I am writing this on the train while yesterday's fourth Education House in Oxford is still live in my mind. Almost every organisation I know in the education and child-rights field will tell you that children and young people are at the centre of its work. Very few of them, if pressed, can point to a child or young person who sits on their board, on their grant committee, on their leadership team, or in the room when the strategy that governs their work gets set.
Education House is one of the most useful convenings the field has. It gets better every edition, and it is rare in that it creates an open, flat, genuinely exploratory space, which is precisely why the questions that surface there tend to be the ones the rest of us have not yet figured out how to answer. The theme this edition was Transforming Systems, Collaborating for a New Paradigm for Education. The afternoon opened with a plenary on the purpose of education, ran through a set of parallel breakouts in the middle, and closed with a session on philanthropy's role in long-term change. I chose the breakout on trust and polarisation.
The gap between how we talk about young people and where we actually include them is not a programming oversight or a logistical difficulty. It is a structural trust problem that runs across the whole field, and it is getting worse.
What the trust session made clearer
The breakout on trust and polarisation reached a simple and, I think, correct conclusion. Trust moves at the speed of listening. It breaks quickly, builds slowly, and cannot be hacked or shortcut by money, technology, or good intention. Scepticism deserves to be honoured rather than dismissed, because people who withhold trust usually have reasons for doing so, and the work of rebuilding it begins with listening first and being honest about what can and cannot be delivered.
That framing applies everywhere the field is trying to rebuild trust, between governments and communities, between funders and grantees, between teachers and parents. It applies equally, and I think more urgently, between the adults who currently design education systems and the young people who are meant to benefit from them. My ten year old and his friends have worked out, before most of us have admitted it, that the generation designing their future has a mixed track record and a tendency to project more confidence than the record supports. I do not think they really trust us to deliver what they need, and I am not sure we have earned much of an argument against them.
Why this is structural, not soft
The usual response to concerns about young people's absence is that they are symbolically important but practically difficult to include. That framing understates the problem. If a generation is being educated by systems designed by adults they do not trust, for a future those same adults have not stewarded well, the legitimacy of the whole project is thinner than the field tends to admit. Legitimacy is the precondition for engagement. Young people who do not trust the system will route around it where they can, will disengage where they cannot, and will increasingly construct their own education from the internet and from each other. Some of that is healthy. Much of it is not. None of it is fixed by adults continuing to talk among themselves.
A related point came up in the trust session. Research surfaced during the discussion, drawn from Brookings work on teachers' experience of AI in classrooms, suggested that the introduction of AI is already eroding trust between teachers and students, partly because strong student work is now suspected of machine authorship, partly because students observe their teachers using the same tools and draw their own conclusions about fairness. AI is not really the point here. The point is what happens when a new technology arrives inside a relationship that is already under strain. Every new thing we put into a low-trust environment tends to make the trust problem worse.
The question the field should be asking itself
Here is a concrete version of the question, and it applies well beyond philanthropy. How many education funders have children or young people on their boards? How many child-focused civil society organisations have them on theirs? How many international NGOs that claim to work for children have children or young people meaningfully represented in their governance, their grant committees, or their senior leadership? How many education ministries have a standing mechanism for children and young people to shape national policy, rather than a youth advisory group that meets once a year and produces a report that no one reads? The answer, if we are honest about it, is very few, and the exceptions prove the rule.
Governance sets strategy, and strategy sets everything else. If the room where a foundation, a CSO, a research institute or a ministry decides what it is for does not include the children and young people it claims to serve, that organisation has already made a structural choice about whose judgment counts and whose does not. The choice may be defensible on other grounds, but it should be named, and it should be weighed against what the organisation claims its purpose is. A field that spends considerable time lamenting the absence of children's voices in policy rooms has been slow to notice the same absence in its own governance.
What needs to change, and who needs to change it
Governments carry ultimate responsibility for education. The closing session of Education House made that argument clearly, and I agree with it. But the argument cuts in several directions at once. Philanthropy, civil society, and international NGOs all claim legitimacy from the constituencies they say they serve, and that legitimacy is weakened the longer the gap between claim and practice runs.
The work begins at home, in each of our institutions. Appointing children and young people to boards and grant committees, with the support structures to make that appointment real rather than tokenistic. Building leadership teams that include the constituencies the work is intended to serve. Resourcing child-led and youth-led organisations at a level that reflects the scale of their stake rather than the limits of their existing infrastructure. Funding the long-term relational work that makes genuine participation possible, rather than the event-based consultation that substitutes for it. None of this is exotic. Some of it is already happening in pockets. What is missing is the field-level commitment that would turn it from exception into practice.
There is also a harder argument, which is that some of the authority the current generation holds over education systems should be shared, or in some cases transferred. That is not a popular claim, because it implies that the people who have been in charge have not done well enough to justify continued unilateral authority. I think that is, on the evidence, true. A generation that is presiding over the most disrupted education systems in living memory, into the most uncertain future most young people will ever face, has a weaker claim to sole design authority than we usually admit.
What we could do with this
Education House works because it holds space for the questions the field has not resolved. The intergenerational trust question is one of those, which is why it surfaced in both of the plenaries I sat in and ran through the breakout I chose, and why I have found it hard to put down since. The useful thing the field could do with a convening as good as this one is to take the provocations seriously enough to act on them in our own institutions, not wait for the next edition to ask the question again.
That means treating intergenerational trust as a design principle rather than a soft concern, starting with who sits on our boards, who sets our strategies, who decides our grants, and who holds us accountable for whether the work we fund or run is actually serving the children and young people it is meant to serve. That applies to every institution in this field. Philanthropy. Civil society. International NGOs. Research bodies. Ministries. The gap between what we say we are for and who we let shape us is the clearest trust problem we have, and it is not going to close on its own.
With thanks to HundrED, Salzburg Global and Teach For All, and the co-convenors, for a genuinely valuable afternoon in Oxford.