Contemporary educational discourse is filled with references to ‘the future’ and ‘the futures of education.’ In September 2024, the United Nations (UN) will host a Summit of the Future, billed as a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance cooperation on critical challenges and address gaps in global governance’ (United Nations Citation2024, n.p.). This event is happening on the heels of a number of major education-focused futures-oriented initiatives, including the UN 2022 Transforming Education Summit (United Nations Citation2023), which took place at UN Headquarters in September 2022, the publication of a landmark UNESCO report on the futures of education in 2021 (ICFE Citation2021) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Future of Education and Skills 2030 project (OECD Citation2019). Whereas futures-thinking is not a novel feature of global educational governance, the scale and unprecedented nature of recent technological, political, and socio-ecological change has heightened the urgency for radical reimaginings of education. Numerous megatrends, crises and developments – including the evolution of artificial intelligence and digital technologies, the acceleration of the climate crisis, the growth of authoritarian populism and civil unrest, the outbreak or intensification of war in many parts of the world and the mass displacement of people – are having a profound effect on education systems at local, national and global levels.