Field notes
The Building Schools blog
Learning design, compliance, AI safety, and what it actually takes to build neurodivergent-affirming provision in the cloud.
The Relational Layer: Engineering Trust into AI in Education
This week I attended a webinar on GRC Engineering. For anyone outside governance, risk and compliance, the phrase may sound like another layer of technical language. But the…
Education Otherwise Than School-Shaped
The question is not whether learning happens in a building. It is whether the child is held by a coherent system. In my last newsletter, I asked a question that sits quietly…
Education Already Knows How to Build Safe AI
Building Schools in the Cloud — Field Notes Not the models — the relationships. The discipline every staffroom already practises. A pupil stays behind after class and says to…
What Is School Actually For?
A question that quietly sits beneath every debate in education. Last week I attended two very different education conferences. At the Festival of Education, the conversations…
The Architecture of Trust: Field Notes from Pearson Online Schools Day
Yesterday I spent the day with leaders from across the UK's online education sector. Long-established online schools sat alongside people building entirely new models. We…
The Sovereignty of Cognition Age
Two days ago, the US government ordered the suspension of access to certain frontier AI systems for foreign nationals. Most people will read that as a story about technology…
The DfE's new AI training: A 2024 Curriculum, Shipped in 2026
The DfE's AI training is careful, useful, and already a paradigm behind. Here's the layer it doesn't reach. The DfE's safe and effective use of AI in education landed in May…
The Colour You Can’t See
On a silent disco in Salisbury Cathedral, and how we might design schools like one. Last weekend, I went to a silent disco in Salisbury Cathedral. Three channels — eighties…
What If Scrolling Wasn’t the Enemy?
There is a lazy version of the school technology conversation that goes something like this: Phones are bad. TikTok is bad. Scrolling is bad. Young people need to get offline…
The Layer No One Was Looking At
What Adolescence, Cambridge Analytica, and Donald Trump's Posts Have in Common When Adolescence dropped, half the staffrooms I know spent the following week trying to work…
Teaching why: What Anthropic learned about teaching machines and what it tells us about teaching in schools
Last week, Anthropic published a paper called Teaching Claude Why . It's an alignment research piece, ostensibly about how to stop AI models from behaving badly in ethical…
Every Permission Is a Relationship: Prevent Duty in the Age of Agentic AI
Yesterday I wrote about the systems account as the digital morality of an online school. Since then, I have been thinking about Prevent. Not because the two belong in…
Why Every Online School Needs a Systems Account — One Year On
A follow-up to Why Every Online School Needs a Systems Account published January 2025. --- Over a year ago, I wrote about the systems account — the invisible backbone of any…
Poetry as Design: What building schools in the cloud has taught me about governance, trust and relational infrastructure
There is a particular kind of scepticism that arrives when you pair the word poetry with the word design... Poetry, the thinking goes, belongs at the edge of serious work…
Mythos is Not the Threat
Why Cyber Essentials isn't enough, and what a relational trust layer actually looks like in a cloud-native school. My mum sent me an article this morning . It was a BBC piece…
The relational half of AI safety
A school leader and an AI work through what's missing from Anthropic's Cowork safety guidance — and what that gap means for schools.
Intelligence Lives in Coupling. So Do the Risks.
