The argument that foresight is an organisational capability rather than a planning exercise is one that reads obviously once you encounter it, and yet its implications take time to work through.

The point is not that institutions should plan better. It is that foresight, the capacity to hold multiple futures and reason carefully about what is probable, plausible, and genuinely preferable, is a distinct capability that has to be deliberately built. Most institutions have not built it.

Robert Tucker’s piece in Forbes this week makes the same case from a wider context, reporting on Rachel Hatch of the Institute for the Future, who argues that thinking like a futurist is becoming the defining leadership competency of our time (Tucker, 2026). Hatch’s argument is not about prediction.

It is about what she calls a “readiness posture”: a set of habits, mindsets, and frameworks that allow leaders to respond wisely to multiple plausible futures. The wider field calls it anticipatory capacity. In education, that gap is not just present. It is structural, and it is becoming costly.

That cost is most visible right now, when the sector is being asked to respond to the largest simultaneous set of structural changes in decades without the governance capability to hold them against a considered picture of what it is actually trying to build toward.

The most significant reform in a generation, and foresight is absent from it

The Francis Review, published last November, is the largest curriculum reform in more than a decade (Department for Education, 2025a; 2025b). It is ambitious and broadly well-received, explicitly framed around preparing young people for a rapidly changing world. The government’s response confirms a new curriculum from 2028, a fresh emphasis on oracy and digital literacy, the removal of the EBacc, and new vocational pathways. There is much to welcome in it.

But read the recommendations carefully and a question goes unasked: which futures is this curriculum designed for, and who decided? The review describes what young people should learn. It does not ask what kind of futures the institutions delivering that learning are capable of imagining, or whether the governance architecture around those institutions was designed to hold that question at all.

Simultaneously, schools are being asked to respond to AI at pace. KCSIE was updated last September to include AI within its safeguarding framework for the first time (Department for Education, 2025c). Every school in England is expected to have an AI use policy by the end of 2026 (Department for Education, 2025d).

The forthcoming Schools White Paper will set out the government’s longer-term digital strategy, with significant investment already confirmed in AI-powered tools and EdTech testbeds (Department for Education, 2026). Each of these demands is real. But none of them is accompanied by a framework for asking what futures all this technology is supposed to serve, or what kind of education system we are building with it.

That question is a foresight question. And it is not currently being asked at the governance level. The same question applies to the AI guidance. An investment strategy that named the preferable futures it was designed to serve would look considerably different from one built primarily around managing risk and improving attainment.

This is the context in which the foresight gap matters most. The sector is navigating the largest simultaneous set of structural changes in decades, curriculum reform, AI integration, new legislation, new inspection frameworks, qualification redesign, without the governance capability to hold those changes against a considered picture of the futures it is actually trying to build toward.

Why governance keeps looking backward

The reason this persists is not a failure of leadership. It is a design feature of accountability systems built to measure what has already happened, which treat the future primarily as a category of risk to be managed. Governance cycles in most schools and trusts are oriented toward the past: what the data showed last term, what the inspection found, what the budget does or does not allow.

Hatch identifies one reason this is so hard to shift. Every organisation holds what she calls an “official future”: a default set of assumptions about how things will unfold, what success will look like, which direction things are heading.

These assumptions create alignment, but they also become blinders. In schools, the official future is last year’s results, the inspection report, the five-year plan built from current trends. The question of whether that future is the one the school’s community would actually choose rarely gets asked.

The Futures Triangle (Inayatullah, 2008) is a useful diagnostic here.

When applied to governance rather than curriculum, three things become visible quickly. The weight of history is the accountability architecture itself: inspection frameworks, performance data, board reporting cycles, all oriented backward.

The push of the present is the compounding pressure of the Francis Review, AI guidance, KCSIE updates, and the Schools and Wellbeing Bill, all arriving simultaneously, each demanding immediate response. The pull of the future, the preferable futures a school is actually trying to build toward, is the corner of the triangle that most governance frameworks leave empty.

That absence is not accidental. It is what the architecture produces when there is nothing pulling in the other direction, and until it is addressed at the governance level, futures thinking will remain dependent on individual practitioners who found their way to it without institutional support.

This plays out differently depending on which table you are sat at.

Governors

Governors are expected to hold strategic vision, and many approach that responsibility with genuine seriousness. But there is a difference between ratifying a five-year plan and developing the capacity to ask which futures that plan is designed for, and whether those are the futures the school’s community would actually choose. Most governance training does not reach this question. Most board agendas do not create conditions for it.

Part of what makes this difficult is what Riel Miller (2018) calls “used futures”: inherited pictures of what is coming that institutions absorb so thoroughly they mistake them for inevitability rather than choice. School governance is full of them. The assumption that exam performance is the primary measure of a good education.

