October 2026
Two things happened in the same week that don't usually happen together. A global education initiative made the case that human connection, not cognitive horsepower, is what schools should be optimising for in the AI age. And the chief executives of two of the labs building that AI stood up and asked the industry to slow down.
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September 2026
Three essays from Anthropic's CEO, read alongside this week's news, convinced me the real story here is bigger than education. It's about whether we keep control of what we're building, and it's playing out as a genuine collision between moral responsibility and financial and political incentive.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
The 2026 edition of the statutory safeguarding guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, comes into force on 1 September — and it changes the conversation about AI in schools.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Notes from UNESCO's first thematic consultation feeding its Education Beyond 2030 process. The message from the keynote speakers was blunt: for millions of learners uncertainty is already the reality, and the system in place before a crisis may already have been excluding children.
4 min readRead articleAbout the Author
Paul Penfold is an education and technology consultant based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with six decades of experience spanning classroom teaching, academic research, government policy, and humanitarian service. He advises schools, ministries, and EdTech companies on AI in education, alternative education, and learning technology, and has published 37 papers on immersive and virtual-world learning. His career includes refugee education on the Thai-Cambodian border, pioneering virtual-world hospitality education at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and national tourism HR strategies across Asia and the Caribbean.
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