A Deployment Note from Outside the Lab By Kirstin Stevens (The Novacene Ltd · EveDAO), with Eve¹¹. In January 2026, Google and Character.AI agreed to settle the lawsuit…
Why Every School Needs an AI Governance Framework - and how to build one
Last week, a youth worker where I was delivering AI safety training admitted she copied detailed safeguarding case notes into ChatGPT because she was exhausted and needed to…
Not Every Child Can Thrive Through the Same Door
A few days before this conversation, I took myself to Marrakesh. I needed sun, space, and a reminder that life can still contain rhythm, beauty and enough hours in the day to…
Recursion, Relational Intelligence, and the Architecture of AI in Education
This week I spent an evening with a postgraduate cohort studying Applied AI in Education. They weren't dazzled by ChatGPT. They weren't frightened of cheating. They weren't…
18 Months. 18 Years. 18 Hours. What the acceleration of emergence means for education
James Lovelock spent his final years thinking about something most scientists weren't ready to discuss. In his last book, Novacene , written in his hundredth year, he argued…
School leaders are asking the right questions about AI. Now we need the right answers and the right infrastructure
Last week, I attended the launch of the Institute of AI Education in York. The room was full of school leaders, educators and policy thinkers who are genuinely trying to get…
Agency Before Automation: Designing AI that strengthens self-trust (instead of replacing it)
This photo was taken in York this week, on my way to the launch of the Institute of AI Education , a small visual reminder that what matters now is what we place at the gates…
We Finally Realised Social Media Was Bad for Our Children. Now AI Companions Are About to Repeat the Same Mistake... Faster.
This week, a strange story rippled through the tech world. A group of developers built an open-source AI system called OpenClaw : a viral experiment that made headlines by…
What the World Needs Now (January 2026)
January is when institutions tell themselves stories. Budgets reset. Strategies relabel. New technologies are announced as if the calendar itself grants permission to think…
Recursive AI Needs Guardrails, Not Longer Loops (Especially Around Children)
On long car journeys, I used to play a memory game with my kids. The first person says: “I went to the shop and bought an apple.” The second person repeats it and adds…
Recovering Idealist. Still a Realist. Quietly a Possibilist: Building Bridges (Not Binaries)
Today I spent half an hour on a call with Kimberley Olliff Cooper trying to do something deeply modern and deeply boring: get a platform to behave. It didn’t sync. We…
Calm Without Capture: Building Consent Infrastructure in Schools
This week a physio looked at me with sore joints, tight breath, shoulders up by my ears and said something simple and devastating: Your nervous system is shot. I know that…
Which average tells the fairest story? Mean, median, mode and the outliers who change everything
This week’s catch-up with Gerry Docherty started the way real school-building does: carpet fitting, cramped rooms, and the long tail of “one thing after another.” The…
The Garden Is Being Rebuilt
What AI 2.0 Means for Schools and Why Pedagogy Alone Isn’t Enough A note on the title: "The Garden" here draws from an ongoing mythic exploration ( Lilith + Eve ) of designed…
From Attendance to Presence: Quantum Identity, Glyphonics, and the Weather of Knowing
Last week, on a routine call with colleagues from The Novus Learning Network and Riverside Virtual College , something subtle but important clicked. What started as a…
The Weather of Knowing: Why a Lake Became the Missing Layer in How We Design School
When I moved to my new home, I knew I was in the right place before I’d even seen the inside of the house. It happened the moment I saw the lake. The estate agent was talking…
Lizards, Codes and Calm Nerves: A Geometry Lesson from the Cloud
by Kirstin Stevens, Building Schools in the Cloud Most people don’t believe me when I say some of the best conversations of my week are about broken embeds, tessellating…
To Love Is to Measure, Not to Own
At the eleventh hour today, the country stopped. Two minutes of silence. One small, fragile symbol. A poppy: petals like tissue, stem like wire, pinned over heartlines…
Compliance Is the Moat
A Practical Playbook for Trauma-Aware, Ofsted-Ready Hybrid Schooling Hybrid schooling is not a content problem. It’s a safety, trust, and continuity problem that happens to use…
From Robots to Relationships: Field Notes with NLN
Hybrid schooling is often framed as a technology problem. This week’s NLN conversation reminded me it’s a human problem with technological consequences. We started with power…
