Preparing learners to thrive in a changing world
Subject knowledge and skills
Teachers and students view subject knowledge as essential for students’ progression through formal education, but value it less for students’ life afterwards.
We wanted to understand teachers’ and students’ perspectives on the importance of different skills, values and subject knowledge for students’ futures. To support this analysis, we needed to develop a list of categories for each to consider. We used a framework created by the University of Cambridge Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI)↗* as a starting point. We then analysed research literature and future skills frameworks from 2021 to 2024 to understand whether there were any new, emerging skills. From there, building on the existing DEFI framework, we created the following list of eight skills categories that we asked teachers and students to reflect on.
*Kotsiou et al, 2022, A scoping review of Future Skills frameworks↗
We explored these skills categories in our survey, together with subject knowledge (for example, discipline-specific subject knowledge, mastery of key concepts) and values (for example, environmental awareness and sustainability mindset, cross-cultural literacy, social agency).
Findings
Next step in education
When presented with the list of categories, both teachers and students consider subject knowledge to be critical for students’ next step in education. It is the most selected option by teachers, and the second most selected by students (after thinking and research skills). This emphasises the critical role of subject knowledge in preparing students for immediate educational milestones such as exams and progressing to advanced study or higher education.
Question for teachers: Which of the following, if any, do you view as important for students to learn to be ready for their next step in education? Please select all that apply.
Question for students: Which of the following, if any, do you view as important to learn to be ready for your next step in education? Please select all that apply.
Subject knowledge
Thinking and research skills
Communication skills
Self-management
Digital skills
Creativity and innovation skills
Values
Physical skills
Leadership, management and business skills
Aesthetic skills
None of these
To refine thinking further, when asked what is most important for students’ next step in education, both students and teachers choose the same top three, albeit in a different order. Students most often select self-management skills, followed by thinking and research skills and subject knowledge. Teachers most often prioritise thinking and research skills. Self-management skills and subject knowledge are the next most common choices.
Question for teachers: Which of the following do you think is the most important for students to learn to be ready for their next step in education? Please select one option.
Question for students: Which of the following do you think is the most important to learn to be ready for your next step in education? Please select one option.
Light colours refer to categories which are 'important'.
Can't see this chart? Download it here↗.
"It’s incredible to see that teachers and students are recognising the importance of thinking and research skills and self-management skills. This is what research shows is important based on the science of learning, so it’s great to see this also being recognised by students and teachers themselves."
Professor Sara Baker, Professor of Development Psychology and Education, University of Cambridge
Future after education
While both students and teachers consider subject knowledge important for students’ next step in education, there is a striking difference in its perceived importance for students’ futures beyond formal education. Subject knowledge is the least selected option by both teachers and students when asked to think about what is important for the future beyond education. In sharp contrast, leadership, management and business skills, values, self-management skills and communication skills are most frequently viewed as important.
Question for teachers: Which of the following, if any, do you view as important for students to learn to be ready for their future after finishing education? Please select all that apply.
Question for students: Which of the following, if any, do you view as important to learn to be ready for your future after finishing education? Please select all that apply.
Leadership, management and business skills
Values
Self-management
Communication skills
Creativity and innovation skills
Digital skills
Thinking and research skills
Aesthetic skills
Physical skills
Subject knowledge
None of these
"I would say leadership, management and business skills are the most important for the future. Leadership can help your team grow."
Student, Pakistan
When asked to identify what they consider most important, students most commonly choose leadership, management and business skills, followed by self-management skills and communication skills. Teachers most commonly choose self-management skills and leadership, management and business skills as the most important, followed by thinking and research skills.
Notably, when considering the skills needed for life beyond education, both teachers and students select thinking and research skills as most important more frequently than subject knowledge.
Question for teachers: Which of the following do you think is the most important for students to learn? Please select one option.
Question for students: Which of the following do you think is the most important to learn? Please select one option.
Can't see this chart? Download it here↗.
Challenges in teaching and learning
We were curious about the skills that students find most difficult to learn and teachers find most difficult to teach.
Almost a quarter of teachers (23%) identify self-management skills as the most difficult to teach. The next most frequently selected options are thinking and research skills, values, and creativity and innovation skills.
Students also see self-management skills as a challenge, with 19% of students considering this skill as the most difficult to learn. A relatively large proportion of students consider leadership, management and business skills and communication skills the most difficult to learn.
