What Does a Child Need to Know in a World Run by AI?
Last week, Jack Clarke, a co-founder of Anthropic — one of the leading companies developing artificial intelligence — was interviewed on television. He was relaxed about it, which was itself slightly alarming. Primarily he was talking about the need to find a brake on how AI is developing before it goes in directions that could do real harm to mankind. He explained that AI can now write its own code, which means that the programmer, that great hero of the digital age, is becoming redundant. More striking still, he said that what Anthropic looks for when recruiting is not technical expertise but people from liberal arts backgrounds: philosophers, historians, people who have read widely and thought carefully about what it means to be human.
He also said something simpler and more important: that what young people need is a hobby. Something they are genuinely passionate about. A subject they pursue not because it is on the syllabus but because it fascinates them. Curiosity, he said, is the quality that no algorithm can replicate — and the one that will matter most in the world his company is helping to build.
He is not the first person from the technology industry to say this. At the launch of the iPad in 2011, Steve Jobs said: ‘Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.’ That was fourteen years ago — before smartphones had colonised childhood, before AI could write its own code, before 957,000 young people in the UK had dropped out of education and work. The argument has only grown more urgent since.
I found myself thinking: this is exactly what our primary schools should be cultivating. And it is almost exactly the opposite of what our education system currently rewards.
The system we have built
For the past two decades, English primary education has been shaped by a single question: how do children perform on standardised tests? SATs at the end of Key Stage 2 have driven schools to focus relentlessly on the measurable — reading scores, multiplication tables, grammar and punctuation — at the expense of everything harder to count. Art, music, drama and creative writing have been squeezed to the margins. Curiosity, play, and divergent thinking have no place in a test paper.
Sammy Wright, a head teacher, and author of Exam Nation (2024), documents this with uncomfortable precision. The English education system, he argues, has become a machine for sorting children into winners and losers at younger and younger ages. For children from disadvantaged backgrounds in particular, the relentless experience of being tested and found wanting — year after year, from the age of five — is not a route to opportunity. It is a systematic destruction of the confidence and curiosity they arrived at school with.
The government’s own Curriculum and Assessment Review, published in November 2025 and chaired by Professor Becky Francis, reached a similar conclusion. The English Baccalaureate, it found, had “to some degree unnecessarily constrained students’ choices” and “limited their access to, and the time available for, arts and vocational subjects.” It recommended removing the EBacc and the government has indicated it will accept that.. The damage, in other words, is now officially acknowledged. But acknowledgement and action are different things — and the problem begins long before secondary school – and the government has not indicated that it has grasped that.
What the evidence says about early years
A major new evidence review co-commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Cultural Learning Alliance, published in May 2026 and drawing on 1,176 studies across all four art forms, concluded that arts education “is not a luxury or add-on to children’s education: it is a fundamental component of a well-rounded educational experience that supports human flourishing in its fullest sense.” The most significant benefit documented across all four art forms was not attainment. It was agency — the sense that one has something to contribute, that one’s perspective matters, that one is capable of original thought and action.
Agency, in other words. The quality Jack Clarke was describing when he talked about curiosity and passion. The quality that no AI can replicate, because an AI has no perspective of its own, no investment in the question, no reason to care about the answer.
The University of Nottingham’s RAPS project, which tracked 40 arts-rich primary schools, found that 77% perform as well as or better than comparable schools academically. Thirty-six percent perform well above their local authority average, compared with 28% of comparator schools. The researchers concluded that “there appears to be little or no penalty attached to having an arts-rich curriculum and there are additional benefits.” The arts do not come at the cost of the three Rs. They support them.
The cost of getting this wrong
Alan Milburn’s government-commissioned review of young people not in education, employment or training, published in May 2026, contains a finding that should stop every primary headteacher in their tracks. Children who are not school-ready at the age of four or five are nearly three times as likely to be NEET — out of education, employment or training — by sixteen. Three times.
The report says there are currently 957,000 young people in this country (verbally Milburn is saying it is now a million) who are NEET. The annual cost to the economy is £125 billion. The lifetime cost for each individual is approximately £130,000. And 81% of those young people say, when asked, that the curriculum was too focused on exams.
What constitutes school-readiness at four and five? Not reading. Not numbers. The social and emotional skills — the capacity to attend, to communicate, to regulate one’s feelings, to work alongside other children — that arts education builds from the earliest years. The child who has learned to wait for their cue in a group, to hold their contribution within a larger whole, to try something and fail and try again, is a child who is ready to learn. The child who has spent their early years on a screen, in isolation, is very often not.
Milburn also found that only 19% of white working-class parents regularly take their children to museums, galleries or theatres, compared with 29% of middle-class parents. That gap opens early. It does not close on its own. And it is one of the reasons that the majority of students at conservatoires like the Royal Academy of Music are still privately educated, as Richard Morrison noted in The Times in April 2026, despite 93% of children attending state schools. The pipeline closes at primary school.
What we should be doing instead
Jack Clarke’s prescription is, at its heart, very simple. Give children something to be passionate about. Cultivate their curiosity. Teach them to ask questions and sit with uncertainty. Let them make things — things that have never existed before, things that are theirs. Help them understand that original thought and hard work are not opposites but companions.
This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, one of the oldest ideas in education. It is as old as Plato’s argument in The Republic that musical education shapes the soul before reason can — that how children learn to hear and move is inseparable from how they learn to live. What is new is the urgency — because we now know, with considerable precision, what happens when we fail to do it.
The children in our CATS schools who learn to play together in an ensemble, who exhibit their work at a professional arts show, who devise a dance and teach it to their classmates, who paint butterflies and hang them in a net above the school hall — these children are not doing something extra. They are doing the essential thing. They are learning to be human in a world that will increasingly need them to be very, very good at it.
The question is whether the people who design our education system — in government, in Ofsted, in the academy chains that run so many of our primary schools — are listening to what the evidence, the economists, the AI pioneers and the children themselves are telling them. The evidence is no longer ambiguous. The question is whether anyone in power is willing to act.
