The current, ongoing task is to draw together what they have told us about their Year 10 experience. But it is the longitudinal nature of this study that makes it particularly interesting. When the study began in 2019 we did not yet know the global disruptions that would shape their learning, but by continuing the interviews each year we have been naturally about to track their impact. It was when they were in Years 5 and 6 that we were able to monitor first-hand how online learning due to COVID-19 impacted the students with interesting findings including a reluctance of these digital natives to learn digitally. But this year, there was another story in the data that we felt needed attention first.

In 2024, when the cohort was in Year 8, we began asking questions about GenAI. We continued those conversations in Year 9 and again this year. That now gives us three years of student perspectives from a period in which GenAI has moved extraordinarily quickly from novelty to an increasingly commonplace feature of education.

So, as we move on and prepare the annual Barker Journey article, we went back and looked at what the same students have told us about GenAI across those three years. We looked for continuities, changes, and emerging tensions in how they understand its place in their learning.

And last night, the first draft of the Barker GenAI Journey was finished. There is some editing work to be done, some proofing, reviewing. But to see this “spin off” of the larger project come together has been exciting – and informative.

Some intriguing shifts are visible. The school has not pushed AI, but from the students’ point of view, the question of whether GenAI belongs in education appears to be diminishing. Increasingly, they seem to accept its presence. Their attention has shifted towards a more challenging question: how should I use it well?

We are also seeing students become more independently reasoned in where they draw boundaries around its use. They know there is a need to evaluate critically what GenAI produces. And, perhaps most interestingly, some students indicated that they are comfortable acknowledging unresolved tensions. GenAI can be genuinely useful, then, while simultaneously raising questions about independence, effort, thinking, and what meaningful learning should require.

None of these are necessarily neat positions. Perhaps that is exactly why they matter.

The Barker Journey has always been grounded in the idea that if we want to understand learning, teaching, and schooling, we need to listen carefully to the young people at the very centre of the experiences.

As GenAI becomes part of the educational landscape in which this cohort is growing up, their voices offer an important window into something we are all still working out.

The full Barker GenAI Journey analysis is in development. More soon.