Preparing teachers to prepare young people for the world is a joint project involving a wide-ranging community of teacher-educators. Our goal is to create a new White Paper for teacher education which responds to a research-informed vision of what the world may look like in 2050 and the challenges, problems and pressures which are likely to confront the next generation of adults.
The project was created by the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and Cambridge University Press and Assessment.
About the project
Recent policy developments have left teacher-educators in a quandary. The teacher education curriculum is tightly constrained, pedagogical choices are limited, and there is little autonomy over how new teachers are prepared for their professional career. Political short-termism and economic goals dominate. Under the state’s model of “training”, teacher education must be efficient, consistent, and technical–producing supposedly classroom-ready teachers based on a narrow focus on “what works”.
Meanwhile, the world is undergoing profound changes. Climate change, artificial intelligence, pandemics, mass migration, threats to democracy, and renewed global conflicts will all reshape how people live, work and relate to one another by 2050. There is growing recognition that education must evolve in response. This project looks beyond political short-termism to imagine a vision for teaching and teacher education that meets the needs of a radically changing world. We invite teacher-educators everywhere to help shape it.
Get involved
If you work in teacher education, we want to hear from you and invite you to some of the questions posed on this site!
In January 2025, we set the process of creating our vision in motion at an event for teacher-educators and education policy specialists in Cambridge. Over the course of a day, we heard from experts in fields such as engineering, medicine, genomics, climate change, politics, business and philosophy, each of whom explained what their discipline tells us about how the world may look in 2050. You can watch all the presentations below, or read a summary here.
In response, our teacher-education audience raised questions about their own practice and understandings. When asked to share these and vote on the comments of others, 89 comments were made, some of which were liked 11 times.
This site clusters those ideas into four areas: Teacher education as an activity; Teachers’ knowledge; Skills and dispositions and The business of education. On each corresponding page, you will find provocations and questions. We invite you to respond to as many of these questions as you would like. You answers will help us to formulate our White Paper.
Contributions can be entirely anonymous, but if you would like to be part of the project going forward, or stay informed as our vision emerges, please fill out the form below.