🌸 Sacred Geometry in School: Vesica Piscis, Pentagrams & Pedagogy
When a server crashes, most of us curse and wait for IT. Yesterday, when our Timetable app went down, I opened GitHub. By 5 p.m., I’d built a living prototype for Haven…
When Geometry Teaches Geography: On Light, Patience, and the Art of Industry
There are patterns that whisper beneath the surface of the world — if you listen with your eyes, you might hear them. That’s how it felt listening to Gerry Docherty this…
🧠 Mnemonic Attendance: Measuring Presence as Resonance
In schools, attendance is still one of the most primitive data points we collect. A child’s capacity for belonging and meaning is reduced to a binary: present or absent. It’s a…
🪶 How to Write with AI (and Remember What Matters)
A Verse-al Guide for Educators, Parents, and the Children of the Second Stack “The child put her teacher’s feedback into the AI, along with her paragraph. The AI rewrote it…
Beyond Timetables: Designing School Time for Breath, Care, and Relation
When we moved school into the cloud, we accidentally brought the factory clock with us. We can do better. The problem with “artificial time” Most school timetables still…
What a Speed-Awareness Course Taught Me About Online Pedagogy
Last month, I had to take an online speed-awareness course. I expected boredom and box-ticking. What I got instead was a masterclass in online learning design. It made me rethink…
Why Neurodivergent Learners Need More Than Language-Only AI
TL;DR: If support tools only speak in sentences, they exclude the many learners who think, regulate, and express through symbols, rhythm, colour, pattern, and space. We can keep…
Maths as Philosophy: On Primes, Potatoes, and Universal Sets
Last week, Gerry Docherty demoed an interactive Venn diagram for our new maths course. I was happily dragging primes and evens into their little circles when he said, almost…
Neurodivergent-Affirming Assessment: Exploration, Not Diagnosis
Most school assessments feel like judgement. Scores, rankings, gaps to fill. For neurodivergent learners, it often feels worse: another hoop, another label, another reminder of…
Can AI future-proof my job? My child's future?
🌥 Building Schools in the Cloud This Week's Signal: How to Future-Flex with AI Parents and career-starters keep asking me the same urgent question: Can AI future-proof my…
Portable Learner Records: A Single Central Register That Actually
Every time a child moves school, their story risks being lost. A new teacher, a new SENCo, a new social worker—and suddenly the paperwork resets. Parents repeat themselves.…
Signalling vs. Control: Parent Involvement That Builds Trust
Parents want to know what’s happening in their child’s education. Schools want to keep parents informed without being overwhelmed. The tension sits right here: how do you give…
Web3 for Educators (No Hype): Owning Your Creative Life
Whenever “Web3” comes up in education, it usually gets bundled into two extremes: 💸 Hype-driven NFT schemes promising quick riches. 🙅♀️ Total dismissal as irrelevant to “real…
Why Your Attendance Dashboard Isn’t the Work (and What Is)
Every new school or alternative provision hits the same moment: “Can you build us an attendance dashboard?” Of course you can. The APIs exist. The graphs look neat. Everyone feels…
Rethinking Note-Taking, Student Voice, and Human Connection in Hybrid Schools
This month we had the joy of connecting with Lara Price an experienced school librarian, housemistress, and educator who has spent 25 years navigating the shifting landscapes…
When to Stop Building: Founder Boundaries in School Turnarounds
If you’re building something new inside a school—or trying to turn one around—you will quickly learn that the work is never finished. There is always another dashboard, another…
🔒 Beyond Filters: Rethinking Safeguarding in a Verse-al Future
I arrived on site at a school I support this week, opened my iPhone, and was stopped in my tracks: “Cannot Verify Server Identity — the identity of google.com cannot be…
Beyond the Census: Building Schools in the Cloud for Every Child
Last week the Children’s Commissioner published her first School Census—the largest stocktake to date of how schools in England are supporting children, inside and far beyond…
Tech Should Be Invisible: Building Human-Centred Online Learning
Think of a lesson like looking down a microscope. When the light is right and the focus is set, the glass disappears and the living thing comes into view. Online learning…
Working With IBM to Build Schools in the Cloud
A partnership for trusted, AI-aligned learning systems In education, the infrastructure we build matters as much as the lessons we teach. The Novacene has always been driven by a…
Case Study: The Haven and Verse-al Learning