Thinking back to the perceived shift in importance of subject knowledge for students’ future after finishing education compared to their next step in education, it is interesting to note that teachers consider subject knowledge less of a challenge to teach than students find it to learn: 12% of students list it as the most difficult to learn, but just 4% of teachers report it as the most difficult to teach.
Question for teachers: What do you think are the most difficult to teach students? Please select up to 3 responses, with 1 being the greatest challenge.
Question for students: What do you think are the most difficult to learn? Please select up to 3 responses, with 1 being the greatest challenge.
The chart reflects the percentage of responses selecting each skill as the hardest to teach or learn.
Self-management skills emerge as a critical focus for education. Both teachers and students agree on their importance for students’ futures and on the challenges of learning and teaching this skillset. This topic is explored in more detail later in the self-management skills chapter.
Students say communication skills are more difficult to learn than teachers believe they are to teach. The challenges students face in this area are explored in the communication and interpersonal skills chapter.
Teachers find thinking and research skills and values more difficult to teach than students report they are to learn.
Technology and learning
A quarter of students (27%) say that the greatest benefit of technology (from the options listed) was its application in finding and understanding information. A slightly higher percentage of teachers (29%) emphasised its role in supporting students’ skill development more generally.
Question for teachers: Which of the following, if any, do you view as benefits of technology in preparing students for the future? Please select all that apply. And which of the following, if any, do you view as the greatest benefit of technology in preparing students for the future? Please select one option only.
Can't see this chart? Download it here↗.
Question for students: Which of the following, if any, do you view as benefits of technology in preparing you for the future? Please select all that apply. And which of the following, if any, do you view as the greatest benefit of technology in preparing you for the future? Please select one option only.
Can't see this chart? Download it here↗.
Perhaps students’ emphasis on finding and understanding information as the greatest benefit of digital technology may suggest that they see digital technology as a shortcut to subject knowledge. As one student put it:
"As AI gets more popular and more widely available the need to memorise subject knowledge becomes less important as we can find and implement subject knowledge easily with the help of AI."
Student, India
"If students produce a PowerPoint on a topic, AI can do in 30 seconds what in the past would have taken students three hours to do. This can impact how deep and profound their knowledge is. Critical thinking comes from looking into what’s below the surface, not just what’s on the surface that you can present off-hand. By taking shortcuts, you’re missing the beautiful mountain road."
School Leader, Oman
"It definitely worries me that more and more students are starting to rely on technology alone. I’m starting to see that many students would rather go to ChatGPT (or any other AI website) whenever they need the slightest help, instead of using their brainpower. It’s a way to get an easier answer. Personally, I don’t like to use AI as it takes away the creativity from my brain."
Student, United Arab Emirates
Others were more positive:
"It’s impossible to get AI away from our agenda. I think it’s a very powerful tool. After school, there is no one to help [students]. If AI can support by tutoring students, I think it may be valuable."
Teacher, China
"AI really can help a lot because it’s time-saving. When I was revising for my AS levels, I used it to make a study schedule."
Student, Pakistan
"I wouldn’t say that AI is making students lazy and I don’t believe that they’re trying to look for shortcuts. I would say that they’re embracing AI in a positive way because they see that they are more effective, that they can bring more information to any decision."
Higher Education Leader, Spain
Analysis
Our research shows that subject knowledge is not highly valued for students’ long-term futures. This may suggest that it is seen more as a currency that enables students to take their next step in education.
"It must be so disempowering for students to feel like disciplinary knowledge is just for the exams. It really raised for me the question of how teachers can communicate the intrinsic value of disciplinary knowledge."
Loic Menzies, Senior Research Associate, Jesus College, University of Cambridge
Subject knowledge provides the foundations for informed thinking. Distinct skills are needed to apply subject knowledge so that subject knowledge and skills together enable effective action and decision-making. Having a particular skill can help students to acquire further knowledge and vice versa. For example:
- Analytical skills can help us to acquire knowledge from reading a text.
- Being able to apply knowledge from a range of subject areas or disciplines to a particular problem or context can support effective problem-solving.
"You need to acquire knowledge to develop some cognitive capacities, skills and higher order thinking. The hard thinking doesn’t come just as something independent from knowledge and this process of acquiring and applying knowledge continues throughout life as part of lifelong learning."
