Can schools do more to develop emotional intelligence in students?
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When the AI company Anthropic unveiled its latest suite of enterprise tools earlier this year, investors did not need long to grasp the implications.
The new products included plugins capable of reviewing contracts and carrying out legal workflows that would once have required considerable human time. Within a single day, an estimated $285 billion had been wiped from the value of software stocks around the world.
The market appeared to reach a blunt conclusion. Technical work is becoming cheaper.
Yet only days later, Anthropic president and cofounder Daniela Amodei offered a rather different view of what the company itself values when recruiting people.
“The things that make us human will become much more important,” she told ABC News.
Anthropic looks for strong communicators with “excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious,” she explained. It wants people who are motivated by helping others. Despite the rapid progress of AI, Amodei believes the number of jobs it can perform entirely without human involvement remains “vanishingly small.”
This was not simply a reassuring line from an AI executive trying to soften an unsettling product launch.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a similar argument during an appearance on the MD Meets podcast in November. As AI takes on more analytical and technical work, he suggested, empathy and emotional intelligence will become more valuable rather than less.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon echoed the point on Fox News the following month. His advice to young people was to develop “critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ,” while also learning to write clearly and contribute effectively in meetings.
A pattern is emerging.
The people building and deploying workplace automation increasingly describe their ideal employee in terms that sound less like a computer science course and more like a lesson in human development.
The Research Points In The Same Direction
The evidence largely supports what these business leaders are saying.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 draws on responses from more than 1,000 employers operating across 22 industries and 55 economies. Empathy and active listening appear among the 10 core skills employers value most, alongside analytical thinking, resilience and creativity.
The report becomes more revealing when it considers which skills generative AI may replace.
Working with Indeed’s Hiring Lab, researchers examined more than 2,800 workplace skills and compared them with the capabilities of current generative AI systems. They did not identify a single skill with a very high likelihood of being replaced.
The skills with almost no potential for substitution were those grounded in human relationships. Empathy and active listening sat at the top of that group.
This creates a striking alignment. Employers are placing greater value on the qualities that AI is least able to reproduce.
For education leaders, that should not be treated as an interesting side note. It should be shaping decisions about what children learn, practice and experience in school.
But could that opportunity be slipping away? Let’s examine England’s approach as an example.
England’s Curriculum Review
England is currently undertaking its first complete review of the national curriculum in more than a decade.
The independent Curriculum and Assessment Review published its final report in November 2025. The government accepted most of its recommendations on the same day. Among them was a new oracy framework intended to strengthen spoken communication.
A consultation on the revised programs of study is due to begin in September 2026. Schools are expected to begin teaching the new curriculum in 2028. Communication has secured a place in the proposed reforms.
Emotional intelligence has not, at least not to the same extent.
Educationalist Jean Gross believes this is a serious omission. Gross previously advised the UK government and led the national social and emotional learning program known as SEAL. She also cowrote the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance on social and emotional learning.
Writing in Tes this month, she argues that social and emotional development has been pushed into relationships and health education, an area that many schools struggle to prioritize. Meanwhile, the central curriculum continues to focus overwhelmingly on subject knowledge.
Skills such as understanding another person’s perspective, resolving disagreements, responding constructively to feedback and recovering from failure can all be taught. Yet few schools develop them in a deliberate or consistent way.
Gross describes these human capabilities as “our USP” in an economy increasingly shaped by machines.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that effective social and emotional learning can produce an average of four additional months of academic progress in a year. The reported gains are greatest among disadvantaged pupils.
The evidence is not flawless. The EEF rates its security as low and warns that results depend heavily on the quality of implementation and staff training.
That qualification should be taken seriously. It does not, however, justify excluding this work from a curriculum that will shape education well into the 2030s. It suggests that schools need to approach it with greater care, stronger training and clearer expectations.
The Consequences Are Already Visible
This is not a distant workforce problem.
In May, former UK health secretary Alan Milburn published the interim findings of his independent review into young people who are out of work. He warned that the country is facing a “generational fault line.”
The report arrived alongside Office for National Statistics figures showing that 1 million people aged between 16 and 24 were not in education, employment or training during the first quarter of 2026.
Without meaningful reform, Milburn’s review estimates that the number could rise to 1.25 million within five years. Most of these young people have not simply withdrawn from the labor market. Some 84 percent say they want a job or an opportunity to train.
Gross argues that the report reinforces a concern repeatedly raised by employers. Too many young applicants arrive without the interpersonal skills required to enter and remain in the workplace.
AI could make this problem considerably worse.
Routine junior tasks have traditionally given young employees an opportunity to learn how workplaces operate. They could observe colleagues, build confidence, make manageable mistakes and gradually take on more responsibility.
Those are also some of the tasks most exposed to automation.
If AI removes part of the work that once helped beginners find their footing, while employers simultaneously demand stronger judgment, communication and emotional intelligence, the first step into employment becomes much harder to reach.
Schools may soon be the only institution capable of developing these qualities consistently and at scale.
Schools Do Not Need To Wait
Gross notes that the original SEAL materials remain freely available online. They include lessons, assemblies and activities that can be used across different areas of school life. The EEF has also published six recommendations for integrating social and emotional learning into everyday teaching.
The important change is conceptual.
Emotional intelligence should be treated as part of the curriculum, not as a pastoral extra to be addressed after the serious academic work has finished.
That might mean structured group tasks in which pupils have to negotiate disagreement rather than simply divide the workload. It could include feedback routines that teach students how to offer criticism, receive it and respond without becoming defensive.
History and science lessons can use role play to help pupils examine events or decisions from different perspectives. Project work can assess how students communicate, collaborate and adapt, as well as judging the quality of the final submission.
The choices a student makes, the questions they ask, the way they handle uncertainty and their ability to work with other people may tell us far more about their future readiness.
Curriculum time is limited. England’s move toward a knowledge rich curriculum has helped teachers become more confident in evidence informed instruction. Few people would support discarding those gains.
Human skills are also difficult to assess consistently. Schools know that anything absent from formal assessment can quickly become secondary, regardless of how often policy documents describe it as important.
Gross acknowledges another risk. Teachers have invested years in adapting to the existing model. A sudden change in direction could create disruption without producing better outcomes.
These are reasons to design reform carefully. They are not reasons to ignore the issue.
The companies at the forefront of AI know which tasks their systems are likely to absorb. They also know which qualities they still struggle to reproduce. Again and again, their leaders return to empathy, communication, curiosity, judgment and emotional intelligence.
England’s curriculum consultation in September offers one opportunity to respond.
Every other education system faces the same decision.
When the people building the machines tell us that human qualities will become more valuable, are schools prepared to believe them?