The British press does not focus as much as it should on the harmful uses of artificial intelligence (AI) by children. And there is even less understanding of the uses of this technology by their teachers.
A new report from the Department for Education that features the experiences of teachers, heads and AI organisations both in and out of the classroom, and which has received barely any notice from the press, sheds some light on the direction in which we are travelling.
Given how little the report, published late last month, has been shared to date, it is worth reproducing here some segments demonstrating the extent to which AI is already shaping British education—much more than many parents are likely to expect:
Respondents described using GenAI to create or enhance teaching resources, including designing handouts, worksheets, presentations, images, model answers and quizzes. …
In primary school settings, teachers reported using GenAI to create reading materials or comprehension questions for pupils and students. …
GenAI tools were used to plan and design lessons (including experiments or assemblies) and courses. Some respondents (largely in secondary and further education) reported using GenAI to produce schemes of work. Using GenAI to create or design a whole course was only mentioned in a few instances. …
GenAI tools were used to support and automate a wide range of administrative tasks for both teachers and non-teachers. This included writing letters and emails (e.g. to staff, pupils and their families), developing communication and marketing (e.g. producing content for newsletters, creating social media posts, writing press releases), summarising meeting minutes, writing documents relating to students and to produce institutional documents. …
Respondents also used GenAI tools in lessons, for example to generate a good writing example, to explain a complicated concept or idea, as a search tool in class, to convert texts to images as lesson stimuli, and as an aid for specific tasks and activities (e.g. to generate a structure for an essay in a lesson). …
GenAI tools were used to help write student reports, generate example questions for exams (including essay questions), produce banks of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), mark or grade student work, and to produce marking rubrics. …
Respondents who were teachers described using GenAI tools as a search engine to support their work, including to research a topic or concept that they planned to teach. GenAI was also used to support other research applications including summarising articles, books and videos, and to aid data analysis (e.g. identifying trends and themes).
Throughout the report, we are told that the users of AI say this benefits them positively by “freeing up teacher time.” One might wonder what teachers might use this free time for if creating resources, planning lessons, communicating with parents, providing writing examples, marking work and creating reports—that is, teaching—has already been taken care of.
But it is worth noting that a measly 567 respondents, not solely made up of teachers and heads, took part in the government’s call for evidence on AI. Also, even though most of these were “early adopters” of the technology, towards which they held “positive views,” the Department for Education itself said that this was “not a representative audience” given that “respondents were much more likely to be early adopters who had used GenAI compared to the general teaching population.”
“Almost all respondents,” the document states, “reported at least some concerns about GenAI use in education.” It adds that some teachers were simply “experimenting” with AI, while others were “keen to stress the importance of checking teaching resources for accuracy” due to the high frequency of errors in work produced by AI. Several respondents said there was a risk of teachers—and pupils, for that matter—coming to “over-rely” on the technology regardless.
It would be easy to overstate AI’s current reach in education, though not its potential impact should we continue down this path, which the government is clearly eager to do.
