Educating for… UNCERTAINTY

What will the world look like in ten years’ time? What jobs will exist? How will artificial intelligence change the way we work and learn? What will climate change mean where we live? And what political decisions will shape our communities?

We can make predictions, but we cannot know the answers with certainty. Partly, this is simply because the future is difficult to predict. But there is another reason that is particularly important to us at SEEd: what we do changes what happens next. Climate projections, for example, show us possible futures under particular conditions. If governments, communities and individuals respond and those conditions change, the projected future changes with them.

This is what makes uncertainty such an interesting idea. We tend to associate it with risk: something might happen that we cannot anticipate or control. But uncertainty also means that more than one future remains possible. What we do today becomes part of what happens tomorrow. So, while uncertainty can certainly be frightening, it also leaves us something very important: the possibility of making a difference.

And there is plenty of uncertainty around us. The World Economic Forum describes it as a defining feature of today’s global risk landscape. Wars and geopolitical tensions can rapidly disrupt trade, energy and international cooperation. Technological developments are transforming economies, jobs and communication faster than institutions and social norms can adapt. Climate change and nature loss are altering the conditions on which our societies depend. And all of these changes interact. In an increasingly interconnected world, a disruption rarely remains confined to one place or one system.

This leaves us with a rather difficult educational question: what exactly are we preparing the next generation for?

Certainly not a world for which we can simply hand them all the answers. Young people will face problems that change as circumstances change, consequences we cannot fully predict, and perhaps questions we haven’t even thought to ask yet. At SEEd, this has made us think increasingly about what education can offer when certainty is something none of us can promise.

We have learnt some things through working with educators and young people, and we will share some of them here. But uncertainty also asks something of us: to stay curious, question what we think we know and remain open to what we might learn next. Perhaps learning to live with uncertainty starts with education being willing to do the same.

So, how comfortable are we with not knowing?

At SEEd, we get to observe this question in practice. Our SEEd Young Changemakers programme (YCM) is deliberately holistic: it brings together different elements of sustainability learning in a structure designed to make a complex process manageable. But for many educators, it is also a new way of working—and anything new inevitably brings some uncertainty.

We see some interesting reactions to this. Teachers often want to see all the programme materials from the beginning so that they know what is coming and can decide which activities will be most useful. Understandably so. Yet what feels most useful can easily become what feels most familiar. Sometimes unfamiliar elements are changed or left out before their purpose has had a chance to become visible. Young people often respond differently: they can be more willing to experiment and see where something leads, but when the route is unfamiliar and progress does not look like the progress they are used to seeing at school, they can struggle to recognise how far they have actually come.

These are small examples, but they point towards something much bigger: when we cannot see where we are going, our instinct is often to make the journey more predictable.

What does education for uncertainty actually mean?

Education for uncertainty does not mean knowing less. Nor does it mean giving students a difficult problem, stepping away and hoping they will work it out. It starts from a rather different idea: sometimes, not knowing is an essential part of learning.

Ronald Beghetto makes this point through problem-solving. If we already know exactly how to get from A to Z, we are not really solving a problem—we are following a known route. Real problems contain something genuinely uncertain: perhaps we do not yet understand the problem completely, several solutions are possible, or we cannot know what an intervention will produce until we try it.

Education for uncertainty deliberately preserves some of that unknown. But Beghetto makes an important distinction between good and bad uncertainty. The aim is not to make learning unpredictable or confusing. Quite the opposite: it means providing reliable support, knowledge and structure while allowing the question, route or outcome to remain open.

Rosemary Hipkins adds an important complication. When learners encounter complex systems, uncertainty does not exist simply because the teacher has chosen not to provide an answer. It exists because the thing they are studying is genuinely complex. Different elements interact, circumstances change and consequences emerge in ways that cannot always be traced through simple chains of cause and effect.

Simply giving learners more autonomy therefore isn’t enough. Without ways of making sense of complexity, freedom can feel like floundering. Learners also need strategies for finding patterns, exploring relationships, reconsidering interpretations and deciding what to do when there is no obvious route forward.

There is an older idea underneath both perspectives. For John Dewey, inquiry begins with uncertainty: we investigate because what we already know is not enough to make sense of the situation in front of us. Seen this way, uncertainty is not always a gap that needs to disappear before learning can begin. Sometimes, it is what makes learning necessary in the first place.

Why isn’t education built for uncertainty?

There is, however, a practical problem. Much of our education system is understandably designed to reduce uncertainty. We establish curricula to define what should be learnt, learning objectives to indicate where lessons should lead, assessments to determine whether learning has happened, and standards so that outcomes can be compared.

None of these things is inherently wrong. The difficulty comes when this becomes the dominant model for learning. Uncertainty is difficult to standardise, difficult to timetable and even harder to mark. It is relatively straightforward to assess whether a student understands the causes of climate change. It is considerably harder to assess how well they investigate a contested local problem, recognise what they don’t know, weigh competing perspectives, choose between imperfect options and reconsider their decision when something unexpected happens.

