BRILLIANT in Liverpool: When Education, AI and Joy Share a Stage

On Tuesday I had the absolute privilege of spending the day at the BRILLIANT Festival in Liverpool – this time not just as a wide-eyed delegate, but as a judge and a speaker.

By the time I left the Exhibition Centre, my notebook was full, my brain was fizzing, and my heart felt… hopeful. Not “toxic positivity” hopeful, but the grounded sort that comes from seeing real people doing real things to make education better. This wasn’t a conference where you sit in the dark being talked at. It felt like stepping into a live experiment about what learning could be if we trusted curiosity, creativity and courage a little more.

A festival, not a conference

The clue is in the name. BRILLIANT didn’t feel like another CPD day in a lanyard. It felt like a festival. You moved from big-thinking keynotes to buzzing round tables, from the “Classroom of Now” to immersive experiences where robots wandered past you and holograms quietly reminded you that the future doesn’t care whether you’re ready or not. I even had the pleasure of hearing an AI Dame Judi Dench explaining photosynthesis in Dan Fitzpatrick's session.

Everywhere, people were asking the same underlying question in different ways:

If we were designing education today, from scratch, in a world of AI and accelerating change… would it look like this?

The answer, obviously, is no. The follow-up – so what are we going to do about it? – is where BRILLIANT did its best work.

Human before hardware

For all the shiny tech on show, the soul of the festival was stubbornly human. Speaker after speaker circled back to the same idea: technology must amplify humanity, not erode it.

Across the day I heard three big assumptions being quietly, firmly challenged:

• That education is something we do to young people, rather than something we build with them.

• That intelligence is a narrow ladder you climb, not a landscape of strengths, styles and stories.

• That families and students should have to “climb over” barriers to be included, instead of us redesigning systems that are easier to enter, understand and trust, to gain access to an inclusive and inspiring education.

  
  

AI sat right in the middle of these conversations, not as a villain or a miracle, but as a mirror. It forces us to ask: what is distinctively human in what we do as educators?

Spoiler: it’s not marking.

It’s care, discernment, imagination, judgement, relationships, and the ability to see a young person not just as a grade or a datapoint, but as a complex, unfolding work in progress.

My BRILLIANT vantage point: judging and speaking

Being part of BRILLIANT this year wasn’t a spectator sport for me. As a judge, I got to see first-hand what happens when schools, universities, organisations and individuals stop waiting for permission and just get on with innovating – often on tiny budgets, powered mostly by stubbornness and belief. Trying to choose between them was equal parts inspiring and mildly cruel. There is a lot of quiet brilliance happening in classrooms and organisations that rarely make headlines.

As a speaker, and part of the Edufuturist's Wolf Pack, I had the chance to share my own slice of the puzzle – drawing on my work at Millfield and my obsession with coaching and behavioural science, exploring how tiny tweaks can make a big difference in the classroom. Standing in front of a room full of people who are willing to rethink, re-build and occasionally dismantle bits of the system is both terrifying and energising. You can feel the collective “itch” to do better.

Themes I’m still chewing on

Since getting home (eventually, after several delays and cancelled trains), a few ideas have kept looping in my mind:

AI is not coming for our jobs, it’s coming to our jobs

The most compelling conversations weren’t about replacing teachers; they were about redefining what our time is best spent on. If AI can take the heavy lifting out of planning, admin and basic content delivery, what could we do with the time and cognitive bandwidth it frees up?

• More coaching conversations with students

• More feedback that is timely, specific and actually used

• More space for creative, cross-disciplinary projects that feel like the world outside the classroom

Skills > content, but not in a fluffy poster way

There was a clear golden thread around skills: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, self-regulation, digital fluency, ethical reasoning. Not as abstract buzzwords, but as experiences we need to intentionally design: projects, challenges, performances, debates, simulations. Knowledge still matters deeply – but it’s the raw material we do things with, not an end in itself.

Joy is not a luxury

One of the strongest messages of the day was that joy isn’t a cute nice-to-have. It’s a serious indicator of a healthy learning ecosystem. And if Sir Anthony Seldon says it, then you must take note.

Joy shows up when:

• students feel psychologically safe enough to take risks

• staff feel permission to experiment and occasionally fail

• leaders make room for creativity and play, even under pressure

Without joy, you can still run a system. You just can’t call it education with a straight face.

Why BRILLIANT mattered to me

Personally, BRILLIANT landed at the intersection of so many things I care about:

• Coaching as a way to help young people and staff learn to “back themselves” in a noisy, uncertain world.

• Neurodiversity, not as a side note, but as a design lens for how we build curricula, assessments and relationships.

• Computer science and AI, not as cold technical subjects, but as powerful languages young people can use to create, solve problems and tell stories.

  
  

Being in a space where those threads are not only allowed but encouraged to weave together was powerful. It reminded me that there is a growing tribe of educators, leaders, technologists and students who are done with minor tweaks and are ready for deeper redesign.

What next?

Festivals are wonderful. Then you go home, open your inbox, and the spell can break very quickly. So I’m asking myself a simple question:

What will I do differently in the next 90 days because of BRILLIANT?

Some of my answers so far:

• build even more student voice into how we design computing and AI learning experiences

• keep pushing for coaching-infused conversations as a norm, not a reward

• explicitly teach students how to use AI as a thinking tool, not just a shortcut

• continue advocating for neuroinclusive design in classrooms, CPD and leadership conversations

• exploring how integrated AI technology can be a game changer for AEN learners

  
  

BRILLIANT didn’t hand out a neat five-point action plan for the future of education. Instead, it handed each of us a challenge:

You already have brilliant ideas. Stop hiding them. Test them. Share them. Build with others.

A big thank you to Martyn Collins and the whole BRILLIANT team for curating a space that managed to be intellectually demanding, emotionally honest and genuinely fun – that’s a rare combination. Liverpool, you were… well… brilliant. Now the real work is making sure the sparks from that day actually catch.