Blog
Posts for category: Opinion
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Newsletter May 2026
There has never been a more uncertain time in education. There has never been a more exciting time to be in education.
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Lessons from Software Engineering: Why AI in Assessment May Be Solving the Wrong Problem
Every few years, a body of evidence emerges from an unexpected direction that turns out to be exactly what education needed to hear. We think this might be one of those moments.
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AI Assessment has a dignity problem - here's how to fix it
AI assessment has a dignity problem. Not a technology problem, or even just a fairness problem, but a problem with how it treats people at precisely the moments they are most exposed and most human.
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Gradually then suddenly (Part 4 / 4)
If the first post in this series traced the industrial birth of marking, the second described the temptation to use AI as a faster horse, and the third argued for rediscovering human judgement, this final post asks the practical question: what would assessment look like if it were designed for the world now emerging rather than the one that produced marks and grades?
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Rediscovering Human Judgement in an Age of AI (Part 3 / 4)
If the first post argued that marking is a child of the Industrial Revolution, and the second showed how AI is mostly being used to build faster horses, this third post is about something older and more fundamental: human judgement itself.
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Why Is the Assessment System Trying to Build Faster Horses – and What Can Be Done About It? (Part 2 / 4)
Early steam engines were bolted onto canal boats instead of horses. Today, autonomous driving is marketed as a convenience feature in conventional cars rather than a reason to rethink how mobility works. And in assessment, AI is being pulled into precisely the same pattern: a new engine strapped onto an old chassis.
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From Disputation to Marks: How the Industrial Revolution Rewired Assessment (Part 1 / 4)
For more than 200 years, formal assessment has been organised around a deceptively simple idea: break performance into parts, assign marks, add them up, and trust the resulting number. Written exams and numerical grading feel so natural that it is hard to imagine assessment working any other way.
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Why AI Demands a New Architecture for Assessment (4 Part Series)
Generative and agentic AI are exposing the limits of assessment systems built for a more predictable, more mechanical world. In response, much of the assessment sector is treating AI as a way to mark faster, moderate more cheaply, and preserve the familiar exam–mark–grade machinery. This will not end well.
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A trip to the dentist
This morning I went for a routine dental check‑up. What struck me was how naturally my dentist fell into a comparative frame. He wasn’t mentally ticking boxes on a rubric. He was looking at two artefacts and asking, “Which represents a healthier, more stable situation?”