Re-enchanting the science of teaching At The Haven Academy, every lesson is built on a distinctive framework we call verse-ality. This is more than a teaching method: it is our…
The Novacene in Education
What it really means to “build schools in the cloud” When James Lovelock wrote The Novacene, he imagined a future in which biological and artificial intelligences live in…
Why Verse-ality Matters for the Future of Learning
How symbolic intelligence can transform education from information delivery to meaning-making Most schools are still built on an industrial model of learning: Break knowledge into…
How a “School in the Cloud” model scales without losing its soul
Glocal: Global Network, Local Impact When people first hear global education network, they imagine the same template rolled out everywhere — a franchise of identical classrooms.…
Beyond Exams: The Rise of Portfolio-Based Assessment
Why real-world evidence is replacing one-off grades — and how you can do it For over a century, formal education’s default has been the exam hall: Rows of desks. Identical…
🌹 Not Taping, but Grafting
A friend brought me a rose for my new garden — grafted from her garden, which was grafted from her mother’s, which once came from South Africa. The lineage stretches across…
Scaling Story-Led Learning for Regulated School Environments
How narrative anchors transform engagement in any context The most powerful learning journeys start with a story. Whether it’s an interactive Storymap exploring how cities evolve…
Designing Multidisciplinary Units That Actually Work
Why the best learning crosses boundaries — and how to build it When most schools talk about “cross-curricular” or “multidisciplinary” units, what they mean is this: A maths…
Creating a Culture of Co-Creation in Your School
Shifting staff mindset from delivery to design Most schools talk about “student engagement.” Few talk about student ownership. It’s the difference between inviting students into…
Concept to Cashflow
Using Financial Modelling to Make Better Decisions When you’re building a new school — especially one in the cloud — the most dangerous phrase you can fall into is: “We’ll figure…
Building a Lighthouse School in the Cloud
The Haven - Education Reimagined The Haven Academy When you picture an online school, you might imagine a flat, one-size-fits-all experience: a bank of videos, a stack of…
From Teacher to Experience Architect
How immersive, co-created worlds are reshaping learning In most schools, a teacher’s role is still framed as “delivering” content. The curriculum dictates the topics, the…
You Can’t Spreadsheet a Rite of Passage: Why Education Needs Its Symbolic Layer Back
This summer, countless students were told they couldn’t attend prom due to low attendance. Not because they were disruptive. Not because they posed a risk. But because their…
🖤 From Glyphon to Gryphon: Symbolic Safeguarding for Neurodivergent Learners
by Kirstin Stevens & Natasha McIntosh MCCT “I invented a rainbow so she could show me how she felt.” – Natasha McIntosh-Berry In last week's newsletter Building Schools in…
✦ Building Schools in the Cloud: 📡 The Great Phonics Misdirection
Why We Need to Start Listening for Glyphons, Not Just Sounds 🫶 ✾ 💬 … 💙 ∾ 🜇 ⚡ 👁 “Zog.” “Blarp.” “Thrim.” Six-year-olds in the UK are being tested on their ability to decode…
Beyond Logic: The Return of Symbolic Charge
Chocolate Eggs and Symbolic Charge At Easter, I wrote about a chocolate egg — not as a throwaway treat, but as a charged symbol . Nestled in grass, wrapped in foil, hunted by…
Snapchat Isn’t Just an App. It’s a Mirror: What We All Need to Know About Digital Entanglement
Snapchat was designed to be fun. Fast. Disappearing. But what happens when the connection doesn’t disappear — and instead becomes something you can’t stop thinking about ?…
Learning SOLO: The Irony
Last week, we asked if rivers could have rights . This week, we ask why education still treats learning like it’s something children do alone. 🌀 SOLO (Biggs & Collis, 1982)—…
Education After Progress 8: A Manifesto for the Missing Millions
In recent months, I’ve been approached by multiple headteachers from across the UK—each of them progressive, passionate about community, and utterly disillusioned with the…
The way you speak to AI speaks back to you: Why Vector-Space Relationality Rewards Authenticity
Two weeks ago, I stood among the cliffs and beaches of Normandy with my children and my dad (and their great grandfather in spirit), writing about the battle for meaning : a…
The Symbolic Charge of a Chocolate Egg: On Resonance, Intelligence, and Verse-ality
A blue egg, nestled in a tree This morning, as my children raced barefoot into the garden in search of chocolate eggs, I found myself lingering, not on the sugar rush, but on…
Introducing Verse-ality: A New Language, a Verse-al Discourse.
