An Oldham school has called on educational leaders to take immediate action through direct industry collaboration following a landmark report.

Leading expert Sir Anthony Seldon warned that UK schools urgently need government guidance on artificial intelligence. The report argues that AI in education must be treated with the same urgency as a national emergency. It calls for a national framework and requires all schools in England to establish formal strategies by September 2027.

Kirsten Pankhurst, Principal of Hulme Grammar School in Oldham, warned that waiting for top-down policy leaves pupils vulnerable in a rapidly evolving and precarious job market.

Under her leadership, the school on Chamber Road is embedding explicit AI literacy directly into its curriculum from September 2026. Through its Brenda Mills Institute for Innovation and Technology (BMIIT), it is partnering directly with tech leaders and enterprise founders, including Purple AI.

Those partners work alongside teachers to shape course content, mentor pupils, deliver masterclasses and run cross-borough hackathons with firms including AMEX GBT, CTI Digital, Nominet and Koder.ly.

Mrs Pankhurst said Sir Anthony Seldon was right to highlight the scale and urgency of the AI revolution in education.

She said holding back on AI education while waiting for a national framework meant sitting on the sidelines while pupils engaged with these tools every single day.

She said pupils would graduate into a world still being defined. She said the school's responsibility was to prepare pupils for that world with clarity and purpose, not by working in isolation but by bringing industry leaders directly into the classroom.

She said pairing 400 years of academic tradition with real-world tech partnerships gives young people the human capabilities, judgement, ethics and critical thinking the modern workplace demands.

She said proactive, industry-aligned education beat reactive policy every time and that the school did not need to wait for a government white paper to start building the workforce of tomorrow.