Innov8: 8 Questions with Daniele Hartford-Fox

At Tekex, we’re proud to highlight the people reshaping what innovation means across the Channel Islands. As part of our Innov8 series - eight questions with members of the Innovate Guernsey Board - we’re speaking with the leaders rethinking systems, challenging assumptions, and helping the islands prepare for tomorrow.

This week, we sat down with Daniele Hartford-Fox - an educator, thinker, and changemaker whose work is redefining how young people learn and thrive. From championing strengths-based education to exploring how AI will transform the skills future generations need, Daniele brings both clarity and urgency to one of the biggest questions of our time: how do we prepare young people for a world changing faster than ever before?

With her blend of humanity, curiosity, and bold thinking, Daniele is helping shape an education system that truly knows, supports, and challenges every student.

If you could relive one day from your school years, what would it be and why?

Weirdly it would be my grandmother’s funeral. I was 15 at the time, a year into being at an all-girls school near Brighton. My parents were living in Texas, and my grandmother was thus my ‘person’ – a no-nonsense, ex-headteacher, painter and nature lover. Her death was sudden and left me bereft, but the response of my school was immense. My friends who were all part of the school choir, sang at her funeral, my teachers both gave me space but also opened the door for me to seek connection. I felt seen and supported by a community. Many years later, when I was reflecting on why that school had such an impact on me, I felt it boiled down to three things – I was known, supported and challenged. Those are now my watch words for how I want every young person to experience education.

You’ve spent your career helping young people prepare for a rapidly changing world. What’s the one skill or mindset you think every student should leave school with?

To know themselves. This is a big ask as I, a 48 year old, feel I’m still on that journey.

But that’s the aspiration. To create a space in which they can be honest with themselves, curious rather than defensive, grounded rather than ‘tinny’.

I have always loved working with teenagers. I find them to be willing to look at the world clear eyed, willing to challenge and have the difficult conversations. In this rapidly changing world, we need to help them ground themselves and have the confidence to dance with change rather than try to ignore it.

And I want them to know their strengths. We spend so much time in education telling children what they can’t do – how to counter their weaknesses in maths, or writing, or independent learning. I’m not sure we spend as much time really getting them to know their strengths. And I don’t just mean their strengths within the academic curriculum (although those are important). I mean strengths like being an effective decision-maker, a powerful communicator, being tenacious, being able to build social connection, being a strong practical problem solver.

My feeling is that in a world of AI, knowing what they uniquely bring is perhaps the most powerful gift we can give young people.

AI is transforming how we live, learn, and work. How do you see it reshaping the classroom - and what excites (or worries) you most about that shift?

At the moment there is a scramble to use LLMs to create new EDTech but, a little like at the beginning of the internet, the current offerings I think are still clunky. They will of course improve and I can see the role EdTech will play in offering differentiated tasks and learning to students.

However, for me, I’m most interested in the impact of AI  in terms of the skills and knowledge children will need.

I’m concerned that the current conversation in education seems to be how do we use AI to help us deliver the same learning outcomes that were needed 200 years ago? I think instead we have to consider, how AI is going to fundamentally shift our economy and society and therefore what knowledge and skills are our students going to need?

Firstly, it’s important to recognise that there are powerful things built in our current system. Learning how to problem solve, learning about our world and our history, learning about how to use your voice or understand what is true are things that are as relevant today as ever. However, assessments such as GCSE that focus on memorisation and handwriting alone in timed conditions seem deeply out of kilter with what is needed. We therefore need to start thinking about what we want to assess and how, because in education as in business, what you assess is what gets done.

Secondly, we need to recognise what the real superskill of teachers is. As we learnt during Covid, for the vast majority of young people learning you can film the best teacher and have online activities but for most young people, that will not result in great learning. Learning is not about information it’s about relationship. It’s about a teacher knowing how to say the thing, at the moment it needs to be said to unlock the potential in a young person. AI won’t replace teachers. But it will change what teachers do. I can’t imagine a world in 10-15 years time where the role of a teacher is to stand at the front and deliver knowledge. But similarly, I know that if we want children to develop, and particularly if we want them to develop deep skills, that requires the coaching and mentoring of teachers.

Education can sometimes struggle to keep pace with innovation. What do you think needs to change most urgently to make learning future-ready?

At the time of the first industrial revolution, the answer to what humans could do differently from the machines that had come in and replaced so many farmers and artisans, was reading writing and arithmetic and so we constructed and education system based no longer on practical apprenticeships but on academic learning to equip our children with the skills they needed to thrive.

The question then should be, not how we use AI to deliver the same academic outcomes we needed for the first revolution, but instead in this industrial revolution full of LLM’s and machine learning, what skills and knowledge are humans going to need.

I have two thoughts on this – looking at the speed of change it seems to me that many of the roles that our society seems to somewhat relegated are perhaps going to be the most protected– when people ask what the saftest role is for the next twenty years, my go to is plumber!

My second thought is that regardless how good AI is, there are contexts in which humans simply prefer to be working with other humans.  It may be that Ai is ‘better’ but would I really prefer an AI boss, AI politician, AI nurse, an AI diplomat, parent or teacher?  Thus, I suspect that these deeper human skills are going to be the ones that set us apart.

This change in what is seen as the most ‘valuable’ will require a fundamental and profound shift in our thinking in terms of what we prioritise in education.

