When we began developing CognateUK’s current work, one question sat at the centre of it: what will people need in order to thrive in a world increasingly shaped by AI?

In our early material, CognateUK drew on Professor Rose Luckin’s work on human intelligence in the age of AI, adapting her seven elements of interwoven intelligence into the human-capability framing we used publicly at the time. That work helped us look beyond knowledge and technical skill, towards the wider human capacities that become important as technology grows more capable.

That starting point still matters.

But as the work has developed, the question has become harder.

We are now less interested in simply identifying the capabilities people may need, and increasingly interested in something more fundamental:

How does capability actually form? And how would we know if it had?

It sounds like a small change in wording. In practice, it has changed a great deal.

Capability is not a list

It is relatively easy to produce a list of desirable qualities: judgement, adaptability, communication, confidence, critical thinking, resilience.

The harder question is what allows someone to develop them.

Judgement, for example, is difficult to teach as a discrete skill. It develops partly through having to deal with situations where the answer is not obvious, make choices with incomplete information, and then examine those choices in the light of what follows.

The same is true of responsibility. It means more when a learner has genuine, appropriately bounded ownership of a decision than when responsibility is simply described as something they ought to possess.

This has gradually moved our attention beyond describing capability, towards designing the conditions in which capability can develop.

The importance of context

Programme design, employer conversations and early pilot activity have kept bringing us back to context.

Knowing something is not the same as knowing what to do with it.

AI makes this distinction increasingly visible. It can provide information, produce options and generate plausible answers very quickly. But someone still has to understand the situation well enough to judge whether an answer is appropriate, what may be missing, what matters in that particular context and when a different course of action is needed.

For us, this means that learning cannot be separated too far from application.

Young people need opportunities to encounter problems that are not entirely pre-structured for them; to work across disciplines; to question both their own assumptions and AI-generated outputs; and to explain the reasoning behind their choices.

They also need opportunities to revisit those judgements and to have them questioned by people with greater experience.

That combination of responsibility, reflection and experienced challenge may matter as much as the eventual answer.

What this means for CognateHelix

This shift is shaping how we approach CognateHelix, the first environment in which we are putting the CognateUK approach into practice.

The programme still gives young people access to knowledge and expertise. But increasingly, the question we ask of each element is not simply_ what should they learn?_

It is also:

What will they have to work out for themselves, and what decisions will they need to explain or take responsibility for?

This gives a clearer reason for the importance we already place on cross-disciplinary work, real-world context, reflection and the responsible use of AI. It also means looking beyond the finished work, to whether a learner can explain how their thinking changed and defend the judgements they made.

The same thinking is why we are resisting the temptation to define a finished model too early.

CognateUK is still developing. Some of our thinking comes from established research and from people who have challenged and influenced us. Some comes from employers, educators and learners. And some is beginning to emerge from our own practice.

We are trying to keep those sources distinct.

Our task now is to learn carefully enough from the work to understand which ideas continue to hold, which need to change, and where our own contribution genuinely lies.

A different question for the next stage

When we began this work, I was concerned with whether young people were being prepared for a world changing faster than many established pathways could respond.

That concern remains.

But I would now put another question alongside it:

What experiences enable a person to develop the judgement to act well when the situation is unfamiliar, uncertain or changing?

That feels closer to the challenge we are trying to address.

CognateUK does not yet have a final answer.

What we are building is an environment in which we can begin to find out.

Lily Lin Founder, CognateUK 6 October 2026