19 September 2026 · AI in five years

AI in Five Years: Parents' Evening, 2031

Invented. Every word of this is made up. It is Tuesday 14 October 2031, and P. is fourth in the queue for Mr O.

The hall smells the way school halls smell. Plastic chairs, orange squash, a radiator ticking. On every chair a parent, and on every parent's lap a phone with the same thing open: their child's tutor. Not a person. The thing the school gives every pupil at eleven, that has sat with the child through every lesson, every homework and every wobble for three years, and knows more about how her son A. learns than anyone alive, A. included.

So nobody here needs to ask how their child is doing. They know. The tutor told them at breakfast. A. rushes the second half of long problems. He reads three years ahead. He stopped putting his hand up in March and nobody knows why. What they're queuing for is the one thing the tutor won't say.

Mr O. teaches maths to a hundred and eighty children and knows all their names. That used to be the whole job. Now the tutor teaches, and marks, and explains it four ways, and never sighs. What's left for him is the part with a name on it. He's the one who can look at a child the machine calls "on track" and say no, he isn't, he's frightened, and I'm changing what we do. The school calls the job teacher. The contract calls it the named adult. Every child has a tutor. Every tutor has to have one of him. He has a hundred and eighty.

"He's fine," Mr O. says when P. sits down. "The tutor's right about the hand. It's a girl. It isn't a maths problem."

P. laughs, then doesn't. "Can I have the file?"

That's the question that fills the hall. A.'s tutor holds three years of him. Every wrong answer, every half-formed idea, the exact shape of how he thinks. It's the most valuable thing anyone has ever made about her son, and it belongs to the trust that runs the school, under a licence from the company that makes the tutor. Next September they move to Leeds. The new school uses a different tutor. A. will walk in at fourteen and be, to the machine, a stranger.

"You can have the report," Mr O. says. "The file isn't mine to give."

Here's what changed in five years, and it wasn't the teaching. Nobody argues any more about whether machines teach well. They do, and the rows of 2026 about cheating and screen time sound like the rows about calculators. What changed is that the record of a child became the most valuable thing a school holds, and a family can't take it with them. The fight in this hall is the fight at every rent tribunal and every GP surgery in the country. The machine knows you. Who holds the knowing?

Some things stubbornly didn't change. The chairs. The squash. A man with a hundred and eighty names in his head, paid less than the licence for the tutor, and the only person in the building allowed to say no.

P. stands up. Behind her, another parent, same phone, same question.

In this invented country, in 2031, a parents' evening is a queue of people asking for their own children back.