My mother always told me that if something wasn’t quite feeling right in my belly then it was better out than in. So, in honouring this line of reasoning I admit that there has been, for quite some time, particularly during the lowlights of the pandemic, rumblings that I have felt would be better out than in.

I start in this vein with the following thoughts:

• Are schools the last bastions of socialisation for society?
• Why is Elon Musk scared of AI? [1]
• Why are children spending their formative education writing in exercise books but will never pick up a pen in their professional lives?
• What will happen to traditional arts in the future? [2]
• If machine learning will outstrip the pace, efficacy, depth and breadth of human learning, what will schools and qualifications need to adapt to in the next 3-5 years?
• What is school uniform preparing students for when a significant number of professionals are working remotely half-dressed in their pants? [3]
• How can the public sector, specifically schools, allow flexible working practices that compete with the private workplace? [4]
• With the current crisis in specialist teacher recruitment and extortionate costs of poor quality agency staff, what role is there for supplementing education with digital learning? …Pooling expertise regionally? …And let’s face it: Robots? [5]