Borhene Chakroun, Director Division of Policies and Lifelong Learning, UNESCO
Students’ relationship with knowledge should not be a passive one where they receive, memorise and then recall the knowledge when required. Instead, we need to help students and teachers see knowledge as a foundation for each student to actively construct, internalise and build on throughout their life.
"Knowledge is something you have to actively construct. It involves you and not just someone or something providing you with information. We should think about knowledge being the medium through which you develop these sophisticated learning skills."
Professor Rose Luckin, Founder and CEO, Educate Ventures
Showing students how the subject knowledge they are developing could apply to their future experiences can also help to underscore its long-term value. This can spark curiosity and interest, supporting them to more deeply engage with the active construction of subject knowledge.
As generative AI evolves at pace, the value of subject knowledge is being questioned and challenged. However, the ability to retrieve information is not the same as building subject knowledge. Information becomes subject knowledge only when processed and organised mentally, enabling advanced cognitive skills such as clear communication, critical thinking and problem-solving. For example, a surgeon cannot build the skills they need to operate on someone without deep subject knowledge of the human body.
"I want to make the case for subject knowledge in the era of AI – it actually matters more and not less; if you don’t have the knowledge how will you know what the AI is telling you? You need to build your own internal capabilities to use the AI thoughtfully."
Professor Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing and Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise, Cambridge Judge Business School
In the same way, we cannot rely on a generative AI chatbot or assistant to replace our long-term memory. When we encounter new information, our working memory must process it while simultaneously engaging with the contextual details of a task. Without prior subject knowledge stored in long-term memory to support this process, the demands on working memory can become overwhelming, hindering effective learning and problem-solving.
"There are two major learning systems in the brain, the basal ganglia, which is the path of habits and automaticity, and the declarative learning through the hippocampal system. When you do things enough, you create basal ganglia automatic internal links or engrams. Skills turn into knowledge, knowledge turns into skills, it all intertwines."
Professor Barbara Oakley, Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Oakland University
A solid foundation of subject knowledge will remain important. New technologies can provide immediate access to large amounts of data and suggest interpretations, but the challenges of misinformation and inaccuracies highlight the need for a sound subject knowledge base to contextualise and assess information critically and effectively.
It is time for us to reevaluate the role of subject knowledge within education. We must urgently reframe it so that it is seen as a foundation for developing skills and not as an equivalent to information. Subject knowledge and skills go hand in hand – you cannot have one without the other. It is essential to help students see the value of subject knowledge as something concrete that they will draw on in the future, and its use as a critical protector against misinformation and disinformation.
"Nobody can take away your knowledge. You could lose a lot of things, but if you have your knowledge and have really good values, you can go very far in life."
Student, Argentina
How you can get started
In the ‘How you can get started’ sections of this report we highlight the Cambridge resources and support available now, or coming soon, that can help teachers and school leaders start putting what they have learned into practice.
- We have resources on AI in the classroom, assessment for learning and climate change education that can support the topics explored in ‘Subject knowledge and skills’. Go to the learner resources section within this report for more information and links to these resources.
- To help students and teachers connect subject knowledge to real-life applications, we are evolving our assessment and teaching and learning design to draw explicit parallels to workplace scenarios. For example, creating an assessment scenario for biology in which the student is situated in a virtual lab as a cancer research scientist conducting an experiment.
Spotlight on: Climate change education
- We are embedding climate change education within a multi-disciplinary approach.
- We regularly hold forums with academic leaders in climate change, including experts from across the University of Cambridge, and feed what we learn into our products and services. For example, Cambridge IGCSE™ Geography has been updated to include a specific climate change topic in Paper 1, along with a greater focus on sustainability. The latest Cambridge IGCSE Business and Economics syllabus redevelopments also considered up-to-date understanding and framing of climate and sustainability issues.
- Together with climate experts from the University of Cambridge, our curriculum experts have designed a climate change education framework. This outlines the key subject knowledge, skills and understanding required for learners to be empowered to make a positive impact in a climate-challenged world.
- The framework is built around four dimensions (below) that together create a holistic approach for climate change education. Organised by learning stages, the comprehensive framework ensures that learners can build on prior subject knowledge and that the content is age-appropriate.
Understanding
causes, effects, consequences and responses.
Evaluating
diverse information, perspectives and data.
Caring
for ourselves, each other and the planet.
