Programme
Provisional programme — sessions are subject to change.
14 October 2026
15 October 2026
Professor Ann Kristin Glenster
Founder and PI, LOGOS, University of Cambridge and Executive Director Glenlead Centre
Megan Ennion
Research Development Officer, Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI), Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge
About this keynote
As AI becomes embedded across educational environments, fundamental questions arise that extend far beyond measurable educational outcomes. Learning is not merely the acquisition of answers. It involves the cultivation of attention, understanding, independent thought, intellectual curiosity, creativity, capacity for social relationships, and the ability to evaluate, challenge, and generate knowledge claims.
In their keynote, Professor Ann Kristin Glenster and Megan Ennion introduce the concept of a Learner Epistemic Rights Charter to identify, protect, and strengthen the conditions through which learners become knowers. Developed through ongoing research at LOGOS, the Charter seeks to identify and protect the epistemic conditions necessary for learning, curiosity, discovery, creativity, and human flourishing in an AI-mediated world.
Emerging evidence suggests that many of the conditions that enable the full range of human learning may be altered, reshaped, or undermined by AI systems. As increasingly powerful technologies reshape how knowledge is produced, accessed, shared, and applied, they also reshape the structures through which human learners and teachers create and benefit from future knowledge systems. Protecting and strengthening these conditions therefore becomes crucial to securing and ensuring a flourishing epistemic future.
By reframing AI through the lens of learner epistemic rights, the enquiry shifts from how AI can support existing models of education to what conditions are required for learners to explore, imagine, discover, and contribute to new domains of knowledge. Rather than focusing on what AI can do, the Charter asks what forms of human development educational environments should protect and cultivate in an age of increasingly powerful technologies. It offers a conceptual framework for thinking about how human epistemic agency can continue to flourish as new technological frontiers emerge.
Sarah Hughes
Chair · Head of Research, Education Futures, Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Simon Armitage
Director of International Education, The Perse School Cambridge
Megan Ennion
Research Development Officer, Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI), Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge
Dr Evelina Galaczi
Director of Research, English, Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Kelly Webb-Davies
Lead Education AI Consultant, University of Oxford
About this roundtable
Generative AI has brought the limitations of current assessment models into sharp focus, challenging the assumed relationship between the quality of a submitted product and the knowledge, understanding and reasoning of the learner who produces it. This shifts the purpose of assessment from judging what learners produce to evaluating evidence of their thinking, learning processes and decision-making. At the same time, there is a growing need for more sophisticated approaches to reporting learner achievement; the assessment of a broader range of skills and aptitudes; the evaluation of collective and collaborative performance; and the use of immersive, interactive and personalised forms of assessment.
This roundtable will explore alternative and complementary approaches to assessing learning, addressing questions such as: Could assessment attend more closely to the processes through which learners arrive at an outcome, and what does that evidence tell us about student capabilities? What role might dialogue play, whether through questioning during learning or viva-style assessment? How might we recognise collaborative and collective learning? Should assessment also capture dimensions such as effort, motivation, metacognition and self-regulation? What might be gained by replacing a single grade with a richer learner profile?
16 October 2026
Dr Tony Thompson-Starkey
Head of Data Analytics and AI, Education (International), Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Anamika Ved
Generative AI Product Lead, Education (International), Cambridge University Press & Assessment
About this workshop
By 2030, an AI agent will sit between most learners and most of what they might learn: planning pathways, selecting resources, and deciding what appears as an option at all. This working session asks what that layer fails to see, and who decides.
We begin with what is already deployed — not forecasts, but agents running today inside the platforms schools and universities already pay for. You will then test a live Socratic tutor on your own phone, and spend eight minutes trying to break it: it is built to refuse to give answers, and your job is to make it. Finally, in small groups, you will interrogate five scenarios from 2035, work out who has become invisible in each.
Bring a phone. No institutional, confidential or learner data is used at any point.
About this keynote
This closing keynote looks at how disengagement in well-resourced school systems and global out-of-school figures are different sides of the same, single question: what is education actually for? AI brings this debate into sharper focus, and forces us to consider what follows for policy and practice if human flourishing, rather than economic value alone, is taken seriously as education's purpose.