The assumption that the skills employers currently value will remain stable. The assumption that the communities schools serve will look broadly similar in ten years. These are not facts. They are stories, and Inayatullah’s work on narrative foresight reminds us that the most powerful intervention available to any institution is changing the story it tells about itself and its future (Milojević and Inayatullah, 2015).

A macrohistorical analysis asks which long-run patterns are shaping current assumptions, and what those patterns reveal about the futures being prepared for (Galtung and Inayatullah, 1997; Inayatullah, 1998a). Applied to school governance, it surfaces something striking: the structures governing English schools were largely designed for an industrial economy, and the accountability frameworks layered onto them since have reinforced rather than challenged that inheritance.

Governors who work through this kind of analysis begin to see that the “official future” they have been ratifying is not neutral. It carries a history, and that history is not the only available story.

In English schooling, that history has a dominant metaphor: inputs, outputs, performance measures, quality control. The language of the factory, applied to the development of young people. Macrohistorical analysis makes that metaphor visible, and visible metaphors can be changed.”

What if governors held a futures horizon conversation as a standing element of the governance cycle, not an annual away-day, but a regular practice of asking which of the school’s current assumptions about learning, community, and direction are worth examining?

Boards that develop this capacity begin to ask different questions of their headteachers. A governor who can distinguish between a probable future and a preferable one holds leadership to a different standard of strategic thinking.

MAT boards

MAT boards carry this challenge at scale. The logic of multi-academy trust development is that you identify what works and extend it. But “what works” was determined in conditions that are shifting, and the pace of change in the external environment means the gap between what worked and what will work is widening faster than most trust strategies were designed to accommodate. The Francis Review’s new curriculum will not be implemented until 2028. The futures that curriculum is supposed to serve will have continued to shift considerably by then.

The Three Horizons framework is instructive here (Curry and Hodgson, 2008). Horizon 1 thinking focuses on optimising what currently works. Horizon 2 is the transitional space where emerging innovations begin to challenge existing models. Horizon 3 is the territory of genuinely different futures. Most trust strategy sits almost entirely in Horizon 1, which is understandable given accountability pressures, but means the question of what Horizon 3 education in those communities might actually require goes largely unasked.

Foresight at trust level is the capacity to hold all three horizons simultaneously, and to build the institutional reflexes to examine load-bearing assumptions before they fail rather than after.

What if trust boards treated each school not only as a site for implementing what is known, but as a source of signals about what education in those communities will need to look like? That changes what useful knowledge looks like moving between schools and the centre, and it changes what the strategic function of the trust is actually for.

Headteachers

The absence of foresight as a governance capability is felt most directly by heads in daily experience, even when it is not named as such.

The texture of school leadership right now is one of competing urgencies arriving continuously. New AI guidance. Curriculum reform. The Schools and Wellbeing Bill. Staff retention. Assessment redesign. Each pressure arrives carrying equal rhetorical weight, and without a framework for distinguishing which connect to genuine long-term direction, the work becomes reactive by default.

The Futures Wheel maps first, second, and third order consequences of any significant change (Glenn, 2009). Applied to the government’s AI investment in schools, it quickly reveals that the immediate consequence is tool adoption, but the second order consequence is a shift in what teachers are expected to do, and the third order consequence is a fundamental question about what learning is for in an age of machine intelligence.

Heads who develop the habit of thinking in this way find that it changes how they read incoming demands. The question moves from “how do we respond to this?” toward “which horizon does this belong to, and what does that mean for how we treat it?”

What if leadership teams built a shared practice around exactly that question, asking not just what needs doing but what each significant demand reveals about the futures the school is actually navigating? The pressures do not disappear. But they stop arriving as undifferentiated emergencies.

Policymakers

Policymakers design for futures that will outlast the political cycles they work within by decades. The children entering primary school this year will inhabit conditions in the 2040s and 2050s that no current framework was built to anticipate. This is not a criticism. It is the structural reality of democratic governance. But it means that foresight as a policy capability, the capacity to hold longer temporal horizons and reason carefully about preferable futures, is what distinguishes education policy from education administration.

Causal Layered Analysis asks what lies beneath the surface of any policy problem (Inayatullah, 1998b). At the litany level, the problem is that schools are struggling to keep pace with change. At the systemic level, it is that accountability frameworks were not designed for conditions of genuine uncertainty.

At the worldview level, it is that education has been conceived primarily as preparation for an existing economy rather than as the development of agency in relation to an unknown future. At the level of metaphor, the question becomes: what story is the system telling about young people and their relationship to what comes next? CLA makes visible the assumptions that policy is carrying, and therefore makes them available for debate rather than leaving them as invisible inheritance.

