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AI Skills for Life and Work: Labour Market and Skills Projections, a UK government issued in January, makes for intriguing and occasionally uplifting reading for educators. It sketches out a “human-centric scenario” that augurs a growth in the use of intensive, conversational small-group and one-to-one learning. 

But the authors of the report refer to human-centric skills as “soft skills”, and it is here where I part company with them. The word “soft” implies that the hard stuff – the real education – is still to be found in lecture halls and on PowerPoint slides. Increasingly, the opposite is the case. It is only in small groups that the key skills of intellectual autonomy, adaptability, originality and communication can be teased out and nurtured. 

A transition is under way: the centrepiece of university education is shifting from the macro to micro. My modest proposal is that globally it will require at least a million more teachers. That number may sound extraordinary to anyone hanging on by their fingernails in today’s shrinking sector, but I’m probably undershooting. The number of students doubled between 2020 and 2025, to 264 million, according to , and they are increasingly going to need and demand the kind of “human-centric” skills that AI cannot reach. The World Economic Forum that AI will create 170 million new jobs by 2030 and specifically names higher education teachers as a growth area. 

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Two questions arise from my proposition: “What goes on in smaller settings that matters so much?” and “How can this provision be ramped up without spending a lot of money?” 

One of the easiest and cheapest ways of responding to the second question is student-to-student (often called peer-to-peer) dialogue. But while this model brings us nearer to an answer to the first question, on closer inspection, it doesn’t cut the mustard. Why? The point of small-group encounters is the enhancement of essential skills such as autonomy, adaptability and originality. So, a teacher needs to be present for this to happen. Such occasions are about a back and forth of ideas, but they are not merely an opportunity for sharing. 

Small-group discussions and one-to-ones are ripe for radical expansion because they can expand students’ capacity to act, think and communicate. Across the almost 40 years I’ve been teaching in the sector, nearly all the moments where I have seen students not only acquire new, useful and substantive knowledge but also put it to use have been when I’ve worked with students intensively and turned “them” into individuals with their own needs and interests. 

I’ve learned that in many ways these encounters require more teaching skills than lectures because I’m required to be an active listener, adaptive and able to respond to a range of cues. Helping the nervous student as well as over-confident learners demands bespoke solutions. It means, too, providing options and pathways they might not have thought about, and identifying the original contribution that a student can make to a topic. 

I became so interested in this process that I wrote . A core message of the book is that you have to know your field, and understand its traditions, before you can add to it. This is also a reminder that outsourcing small-group and one-to-one teaching to student-led, peer-to-peer encounters, where everyone has a similar level of knowledge, is not the way forward. 

So, that addresses the first question, but where will all these teachers come from? 

One tempting solution is to draw on the cascade model of education pioneered in several African and Asian countries. In this model, skills and techniques are handed on and handed down through widening groups of paid professionals. It is an approach that has helped spread medical education in many countries. 

However, distortion is a common problem, as has found, especially when the cascade takes place across large spans of space and time. One Nepalese showed that only three of an initial 18 components of an educational training programme survived the cascade. The metaphor of a cascade is, in part, to blame; it implies a one-way flow when what is required are feedback loops and check-ins to ensure that the original message is getting though. 

A more fruitful solution can be found in another metaphor, that of the educational ecosystem. In higher education, teaching assistants (who may be postgraduate students or alumni) could be employed and deployed within small-group and one-to-one teaching schedules, supported and sustained by more experienced teaching staff. This also implies the upskilling and valorisation of teaching assistantships, reframing their role from a supplementary to a core activity. 

One knock-on effect will be an increase in oversight duties for other members of staff, but I expect this will increasingly come to be seen as an inherent part of academic careers. When integrated into a  network of support, teaching assistants can help to deliver a human-centric education without breaking the bank. 

Similar mechanisms are already being rolled out. At the , the benefits of recruiting alumni as tutors have been put to use on the MSc in Biodiversity, while are expanding their use of graduate teaching assistants. The mechanisms are to hand, though they are still often framed as supplementary to the old lecture-based system. The dots need be joined. 

The centrepiece of tomorrow’s educational ecosystem in higher education will be the provision of intellectual autonomy, adaptability, originality and communication skills in small-group and one-to-one settings. It is a human-centric re-orientation and an opportunity, and it will require people-centric solutions. 

Alastair Bonnett is professor of social geography at Newcastle University, UK.