AI is disrupting routes into work, putting the identity and security built around employment at risk. Schools must help children develop self-worth that can withstand an uncertain working future, says Dr Stephen Whitehead

On October 1, 2026, the entrance hall of the Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes was on fire. The following day, more than 560 French schools were affected by protests or disruption.

In Marseille, hundreds of young people forced firefighters to flee their truck, which was then set alight. At another school, teachers were accidentally splashed with petrol as a student tried to set fire to a bin. Police used tear gas during the unrest. But the perpetrators of the Nantes school fire had not been identified in reporting the following day.

I do not condone violence. Setting fire to a school is an act of self-harm by a community. And yet I cannot look at those pictures without feeling something other than condemnation.

My first teaching job, in 1986, was at a brand-new inner-city school in the north of England. It was new because, some years earlier, its pupils had burnt the old one down. I understood that arson as an expression of protest and desperation.

The French students’ stated grievances include overcrowded classrooms, missing teachers and crumbling buildings, against a backdrop of government budget cuts. Those grievances do not establish who started the fires or why. I see in the wider unrest an anger driven by something close to despair about the future. It prompts a question Britain should take seriously: what exactly is all this schooling for, if children can no longer rely on the future it promises?

Picture a girl of 10 in a primary school in Stoke-on-Trent, a city I came to know well in my years at Keele University. She was born around 2016. She has never known a world without smartphones, and she will barely remember one without AI. She will sit her GCSEs in 2032 and, if she goes to university, start looking for work around 2038. Her working life, if we still call it that, will run into the 2080s.

What will be waiting for her? Nobody can say with certainty, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. The National Foundation for Educational Research’s Skills Imperative 2035 final report warns that, if recent trends continue, there could be between one and three million fewer jobs in declining occupations by 2035. These include administration, secretarial work, customer service and machine operation. Its earlier projections anticipated overall employment growth, with new jobs concentrated in professional and associate professional roles. The difficulty is whether displaced workers and school leavers will have the skills to enter them.

Our hypothetical girl’s older cousins are feeling the pressure already. Adzuna’s June 2025 report found that entry-level vacancies in Britain had fallen by around a third between ChatGPT’s arrival in November 2022 and May 2025. Its measure included graduate jobs, apprenticeships, internships and junior roles. That comparison alone cannot tell us how much of the fall AI caused, but the first rung of the ladder, the one my generation stepped onto without a second thought, is becoming harder to reach.

Our 10-year-old may have several careers, interrupted by stretches of retraining, freelancing, caring and uncertainty, without identifying with any single profession. Permanent, full-time employment, a pension and a home of her own are promises no school can honestly make her. She may converse routinely with AI while that same technology makes it harder to find employment.

In her classroom, she is being drilled in grammar terminology she will be tested on at 11. She is learning to memorise, to reproduce, to sit still and get the right answer. In secondary school, she will spend years learning to write the structured essay, the kind of task a machine now completes in seconds. Guernsey school principal Daniele Harford-Fox put it bluntly: our exam system trains children to be “bad computers”.

This is not the fault of teachers, most of whom see the problem more clearly than the politicians who set their targets. Mass schooling expanded in industrial Britain, although preparing workers was never its only purpose. The system also trained children in punctuality, obedience and literacy, and sorted them towards different occupational futures in factories, offices and management. That legacy still shapes what schools expect of children.

At 13, my school asked me to choose between two futures. One pathway was technological, the other commercial. Most of my friends took the technological route. I chose commercial, and was taught the one skill that has served me all my life: touch typing. Every book and article I have written since began with those lessons.

At my school, I remember 90 per cent of us leaving at 15 and walking straight into a career. Nobody thought this remarkable. This was the 1960s, but even in the hard years of the mid-1980s, a lifetime of employment seemed a reasonable expectation for school leavers, and certainly for graduates.

The band Pink Floyd gave my generation the image of schoolchildren as bricks in a wall: identical, interchangeable, mortared into place. It was a protest song, but in an odd way it described a deal that worked. Becoming a brick at least got you a place in the wall. Today’s young people are being asked to accept the same discipline without the same reward.

School absence in England remains above pre-pandemic levels, despite improvement in the latest autumn and spring figures. Surveys also show children’s mental health worsened between 2017 and 2020, with the higher rates persisting in subsequent waves. Around one million young people in the UK were neither working nor in education or training in April to June 2026. These problems do not all have one cause. But we should be wary of dismissing disengagement as laziness or entitlement, and take seriously young people’s doubts about what education will deliver.

The job for life was never as universal or as liberating as nostalgia suggests. For millions of women it was never on offer, and for many men it was a cage as much as a career. Yet employment has supplied identity, purpose and a sense of worth as well as income. Losing work can damage mental health. If schools prepare children to depend on it for all of these, uncertainty about work becomes a psychological problem too. The most valuable thing a school can give a child is a capacity for self-understanding that lasts a lifetime.

The researchers who study future skills keep arriving at the same list: communication, collaboration, problem-solving, creative thinking. These are important, but the educational response must reach beyond employability. What our children need most is emotional development, something schools still give far too little attention.

Nowhere is that gap wider than among boys. For generations, young men have been taught to suppress feeling, to measure themselves by status and achievement and to look to work for proof of their worth. Take away the job, and many find there is nothing underneath. I have spent more than 35 years studying men whose identity rests on external validation. When that validation disappears, the result is too often anger, isolation, addiction or despair.

Finding meaning outside a payslip requires genuine self-respect and what I call healthy self-love: an inner security that does not need constant confirmation from employers, markets or social media. Taking up new hobbies will not, by itself, give someone that security.

That requires a profound shift in what schools value. A child can leave school fluent in algebra and illiterate in emotion. Classrooms should be places where children learn to understand their emotions, their relationships and themselves as seriously as they learn equations. Schools should help children grow into first-class humans.

Society must also recognise unpaid care, parenting, community work and creative effort as contributions, not gaps on a CV, and make lifelong learning a real possibility. We need a far more honest public conversation about how income, dignity and identity can be secured when paid work no longer provides them for everyone.

The children entering our schools today will grow up in a world where the jobs their parents and grandparents took for granted may no longer exist. We cannot promise them a career, financial security or even a clear path into employment. But we can, at least, give them the emotional foundations to cope with uncertainty, find meaning beyond paid work and build lives of genuine worth. That may prove to be the most important education we can offer them.

Stephen Whitehead is a British gender sociologist and the author of more than 20 books, published by Routledge, Polity, Oxford University Press and Random House. A foundational figure in masculinity studies with over 35 years of research, he co-developed the concept of toxic masculinity and originated the frameworks of Total Inclusivity and healthy self-love. He was Senior Lecturer at Keele University from 1997 to 2015. He currently leads the Global AI Intimacy Study, an international investigation into how AI is reshaping human relationships, with fieldwork across Latin America and India. His next book, Where Have All the Good Men Gone? The Reordering of Intimacy, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, will be published in 2027. He is The European’s Leadership and Organisational Culture Correspondent and lives in Thailand. www.stephen-whitehead.com

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