A new national survey of Australian parents has found deep and widespread unease about whether schools are preparing children for a workforce being rapidly reshaped by artificial intelligence with only 38.04% of parents confident their child's school is doing so.
The Future Ready Schools Survey 2026, commissioned by education research and technology organisation ViVEDUS and drawing on responses from parents of school-aged children nationally, set out to answer one question: what is an education worth having in the age of AI?
The results, released in a companion White Paper titled ‘We want our child to HAVE a future, let’s start there’, suggest a significant gap between what schools currently deliver and what parents believe their children need.
Satisfaction runs even lower
The confidence gap is matched by low overall satisfaction: just 37.64% of parents agreed their child's school is effectively developing the broader capabilities such as critical thinking, creativity and resilience that parents increasingly say matter most. Overall satisfaction with what schools currently offer sits at just 11.37%.
Parents want more than academic results
When asked to weigh academic achievement against other outcomes, 75.32% of parents said skills such as critical and creative thinking, resilience, character and problem-solving should be prioritised either ahead of or equal to academic results. Only 22.57% believe academic outcomes should remain schools' primary focus.
Critical and creative thinking and problem solving ranked as parents' top priority beyond academic achievement, followed by communication skills, adaptability and resilience, and student wellbeing and mental health.
AI concern is now mainstream
Almost half of parents surveyed (48%) said they were concerned about AI significantly disrupting employment opportunities for their child's generation a concern that founder of ViVEDUS, Dr Paul Browning OAM, says was absent from parental thinking a decade ago.
"Parents are watching AI transform their own workplaces in real time, and they're drawing their own conclusions about what that means for their children's education," Dr Browning told The Educator. "What's striking is how consistent the message is across every state, sector and grade level: parents are not asking for a return to basics, and they're not asking schools to lower academic standards. They're asking for something more ambitious; schools that develop the whole child."
A recurring theme: schools haven't kept pace
Qualitative responses to open-ended survey questions reinforced the quantitative findings. Many parents described current curricula as disconnected from the realities young people will face, with one respondent describing the system as built for "Prussian soldiers or factory workers rather than the 21st century."
A recurring theme among responses was a desire for schools to protect and develop children's capacity for independent thought in an AI-saturated environment, with several parents expressing concern that overreliance on generative AI tools was already affecting their children's ability to think and reason independently.
Recommendations for schools and system leaders
The White Paper closes with ten recommendations directed at policymakers and school leaders, including calls for:
- A national citizens' assembly on the future of education
- Broadening university entry requirements beyond academic achievement alone
- Elevating the Australian Curriculum's general capabilities from aspirational language to genuinely assessed outcomes
- School-level audits of how much time and assessment weight is currently given to developing capabilities such as critical and creative thinking and resilience, versus content delivery and exam preparation
Dr Browning said school leaders don't need to wait for systemic reform to begin responding.
"The most important decisions about what a school values, what it assesses, how it designs learning, how it engages parents, are made at the school level, every day,” he said.
“Schools that are already building genuine partnerships with parents and deliberately developing these broader capabilities are showing it's possible without waiting for permission."