The Skills We Need to Teach: Personal Development in Schools and the Role of AI

Personal development in schools today

My children are at school now, and if I judged their education only by the glossy newsletters, I would conclude they were becoming paragons of personal development. Each week brings another debating contest, sports fixture or school performance. Inspectors note the “breadth of enrichment.” Parents feel reassured.

Yet enrichment still mainly reaches the motivated few. Attendance is falling, anxiety is rising, and disadvantaged pupils are often left out. If one in five children is missing school regularly, how confident can we be that they are learning resilience from a school fixture they never attended?

Why soft skills matter more than ever

Schools are brilliant at counting what can be measured - exam results, lateness, progress charts. But they struggle with what matters most: empathy, creativity, resilience, and communication. These so-called soft skills are in fact survival skills. Employers know it. Parents know it. Pupils sense it too.

The urgency is growing. Nearly a decade ago the World Economic Forum positioned that 65% of jobs available to a 13 year old today did not yet exist. That was shocking then. With AI now drafting legal briefs, analysing datasets and producing art, the true figure must be even higher. Machines are replacing everything schools still measure: memorisation, procedures, right answers. What remains stubbornly human are the very things inspectors cannot track.

Ofsted reports show the personal development gap

Inspection reports confirm the inconsistency. I looked at ten Brighton and Hove secondary schools. Eight were rated Good or Outstanding for personal development. On the surface, reassuring. But in report after report the same caveat appears: provision is inconsistent, not all pupils benefit, disadvantaged groups miss out.

In other words, the grades hide inequity. Inspectors reward provision — clubs, trips, activities — rather than outcomes.

A simple solution: weekly reflection

The solution is not more enrichment, but something much smaller and more routine: building reflection into the week.

• In English: How did the character feel?

• In Science: What’s another way you could test this?

• In History: How would you explain this to a Year 6 pupil?

Pupils write a few lines. At first, responses are flat: “He was sad.” With practice they deepen: “He was sad but also angry, because it wasn’t fair.” Eventually, connections appear: “Her perseverance reminds me of how we had to keep testing our experiment in Science until it worked.”

This is personal development made visible: not occasional enrichment for the confident few, but small, regular acts of thinking that every child can do. Reflection of this kind already happens in good lessons today - a teacher asks a thoughtful question, a pupil gives a tentative answer - but the insight is lost as the class moves on. We need to lift it out, monitor it, celebrate it, and use it as a guide. With the right system, reflection can be coached and developed, just like any other skill.

How AI in education makes it possible

The barrier has always been scale. Teachers cannot read 150 weekly reflections. But AI can.

Artificial intelligence can classify responses along a clear progression: recall, reaction, analysis, application, evaluation. Teachers see patterns, pupils see their own growth, and inspectors see evidence that goes beyond glossy photos. For the first time, personal development in schools can be measured consistently across whole cohorts.

Why the future of work depends on it

Employers already know the stakes. In my own work, I’ve seen brilliant technical analysis collapse because it wasn’t explained in a way clients could grasp, while another colleague, less precise but more empathetic, won the deal. That is the world my children are heading for.

Unless schools start to measure and build these skills for all pupils, personal development will remain the biggest box-tick in education. AI is busy replacing the measurable; schools need to double down on the immeasurable.

The good news: skills can be measured

The good news is these skills can be made visible. A short weekly reflection, tracked over time, is enough to show depth, growth and consistency. Instead of pretending, we can finally prove that every child - not just the most confident or advantaged - is building the empathy, creativity and communication they will need in a world where everything else is automated.