My son Charlie sat his final A-level paper last week and the significance of this has only just sunk in. It’s not simply that he has finished his schooling; he’s the last of my children to do so. No more PTA meetings, no more parents’ evenings, no more school runs. My kids are all grown up. I’ve fulfilled my biological duty, raising four of them to adulthood, and can now disappear over the horizon into the sunset – or, rather, the Sunset Care Home.

This is particularly poignant as I helped set up the school my children went to. Between 2009 and 2011, I led a small group of parents and volunteers who founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove, then the education secretary. To this day, I can still picture Boris Johnson, as mayor of London, opening the West London Free School. ‘The Secretary of State has added a new word to the English language,’ he said. ‘We give, they gave, he Gove – he Gove us this school.’

Seeing the school disappear in my rear view mirror is a bittersweet moment

I thought we’d got through the most difficult part at that point, but as the chair of governors I had to deal with a seemingly endlessly series of problems, such as persuading the environmental health officer of Hammersmith and Fulham Council that the building the Department for Education had bought for us was safe to convert into a school. Unexpectedly, my job became managing about half a dozen project managers, each overseeing a different aspect of a £25 million construction project. It was three years before we moved into our permanent home, and in the meantime we had to accommodate 120 new 11-year-olds arriving every September. At one point the pupils were split between two temporary sites and I had to line up a third in case the phased delivery of the main site was delayed. I felt like an air traffic controller having to deal with too many planes circling Heathrow, all of them running out of fuel.

Landing those planes – and helping to set up three more schools at the same time, because it turned out running just one was uneconomic – was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but also the most rewarding. After some teething problems, the West London Free School has flourished thanks to its fantastic staff, governors and students, and was named the best comprehensive in the country last year by the Sunday Times.

Meanwhile, it’s now part of a ten-school multi-academy trust, with a new secondary due to open in Cambridge in 2029. Seeing my own children in the classrooms as I’ve shown people around has been a constant source of delight, although I can’t say the feeling has been reciprocated when I’ve spoken at founders’ day.

Now that Charlie has left, I won’t have an excuse to nose around any more, and that’s probably just as well. It couldn’t be in safer hands and the last thing the staff want is to be button-holed by a 62-year-old Tory peer telling them how to run things. But seeing the school disappear in my rearview mirror is a bittersweet moment. It feels like a prelude to retirement, the beginning of a shuffling off.

On the other hand, your last child finishing school isn’t the rite of passage for a parent it once was. Yes, all four are university-bound in one form or another, but Charlie won’t be going until 2027, and two of the other three are hoping to continue living at home while they study, to avoid paying the exorbitant rent for student accommodation. So in all likelihood three of the four won’t be moving out for at least a year. In addition, any flight from the nest will probably be short-lived, given that AI is wrecking the graduate labour market and they won’t be able to afford to rent or buy. Caroline and I are resigned to living with our children into our dotage. It’ll be them trying to move us out by then, not the other way round. The most I can hope for is permanent exile to my garden office.

I’m tempted to advise the kids to skip uni altogether. Charlie’s hoping to go to Edinburgh, which means he won’t graduate until 2031. Surely he has a better chance – slim though that is – of getting a decent job now than in five years’ time? By then, AIs will be running the world, with Gen Z subsisting on space food while watching Love Island spin-offs.

My hope is I can persuade them to do voluntary work instead. That has got to be part of the answer to the seismic changes unleashed by AI. Yes, they won’t earn anything, so will have to subsist on Universal Basic Income and whatever Caroline and I can scrape together. But they could enjoy the satisfaction of building a public institution, like a school. The job I was paid nothing for turned out to be the most valuable of my life.