Artificial intelligence
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Top takeaways
- Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how we work and live. It presents opportunities as well as risks and threats.
- The DfE is keen to make use of AI tools in schools, e.g. to help reduce teacher workload through marking support, and is funding AI projects for this purpose.
- There are plenty of resources available to help you navigate the world of AI and its role and impact in schools, whatever your current knowledge level.
- Both staff and students need to develop AI literacy skills.
Getting started
If you’ve been avoiding the whole AI issue so far or just don’t know a lot about it, here are three things to note:
- AI is a lot more than just ChatGPT
- AI is changing the world of work
- You don’t have to love it, but you do need to know about it.
See the resource list further below for some useful reading!
DfE plans
In her speech at the Bett Show, Bridget Phillipson described a ‘brighter future for our children – delivered by a digital revolution in education’. She talked about:
- the potential for digital tech in the classroom to accelerate learning
- AI setting teachers ‘free’ with ‘less marking, less planning, less form filling’, thus supporting retention and reducing burnout.
See Phillipson’s AI ‘revolution’: What schools need to know for a useful summary of plans and promises.
This follows on from the announcement of £1 million of funding awarded to 16 ed tech companies, to build prototype AI tools ‘to help with marking and generating detailed, tailored feedback for individual students in a fraction of the time, so teachers can focus on delivering brilliant lessons’.
The tools are to be developed by April 2025, and should assist teachers with formative assessment. For example:
- providing feedback on a set of essays at the click of a button
- identifying common errors that students have made in a maths problem, thus helping the teacher plan their next lesson.
Risks and challenges
While AI tools might help save time and enable us to do new things, of course it also comes with threats and risks. These are just a few.
- Data security. Be careful what you feed ChatGPT!
- Worries about plagiarism and students not doing their own work.
- Energy consumption and impact on efforts towards net zero.
- Unreliable and biased content thrown up by the AI algorithms.
The case for AI literacy and skills development
To combat some of these risks, it’s important that everyone – staff and students – have some basic AI literacy skills. This might include:
- some understanding of how tools such ChatGPT work, why we need to be mindful of what data we feed it, and checking the content it generates
- examples of how tools like ChatGPT give better results with better prompts (such as the PREP and EDIT framework) and can work well for research and document drafting
- other AI tools, and ways in which they can help with resource creation.
Bear in mind that AI is impacting careers, with new roles being created (prompt engineer, data and algorithm specialists, AI ethicists, robotics engineers and many others). Students need a curriculum and teachers that can equip them for this.
Questions for reflection and action planning
- Do your teachers have the knowledge and skills to teach students about AI? Are there plans in place for professional development in this area?
- Do you know how staff are using AI tools? Has anyone conducted an AI audit? There may be examples of effective practice which other staff can learn from.
- Are your students learning how to use AI tools e.g. ChatGPT as a research partner?
- Are you providing AI literacy training to staff and students?
- Are support staff using AI tools to help save time on tasks? What could help with this?
- What changes do you think will be needed in the curriculum and careers education to ensure pupils are prepared for new roles and skills?
Reading and resources
From the DfE
Using AI in schools
Wider context
