Ask a Midwife What She Wants AI For, and She Won't Say Robots

Ask a midwife what she wants AI for and she probably won't say robots. She'll say paperwork.

The welding tutor I met in Wales said something similar. He could see AI turning up in the safety checks and the paperwork rather than in the welding itself, and he'd already decided it needed to be part of his lessons. None of this has anything to do with wanting a career in tech; it's about getting some of the week back.

Which is why I've been pondering the government's new plan for technical education in England, announced last week.

The proposal is to give 14-year-olds proper hands-on routes alongside English, maths and science. There's a lot in it to like.

But in the Prime Minister's headline message to young people, he told them they could choose "construction, coding or classics", and in that message, coding is the nearest he gets to technology. That feels too narrow to me, because coding is a route some young people will want, while knowing how to work with AI is something most of them will need, across all sorts of jobs.

The same narrow framing runs through the rest of the announcement, where AI appears mainly as one local sector or career route among many, and its only worked example is a 14-year-old who is already interested in AI taking a vocational digital qualification. Yet Skills England, the government's own skills agency, set out a much broader view in June: most workers will need practical AI literacy, the ability to use, verify and safely integrate AI tools, while only a smaller share will need specialist technical skills. That broader idea is largely missing from last week's plan.

Whatever route a 14-year-old takes, learning to work with AI properly, including knowing when not to trust it, should be part of it. Because for most of them, AI won't be the job. It'll be part of how they do the job, whether that job is midwifery, welding or classics.