AI tools will soon be in use in classrooms across England, but the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has one big question she wants answered: will they save time?
Attending a Department for Education-sponsored hackathon in central London last week, Phillipson listened as developers explained how their tools could compile pupil reports, improve writing samples and even assess the quality of soldering done by trainee electrical engineers.
After listening to one developer extol their AI writing analysis tool as “superhuman”, able to aggregate all the writing a pupil had ever done, Phillipson asked bluntly: “Do you know how much time it will have saved?”
That will be our next step, the developer admitted, less confidently.
In an interview with the Guardian, Phillipson said her interest in AI was less futuristic and more practical. Could classroom AI tools free teachers from repetitive tasks and bureaucracy, allow them to focus on their students and ultimately help solve the recruitment crisis that bedevils England’s schools?
“I think technology will have an important role to play in freeing up teachers’ time, and in freeing up that time, putting it to better use with more face-to-face, direct teaching that can only ever be done by a human,” she said.
“This is less about how children and young people use technology, and more about how we support staff to use it to deliver a better education for children. I think that’s where the biggest potential exists.
“In the next few years I want to see AI tech embedded across schools, with staff supported to use the best technology to improve children’s outcomes but also to make teaching a more attractive career for people to go into and stay.
“It’s not about replacing teachers. It’s about how the use of technology can complement the very human face-to-face contact that can’t be replaced.”
Some of the tools are being designed to solve very specific problems. Jessica Leigh Jones, the chief executive of iungo Solutions, showed Phillipson and Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, a tool to assess how well students had wired circuit boards for vocational qualifications such as T-levels.
Using a digital microscope, the tool can rapidly scan dozens of boards and provide feedback to students in a fraction of the time needed by a qualified and experienced electrical engineer – a specialist role in short supply, Jones noted.
Jade Lesh, iungo’s digital growth engineer, told Phillipson the tool “minimises the time spent marking each piece of work”, and that their tests have found it to be as accurate as a trained human’s eye.
Time saved was also Phillipson’s interest in an observation tool being developed by TeachScribe, giving early-years teachers earpieces to record their comments about each child’s development – how well they are playing with others or being creative – which are then uploaded to a database and compared with the government’s early-years curriculum goals.
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The developer, Ewan Dobres, said it would save teachers a “phenomenal amount of time” that could be spent with pupils because they would no longer have to stop and write down each observation.
Other applications on display included tools that would allow teachers to scan and transcribe pupils’ handwritten work, and use AI to assess it against national benchmarks in English and literacy.
Helen Williams, chief executive of the Inmat multi-academy trust in Northamptonshire, said her schools had been working with a company called Stylus on a writing assessment tool that not only saved time but allowed teachers to set pupils more of the writing tasks that are a burden for them to mark.
Williams said using AI tool for marking had advantages other than saving time. They “levelled the playing field” between experienced and early-career teachers, and removed the traps teachers can fall into when assessing their own pupils.
“If you’ve got a class of 30, you’re always going into marking with an idea of ‘well, this one will be all right’. AI doing it takes away that unconscious bias and is actually just marking what’s there, which might throw up some things that a teacher hasn’t picked up in the past,” she said.
