Teaching and measuring soft skills in the age of AI

In this episode of Education Futures, Svenia Busson is joined by Michaela Horvathova, founder of Beyond Education and former policy analyst at the OECD.

For more than a decade, Michaela has worked on an important and misunderstood challenge in education: how to define, develop, and assess metacognition and soft skills.

As AI makes knowledge abundant and easily accessible, these competencies are becoming essential. Yet across most education systems, they remain poorly defined, inconsistently taught, and rarely measured.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why we still lack a shared definition and taxonomy of soft skills

• Why what gets measured and graded still determines what gets taught

• The gap between policy ambition and classroom reality

• How the Four-Dimensional Education Framework (knowledge, skills, character, meta-learning) helps structure these competencies

• Why metacognition (learning how to learn) is becoming a foundational skill

• The risks of cognitive offloading and the emergence of a “cognitive divide”

• Why assessment must shift from outputs to thinking processes

We also discuss how schools can move toward competency-based models, drawing on Michaela’s work at Beyond International School.

The challenge is not just to talk about soft skills, but to define them clearly, prioritize them, and measure them in ways that truly reflect how humans learn.

To explore further what was discussed in the episode:

https://beyondeducation.tech/

https://curriculumredesign.org/4-dimensions/