Racing the Clock: Education's Response to AI's Rapid Rise

AI is transforming knowledge, learning and work at an unprecedented pace. This one-day conference brings together educators, researchers, students and industry leaders to explore how education can respond with urgency, purpose and leadership.

The future students are being prepared for is changing

AI is rapidly changing the nature of work, reshaping the skills graduates need, the ways knowledge is produced, and the roles humans will play alongside intelligent technologies. The pace of change creates an urgent challenge for education: students are being prepared for futures that are already shifting beneath them.

Students already feel this shift. Many are using AI daily, often more fluently than their educators. Yet there is growing empirical evidence of a learning-performance paradox: while AI can enhance short-term task performance, it may also undermine deeper learning, including cognitive growth, knowledge transfer, critical judgement, and metacognitive development. This creates an urgent need for education systems to move beyond simply allowing or prohibiting AI use and instead focus on helping students learn with AI in ways that strengthen, rather than replace, human capability.

Why now, and why together

National conversations are already pointing to the need for a coordinated, forward-looking response that prioritises human capability, agency, and ethical engagement with AI. Educational institutions can no longer afford fragmented or reactive approaches; the question is not whether AI will shape learning and work, but how deliberately and responsibly we respond.

Racing the Clock is a moment to bring that conversation into the same room to move beyond fragmented responses, surface what is genuinely working, confront what is not, and start building a shared response across sectors.