Last week, during a curriculum planning meeting, one of our Heads of Department asked a simple question that stopped the room. “If we are teaching a five-year scheme of work for jobs that will not exist in five years, what exactly are we preparing them for?” Nobody had a tidy answer. We spent the rest of the meeting circling it, and I have been circling it since.
It is not a new question. Every generation of school leaders has claimed to be preparing students for an uncertain future. What has changed is the pace. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 78 million new job opportunities will open by 2030, alongside significant displacement, and it names analytical thinking, resilience, AI and big data literacy, and technological fluency among the fastest-growing skills employers expect. A curriculum built around static content is unlikely to serve students well against a backdrop that is moving that quickly.
So what might a future-ready secondary curriculum actually look like? Three shifts stand out to me.
From Content Coverage To Competency
The OECD’s Learning Compass 2030 offers a useful reframe. It is not a curriculum itself, but it sets out the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values students will need to navigate towards individual and collective well-being, including data and digital literacy alongside the more familiar literacy and numeracy. The shift it implies is significant. Instead of asking “have we covered the syllabus,” schools are pushed to ask “can this student act on what they know.” Coverage and competency are not opposites. However, a curriculum designed around competency tends to make room for depth over breadth, and for transfer over recall.
Treating AI As A Curriculum Question, Not Just A Classroom Tool
Much of the conversation in schools has focused on how teachers use AI, or how students might misuse it. That is important, but it is only half the question. The OECD’s recent work on evolving AI capabilities argues that curricula will need to give far more deliberate attention to problem-solving, data literacy and technology use as core competencies in their own right, not bolted-on digital citizenship lessons. The Learning Policy Institute goes further, arguing that the AI era requires schools to be redesigned rather than adjusted at the edges. Whether or not a school agrees with that scale of ambition, it is a useful provocation. Are we updating our curriculum, or are we simply updating our policy on calculators?
Learning That Behaves Like The Real World
The most convincing future-ready curricula I have seen share one trait: the work students do resembles the work adults do.
Edutopia’s collection of interdisciplinary project-based learning case studies is full of small but telling examples, students investigating a real environmental problem in their own classroom, then presenting findings and lobbying local government; students designing and building an irrigation system for a garden they planned themselves. None of this requires abandoning subject disciplines. It requires designing the assessment task so that Science, Design and Civics have a genuine reason to sit in the same room.
None of these three shifts are easy to implement at scale. Timetables resist interdisciplinary work. Universities still ask for familiar subject grades. Teachers are, understandably, cautious about redesigning something that already works reasonably well. However, I would argue that the risk of moving too slowly is now greater than the risk of moving imperfectly.
A curriculum that only prepares students to pass the assessment it was designed around is not, by definition, future-ready.
It is only ever present-ready, and the present does not hold still for long enough to make that a safe bet.
So I will leave you with the question that stopped our meeting last week. If you are teaching your current scheme of work for jobs that may not exist by the time your students graduate, what exactly are you preparing them for? I do not have a complete answer yet. I suspect no single school does. But asking the question, properly and often, may be the most future-ready thing a curriculum team can do.
Journeying:
Related Articles:
- Future of Jobs Report 2025: The jobs of the future – and the skills you need to get them — World Economic Forum
- The OECD Learning Compass 2030 — OECD
- Evolving AI capabilities and the school curriculum — OECD
- Educating In The AI Era: The Urgent Need To Redesign Schools — Learning Policy Institute
- Interdisciplinary Project-Based Learning — Edutopia
The Assistant Principal 