This leaves educators having to navigate some difficult tensions: predetermined outcomes or emergent learning? Teacher direction or learner agency? Getting something right or learning through experimentation? Simply telling teachers to “give students more freedom” misses the point. Education for uncertainty asks educators to relinquish some control over learning without relinquishing responsibility for it.

Why is uncertainty important for SEEd—and for sustainability education?

This is where uncertainty and sustainability come together for us. Sustainability problems rarely offer a simple journey from knowledge to solution. We may know a great deal about climate change, biodiversity loss or inequality while still facing difficult questions about what should happen next. Environmental, social and economic systems interact; people bring different needs and values; interventions can have unexpected consequences. We have enough knowledge to know that change is necessary, without having a complete blueprint for what that change should look like.

Donella Meadows captured this particularly well when writing about the transition to sustainability. Rather than waiting until we can predict every consequence, she argued that we need to act, observe what happens, learn and remain prepared to change direction—to become, in her words, “learning leaders”. This makes uncertainty not simply a difficulty of sustainability, but part of how sustainability happens. We cannot know exactly what a sustainable future will look like because our decisions and actions are among the things that will shape it.

For SEEd, this makes education for sustainability and education for uncertainty inseparable. And it also gives us a useful way of looking at our own work. What happens if we take uncertainty seriously not only as something young people will encounter in the future, but as something educators and learners need opportunities to work with now?

Teaching pedagogies for uncertainty

So, what does that actually mean for teaching? One place we are exploring this is through our Educator Changemakers CPD Webinar Series. Rather than adding another collection of sustainability facts or ready-made activities, the programme looks at pedagogies that can help educators work with complexity: systems thinking, experiential and participatory learning, reflection, action and approaches that give learners genuine agency.

Working with uncertainty does not mean that educators themselves need to feel uncertain about what they are doing. In many ways, the aim is the opposite: to become more certain about how to work with uncertainty. An educator may not know where an open-ended enquiry will lead, what conclusions learners will reach or whether an action will have the intended effect—but they can know why they are leaving those things open. They can have pedagogical tools for providing structure, asking the right questions, supporting reflection and recognising when learners need more guidance. The certainty shifts: from needing to know the outcome towards being confident in the process that helps learners navigate what is not yet known.

Our existing webinar series is already available to purchase for £200, but we are also learning from how educators have engaged with it. We are currently updating it and turning it into an online course, which will be available from October. In a newsletter about uncertainty, that feels rather fitting: we are not treating our own CPD as finished either.

Supporting teachers to let go—without leaving them alone

Of course, asking teachers to work differently and then simply wishing them luck would be a rather good example of Beghetto’s bad uncertainty. Our Young Changemakers programme has taught us how important the other half of the equation is: support.

YCM gives teachers a structure for guiding young people through a complex sustainability journey without determining in advance where that journey should end. That can be unfamiliar, and teachers are learners in this process too. So the answer cannot simply be “let go more”. Teachers need resources, opportunities to ask questions, other educators to learn with and somewhere to turn when things do not go according to plan.

This is also why building a supportive community matters so much to us, including through SEEd Membership. Education for uncertainty becomes a little easier when uncertainty does not have to be navigated alone.

And if you would like to experience this with us, applications for YCM 2026/27 are now open!

Letting young people decide what matters

And then, of course, there are the young people themselves.

In YCM, we do not start by telling them which sustainability problem they should care about or what the “right” action should be. They explore themselves, their communities and the systems around them; identify an issue that matters to them; decide what they want to do; and then find out what happens.

That last part matters. A question might become more complicated rather than simpler. An idea can change. An action might not work. A conversation might reveal something nobody had considered. Young people can be surprisingly willing to experiment with this, although we have also seen how difficult it can be to recognise progress when it does not look like the kind of progress they are used to seeing at school.

Reflection therefore becomes crucial: changing your mind, discovering that the problem is more complicated than you thought, or deciding to take a different route can all be signs that learning is happening.

Perhaps this is the thread connecting all three examples. Education for uncertainty does not mean removing structure. It means thinking much more carefully about what needs to be structured and what needs to remain open.

Enough certainty to give educators and young people somewhere to stand; enough uncertainty for them to decide where to go next.

An uncertain future is a changeable future

We cannot give young people a map of the world they will inhabit. We do not know exactly what that world will look like. But perhaps that isn’t what education needs to provide. We can help young people learn how to investigate what they do not understand, listen when others see things differently, make thoughtful decisions without complete information, act, recognise when something hasn’t worked and change course. And we can support educators to give them the space to do so. Because uncertainty does not only mean that we cannot know what the future holds.

It means the future has not been decided yet.