For the past few months, I’ve been writing about skills: whether “work-ready” has become too narrow a goal, and whether we can still verify what young people can actually do.
Now, I want to explore something that sits underneath both of those arguments. It’s harder to talk about.
Values. It’s a word that makes many educators slightly uncomfortable. It can sound preachy. It can sound political. In an international school, with families from 40 or 50 countries in the same classroom, it can sound like a minefield.
So, most of us leave it on the wall – on a poster in reception – and get on with the timetable.
I understand that instinct. But I’ve come to believe it is becoming a mistake. Here’s why.
For most of the history of schooling, capability was scarce. Knowing things and being able to do things with what you knew was what set a young person apart. Education was organised, quite reasonably, around building it.
That scarcity is disappearing fast.
The National Literacy Trust’s 2026 survey of 13- to 18-year-olds in UK schools found that four in five had used generative AI. In the US, Pew Research found that more than half of teenagers have used AI chatbots for help with schoolwork – and one in 10 now do all or most of it that way.
Those young people can now produce an essay, a business plan or a working piece of code in seconds. Producing an answer is no longer the hard part.
Judging whether it’s any good – and whether to use it – is.
Which leaves a question no tool can answer for them: what should they do with it?
Should they submit the essay as their own? Should they use a persuasive message they suspect is misleading? Should they keep going when the first version of a project fails, or simply ask the machine for another? One in four teenagers in the National Literacy Trust survey admits to simply copying what the AI produces for homework.
Those aren’t only questions of skill. They are questions of character. And young people are meeting them earlier, and more often, than any generation before.
Employers have noticed. In the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, “resilience, flexibility and agility” ranks among the most important core skills, cited by 67% of employers. “Curiosity and lifelong learning” is among the skills rising in importance.
Look closely at that list and something stands out. These aren’t technical skills in the usual sense. They’re dispositions – habits that shape how a person behaves when things get hard, uncertain or unfamiliar.They sit closer to values than to skills. We’ve simply been calling them something else.
In our work with schools at 8billionideas, we came to realise our mission was missing something after we worked with a partner school in the UAE whose head teacher focused on values.
For years we described our purpose as giving students the skills and belief to change the world. It now reads: to give every student on the planet the skills, belief and values to change the world.
It’s a small change in wording. It took us longer than you might think. The reason is this. Skills and belief give young people the ability and the confidence to create change. They don’t tell them what kind of change is worth creating.
Skills and belief give young people the ability and the confidence to create change. They don’t tell them what kind of change is worth creating
We settled on five – resilience, kindness, integrity, curiosity and agility – each defined as something a student does, not something they’re told to admire.
Families will interpret these differently, and they should be discussed rather than imposed. But schools can teach and practise them without asking every family to share one worldview. That gives international schools a starting point, not a final answer.
Defining values is the easy part, though. Teaching them is harder. Values rarely stick when they’re delivered in an assembly or printed on a poster. They stick when students practise them in situations with real stakes: when a group project stalls, when a teammate lets them down, when the shortcut is right there and nobody would ever know.
That means designing projects where failure is expected and recovery is what gets recognised. Group work with classmates students wouldn’t have chosen. Tasks where using AI is allowed, but students must explain, honestly, how they used it.
It also means being explicit. Too many school AI policies are about rules – what’s allowed and what happens if you’re caught. What’s often missing is a conversation about values.
None of this replaces academic rigour, or the broader skills I’ve argued for in earlier pieces. It completes them. A brilliant young person without resilience struggles to recover from the first serious setback. Without integrity, their skill becomes a risk – to an employer, and to everyone else. Without kindness, they may well change the world. Just not in a way the rest of us would choose.
We’ve become very good at asking what young people can do. The harder question now is whether they know when they should – and when they shouldn’t.