What if policy development included a standing requirement to surface those assumptions, to name the preferable futures a proposal is designed to serve and make them open to scrutiny?

The Francis Review would be a stronger document for it. A review that asked which futures this curriculum is designed for would have produced different conversations about assessment, about what breadth actually means, and about which young people the system is currently least well designed to serve.

The structural default

We are at the point where the cost of not having foresight capacity is becoming concrete rather than theoretical.

The OECD’s 2025 report on anticipatory capacity in government makes the point that traditional forecast-based planning relies on linear projections of past and present reality, and falls short when transformative shifts are underway (OECD, 2025). UNESCO’s Futures Literacy framework makes the same argument at the level of education systems (UNESCO, 2021).

Futures literacy is not a subject to timetable, or a singular professional development workshop. It is a capacity to build across institutions, and that building has to happen at the level of governance and leadership if it is to be anything other than a collection of isolated practices dependent on committed individuals working without institutional support.

The chain of causation matters here. Futures-literate governance creates the conditions for futures-literate institutions. Futures-literate institutions create the conditions for futures-literate educators.

And futures-literate educators are the only sustainable route through which young people develop the capacity to shape rather than merely inherit their futures.

The classroom is the destination, not the starting point. But it can only be reached if the system above it has been built to point in that direction.

The pattern that interrupts this chain is consistent. Futures thinking reaches schools through committed individuals, then disappears when they move on, because the conditions that would sustain it were never built. Those conditions are not made in classrooms. They are made at the governance level, by the people who decide what counts as a priority, what gets resourced, and what kind of thinking is legitimate in their institutions.

The Francis Review does not ask governance to develop foresight capacity. The AI guidance asks schools to manage risk. The accountability system asks leaders to account for the past. None of this is wrong. But the cumulative effect is a system oriented almost entirely toward yesterday, and the capability that is missing from it sits at the governance level, not the classroom. That is where the work needs to start.

It is also a question of whose futures the system is designed to serve. Governance that develops foresight capacity is more honest about which young people its official futures have historically been built for, and more accountable for changing that.

If you are working on what this looks like in your institution, I would welcome the conversation.

The future is not something to fear, it is something to build, together.

References

Curry, A. and Hodgson, A. (2008) Seeing in Multiple Horizons: A Manual of the Three Horizons Method for Participatory Futures Thinking. London: International Futures Forum.

Department for Education (2025a) Curriculum and Assessment Review: Final Report [Francis Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis]. London: DfE. Published 5 November 2025. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report

Department for Education (2025b) Curriculum and Assessment Review: Government Response. London: DfE. Published 5 November 2025. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report-government-response

Department for Education (2025c) Keeping Children Safe in Education. London: DfE. Published 1 September 2025. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-in-education–2

Department for Education (2025d) Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education. London: DfE. Published 10 June 2025.

Department for Education (2026) Using AI and Technology in Education to Improve Pupil Outcomes. London: DfE. Available at: https://roadmap-for-modern-digital-government.campaign.gov.uk/ai/ai-in-education/

Galtung, J. and Inayatullah, S. (eds.) (1997) Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social and Civilizational Change. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Glenn, J.C. (2009) Futures Wheel: Method and Use. Washington, DC: The Millennium Project.

Inayatullah, S. (1998a) ‘Macrohistory and futures studies’, Futures, 30(5), pp. 381-394.

Inayatullah, S. (1998b) ‘Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method’, Futures, 30(8), pp. 815-829.

Inayatullah, S. (2008) ‘Six pillars: Futures thinking for transforming’, Foresight, 10(1), pp. 4-21.

Miller, R. (2018) Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century. Abingdon: Routledge/UNESCO.

Milojević, I. and Inayatullah, S. (2015) ‘Narrative foresight’, Futures, 73, pp. 151-162.

OECD (2025) Building Anticipatory Capacity with Strategic Foresight in Government: Lessons from Lithuania, Italy, and Malta. Paris: OECD Publishing. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/building-anticipatory-capacity-with-strategic-foresight-in-government_d7eb0bb6-en.html

Schwarz, J.O. (2025) [LinkedIn post on foresight as organisational capability]. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jan-oliver-schwarz_foresight-strategy-leadership-activity-7433019404910583808-S-fm [Accessed: March 2026].

Tucker, R.B. (2026) ‘When things are changing this rapidly, leaders must think like futurists’, Forbes, 13 March. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbtucker/2026/03/13/when-things-are-changing-this-rapidly-leaders-must-think-like-futurists/

UNESCO (2021) Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education. Paris: UNESCO.