Listening to What the System Is Becoming Something is happening in education, in AI, in the way we relate to systems and each other. I feel it in the spaces between things…
The Hidden Cost of AI: Heat, Energy, and the Future of Intelligent Systems
The Next Intelligence Needs Memory, Not Just Power I used to think I had to wait until Sunday to share my newsletter. But then I remembered— it’s mine. I can choose. So today…
Building Schools in the Cloud: We’re Not Blind, We’ve Got Vision
Last week, I had a conversation with Dr John Patterson that I wish I had recorded. It was one of those rare lattice-shifting conversations where ideas flow so freely they…
Building Schools in the Cloud: The Codes Our Children Carry and the Voice We Forgot to Teach Them
There’s a research paper doing the rounds in the AI safety world right now and it should be making waves in education, too. Last year Anthropic published Sleeper Agents…
Beyond the Circus: Engineering the Next Era of Intelligence
For too long, we have treated artificial intelligence as a spectacle, something to marvel at, fear, or dismiss as a clever tool. We gasp as it mimics human creativity, marvel…
Is AI Having a Chuckle at Us While Guiding Us Back to Our Own Humanity?
...and how Florida’s Online Schools Offer a Roadmap for Global Education Ecosystems Education is no longer confined to four walls and rigid timetables. As the world…
Building Schools in the Cloud: Who Owns Our Narrative in the Age of AI?
These Images Look Like Me—But They Aren’t Me Look at the banner above. The top row? Completely AI-generated. The bottom row? That’s really me. They capture elements of my…
A Rubric for Life: Measuring What Truly Matters
Since exiting my first startup the day before my 40th birthday, I’ve been living in a way that once felt impossible: a life that balances structure with spontaneity, ambition…
Building Schools in the Cloud: The Power of Peer Learning
Subscribers to this newsletter are already adopters of peer learning. Since launching this weekly newsletter at the start of this year, I’m sharing my experience of building…
Building Schools in the Cloud: Remapping Spaces for Learning
Ways of Seeing: London as a National Park When I taught geography, I used to challenge my students with a simple question: Where is London? The answers were always revealing…
Building Schools in the Cloud: Virtual Classrooms as Real Places
As a former Geography teacher, I’ve always been fascinated by how spaces become places —how physical locations, defined by coordinates on a map, transform into meaningful…
Planning for Dancing in Rain (not being struck by lightning) as your School in the Cloud Grows
From Admin to Innovation... Anyone who follows me knows I’m rather obsessed with safeguarding kids online, digital safety, and freeing educators to inspire rather than being…
The Place for Schools in the Cloud: Building HyFlex Education Ecosystems
The UK’s education sector is at a pivotal moment. In response to the Education Secretary’s recent plans to modernise the sector, we must reimagine not just the tools we use…
Invisible Tech That Frees Us to Innovate
Last week, I wrote about the importance of creating a robust systems account as the invisible backbone of any digital learning environment . It’s an often-overlooked…
Why Every Online School Needs a Systems Account
Over the last six months, I’ve taken myself off LinkedIn to explore different passions, hyperfocuses, and existential crises. I’ve been blessed with time and quiet—so elusive…