Andy Burnham’s appointment as Prime Minister has done a lot to reignite an old debate about academic and technical education. Speaking as he announced new technical pathways from the age of 14, Mr Burnham argued that “AI might be able to write an essay, draft a contract or make a slide deck, but it can’t make a train… rewire your electrics or fix your roof. For decades, politicians told young people that desk jobs were the future, but learning practical skills has never been more important.”
He is right that something needs to change, and soon. It is tempting for some to underplay change. Too many educators note that the slide-rule, the calculator, even the internet did very little to fundamentally change education in the UK. However, the World Economic Forum’s Future Jobs report 2025 has made a lot of us sit up and listen. Employers they surveyed predict that, globally, 39% of skills they require will be different by 2030 (33% in the UK).
The graduate recruitment market is already signalling this change. Bright, well-qualified graduates from good universities are finding it very challenging to secure that first role, with the number of opportunities in top 100 firms plummeting in the last year. There are 565,000 students graduating annually into a landscape where the top 100 firms are offering only 22,000 roles, a significant drop from the 30,000 available a few years ago. Even more alarming, the number of direct-hire opportunities in the last year crashed, from 275,000 to only 55,000.
Mr Burnham is right that education needs to change to meet the emerging needs (both in the short term and in the long term) of our students. At Habs, we do not believe that this needs to signal a move away from an ambitious academic provision.
Many of the skills that are identified by the WEF as being crucial in the coming years are precisely what we work to achieve with our students in our ambitious, academic context. Analytical thinking; systems thinking; creative thinking: all of these come with depth of learning, scholarship and, in short, an academically rigorous and satisfying educational experience. Above all these, however, sit curiosity and life-long learning. The WEF says they are going to be crucial for the future and, for us, these are perennially important. They are what we strive, and have always striven, to foster.
But top academic schools must not stop at this.
Our answer to this challenge is something we are calling ‘Habits’.
Habits is our shared language for the kinds of people we want our pupils to become. Rooted in our four values of Ambition, Curiosity, Courage and Community, the Habits it identify twelve dispositions that we believe matter for young people’s success and flourishing: resilience, continuous learning, initiative, openmindedness, critical thinking, creativity, integrity, leadership, risk-taking, collaboration, care and social responsibility.
These are not bolt-ons to school life, nor are they vague aspirations. They are behaviours to be practised, noticed and strengthened over time. The point of calling them Habits is a recognition that, to paraphrase Aristotle, we are what we habitually do. Habits shape what our students become; the way they approach difficulty, respond to feedback, work with others, think independently, take responsibility and contribute beyond themselves. Habits makes a lot of what we are already doing more intentional, explicit and sustained across lessons, tutoring, co-curricular life, leadership, service and the wider curriculum.
It is tempting, when schools talk about skills or future-readiness, to assume that something academic is being displaced. That is not what Habits is about. The choice is not between knowledge and skills, nor between academic excellence and personal development. At Habs, these things belong together. Resilience helps pupils persist with difficult work. Critical thinking makes their academic judgements sharper. Creativity enables them to solve unfamiliar problems. Initiative helps them move beyond passive compliance into genuine intellectual independence. Collaboration, care and social responsibility remind them that education is not simply about individual attainment, but about what they are able to contribute to society.
Habits therefore does not sit beside the curriculum as an additional initiative. It gives language and structure to qualities that already underpin excellent learning, while making their development more intentional, more visible and more sustained.
It is too easy to be drawn into false dichotomies in education, and the distinction between knowledge and skills is particularly difficult to uproot. But a serious education should not force a choice between what pupils know, what they can do, and who they are becoming. At Habs, academic excellence and wider human formation are not competing aims: they are mutually reinforcing parts of the same educational project.
SAVE THE DATE: If you would like to hear more, we will be holding The Haberdashers’ Elstree Schools Future Education Symposium: What Are We Really Preparing Young People For? Rethinking education for life, work and human flourishing in the age of AI on 5 October.
Gus Lock, Executive Principal
Haberdashers’ Elstree Schools
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