Tim Smale hosts Alan Johnson to explore what schooling must do to prepare children who will leave school in 2040. They question whether current vision statements, the new white paper, and existing exam-driven systems truly ready students for emerging careers, technologies and societal change.

The discussion covers practical classroom strategies including oracy, metacognition, retrieval practice and questioning alongside system-level barriers like assessment, investment and inequality. They argue change needs both teacher-led culture and broader systemic reform to be genuinely transformative.