This chapter discusses the role of ideas of the future in educational governance by design. It focuses in particular on the way that unsustainable, unsubstantiated and technologically romantic ideas of the future informed the UK government's Building Schools for the Future programme and the implications of this for the eventual design and lived reality of these new schools. It then proposes an alternative 'anticipatory' role for schools that works with a more ethical, nuanced and robust orientation to the future. It argues that schools can be recognised as playing four important roles in relation to the future: stewardship, modelling, critique and experimentation. These four roles, the chapter concludes by arguing, generate a new orientation to educational governance and to school design. [For the complete volume, "Making Education: Material School Design and Educational Governance. Educational Governance Research. Volume 9," see ED614539.]