether higher education is asking sufficiently large questions about its purpose. The operational concerns are real and pressing: assessment design, academic integrity and the integration of new technologies into teaching practice. Yet these may not be the questions that matter most. Beneath the immediate lies something more fundamental: what does it mean to educate when the future refuses to sit still?
This is not a new question, of course. Education has always involved some element of preparation for the unknown. But there is a difference, I think, between acknowledging uncertainty as a background condition and confronting it as the central fact of our students’ prospects. The pace of technological and economic change, the shifting contours of work, the emergence of capabilities that were speculative a decade ago and commonplace today. All of this suggests that the relationship between current learning and future application may be less predictable than our frameworks assume.
The preparation paradox
Much of current policy frames education as preparation for known futures. The language is familiar: skills gaps, workforce needs, graduate outcomes and employability. The Post-16 Education and Skills white paper speaks of “the skilled workforce our economy needs” and commits to ensuring that people have “the skills they need to adapt to the digital age.” This framing has genuine merit. It connects education to opportunity. It holds institutions accountable for results. It provides a basis for public investment in learning.
And there is evidence that higher education delivers on these terms. Data from the Graduate Outcomes survey indicates that 92 per cent of graduates in employment or further study say their current activity fits with their future plans. Some 77 per cent of those in employment feel they are using what they learned during their degree. These are not trivial findings. They suggest that, for most graduates, the investment in higher education connects meaningfully to what comes next.
Yet the framing carries an implicit assumption: that we can describe, with reasonable confidence, what graduates will need. That the skills gaps we identify today will persist in recognisable form. That preparation for known destinations remains the appropriate model for educational purpose.
I am not certain this assumption holds. Or rather, I suspect it holds partially. That some of what we teach will prove durably useful, whilst some will not and that we cannot reliably distinguish between the two. This is uncomfortable territory for those of us who have spent careers designing curricula, assuring quality and articulating learning outcomes with confidence.
What uncertainty asks of us
If the future is genuinely uncertain, not merely unpredictable in detail but fundamentally unknowable in shape, then education may need to do something other than prepare students for destinations we can describe. It may need to prepare them for the condition of uncertainty itself.
This is not an argument against employability or skills development. Students quite reasonably want to know that their investment will lead somewhere. Governing bodies require metrics and assurance. Regulators expect outcome data. None of this is illegitimate. But it may be incomplete.
From my own experience in senior academic roles, I recall the practical difficulty of holding both modes in tension. In one meeting, reviewing employability statistics and employer feedback. In the next, acknowledging privately that the careers those statistics describe may not exist in their current form within a decade. This is not hypocrisy; it is the ordinary condition of institutional leadership when certainty about the future is intellectually untenable but operationally necessary.
What might it mean to take uncertainty seriously as an educational proposition? Perhaps something about intellectual adaptability, the capacity to learn and relearn as circumstances shift. Perhaps something about disciplinary depth that provides foundations rather than finished competencies. Perhaps something about the human qualities that remain valuable precisely because they resist automation: judgement, creativity, ethical reasoning and the capacity to work with others across difference.
I am cautious about being prescriptive here. Anyone claiming certainty about how to educate for uncertainty is, I suspect, contradicting themselves. But I do think the question warrants more attention than it typically receives in institutional strategy documents and quality assurance frameworks.
Sitting with the question
International Day of Education invites reflection rather than resolution. Perhaps the most honest thing institutions can do is acknowledge the tension: that we are preparing students for futures we cannot predict, whilst doing so with care, rigour and appropriate humility. That our confidence about outcomes is provisional rather than certain. That the metrics we use to demonstrate value capture something real but not everything that matters.
The UNESCO theme this year speaks of youth co-creating education. There is something in this that resonates with the uncertainty question. If we cannot confidently describe the futures our students will inhabit, perhaps they need to be partners in shaping the education that prepares them for those futures. Not passive recipients of preparation for destinations we have mapped, but active participants in learning that equips them for terrain that remains uncharted.
I do not have a framework for this. I am not sure anyone does. But as another International Day of Education passes, it seems worth asking: what would it mean for institutional leaders and educators to take uncertainty seriously, not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be inhabited? And what might that ask of us in how we think about purpose, quality and the education we offer?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are genuine uncertainties I carry into my own work. Perhaps that is the appropriate spirit for a day dedicated to education: not answers, but better questions.