For example, AI is now immensely good at writing – probably better than most adults and certainly faster. For years, I’ve taught students who are powerful communicators - articulate, persuasive and funny. But when they have to write it down in timed conditions, they struggled and thus never got the grades their brains deserved. The table has now turned.  Those who can speak may now have the advantage over those who can write. If we really took that seriously, we would shift our assessments. Why are we testing their ability to handwrite in timed conditions? Should we move to vivas or project based assessments which measure their ability to respond, influence and articulate ideas in a way that will be much more relevant in this industrial revolution.

For me, in the same way we had to suddenly reconsider the skills and knowledge that helped us navigate the first industrial revolution, we need to start doing the same now. And schools have to move fast. The children entering reception this year will leave school in 2040 and the world will look different. Schools have to be ahead rather than behind that curve to equip young people with the skills and knowledge they are going to need.

You’ve spoken on the TEDx stage about reimagining education. What inspired that talk - and has your view evolved since then?

I gave TEDx talk because I feel that we are not asking the right questions (with the right urgency) in education.

Humans have a tendency to believe that the world will continue as it currently is (something we saw during Covid). Education has been the same for the last 200 years and many of us who love schools and teaching young people, probably were the very ones who enjoyed this type of learning, went to university to study our chosen subject and then moved back into schools to deliver that subject. Thus, we are deeply invested in the system as it is and so it is difficult to consider it being significantly different.

Education thus is stuck in its frame – considering AI only from the perspective of how we can use it to deliver the same outcomes and subjects we have always had. But of course that is not the question.

The question isn’t how do we use AI to improve our delivery of the status quo, the question is how is AI going to fundamentally change the skills and knowledge young people are going to need and thus the work that schools are going to have to do.

And this is thus more a human problem than a technological one. The challenge in front of all industries is not how primarily how we use the technology but how we bring people into a state where they aren’t drained or shut down by this level of change.

Three years ago, when I first spoke at a conference in Guernsey about the impact of AI, I expected change to come much faster to the island. And indeed, the technology has done exactly as I had expected – it is increasing and improving at an exponential rate. However, actual on the ground social change has not kept pace. What I had not understood, is that even though the potential of the technology is there, it will take more time for people and thus companies to really engage with it. That has thus dramatically slowed down the speed of impact (although we can already see a 1/3 drop in graduate roles in the UK and USA since the introduction of Chat GPT).

For me, that doesn’t mean that we can ignore it, but it does give us time to start to plan.

And we need to plan. Schools need to plan.

How are we going to change assessments? How are we going to support teachers in pivoting their skills? How are we going to construct timetables that no longer based on classes of 30 children sitting in rows learning knowledge? How do we break down, scaffold and teach skills like influence or decision making, the way we learnt to break down, scaffold and teach mathematics?

But also governments need to plan – how are we going to deal with significant disruption to the labour force? How are we going to deal with tax when we have a significant disruption to employment. How do we manage finding truth in an age when AI can nuance and target messaging to the biases and vulnerabilities of each individual. These are some pretty pressing questions so we need to take the time we have to focus powerfully on them.

As posters in every classroom has said for years – failing to plan, is planning to fail!

If you could collaborate with any innovator, past or present - from Marie Curie to Steve Jobs - who would it be, and what would you work on together?

I found this such a hard question because I find that almost every conversation with someone who thinks about the world differently from me is inspiring. I go away so often imbued with a sense of possibility, energised to build something even better than we had before. For me, it’s not about one particular person but finding people who a) think differently to me and have strengths I don’t have and b) are open eyed and curious, who enjoy pouring ideas into the middle of the table and building and adapting together.

I could list so many inspiring individuals I have come across even in the last 3 years but a recent example is an extraordinary woman called Jo Miller who until recently was the Director of Technology for the UK Government and is now the National Security Officer for Microsoft.  I think what I’ve loved about my conversations with Jo is not just that she has a brilliant and forward thinking mind, but that whilst she has a full sense of all the challenges we face she has a joyful optimism about human potential that means she always builds rather than tears down. Incredibly she has agreed to be our speaker this year at Speech Day and I think her energy and perspectives will be as inspiring to the girls as it is to me!

Collaboration is central to the Tekex and Innovate Guernsey ethos. How do you see schools and businesses working together to better prepare students for tomorrow’s world?

Collaboration is perhaps one of the things I love most in life. Perhaps it’s my ‘improv’ background, but I believe that collaboration often builds more than competition could imagine.

And collaboration is Guernsey’s superpower!

Schools often operate behind both literal and figurative walls. In this moment of rapid change, a priority for me has been to ‘fray the edges’ of the school and work with industry and thought leaders to move quickly to ensure that young people have the skills and knowledge they are going to need.

For example, at Ladies’ we have created our Pathways Partners group which includes major organisations like PwC and Specsavers, local CEOs, tech experts, thought leaders and universities like UCL. They have helped us build our new Sixth Form curriculum, Pathways, that runs in parallel to A Levels and in fact, over the last two weeks we have had a bevy of business people and leaders come in and conduct Vivas with all of our students to assess the end of the course (the girls were amazing!). The opportunity for the girls to work on authentic projects, have seminars with incredibly people and then have 1-2-1 assessments is something that is difficult to imagine in any other context and is allowing Ladies’ to be at the fore-front of educational innovation.

I think this is only the beginning of what is possible in an island community like ours and I’m excited to see what happens next!

And finally, if you had to describe the future of education in three words, what would they be?

• Individualised

• strengths rather than weaknesses focused (I know, not one word!)

• relationship centred