The new government has wasted no time in identifying artificial intelligence as a key lever for generating higher productivity and delivering better public services.
And for good reason. AI holds real promise for tackling teachers’ workload, freeing up time for them to spend with pupils and improving their work-life balance.
Teachers are generally enthusiasts for new technology, but according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Trinity College London, over two-thirds think that AI is too unreliable to help with resource or lesson planning, which is a significant contributor to their overall working hours.
Developing trustworthy AI for education
The problem with popular generative AI products is that they rely on large datasets from the internet to produce their content. The internet is broad and comprehensive but it is riddled with errors and in-built biases, and parts of it are simply unsafe for our children.
There is no point in developing a new AI tool to save time in the classroom if teachers then have to correct its mistakes. This would only add to teachers’ to-do lists. AI that’s good enough for the classroom requires accuracy if it’s to have a tangible impact on teacher workload.
The challenge facing those creating AI products for education is finding datasets and sources of content that are big enough to draw from but reliable enough to be trusted by parents and teachers. Only then will they be capable of producing resources that are fit for purpose, and actually save teachers’ time.
There is a solution, and it’s not just to be found in the vast databases of Silicon Valley’s commercial giants.
It’s actually in some of our finest UK public institutions: the materials already created by our schools and universities.
The challenge is therefore a technical one - how to ensure that AI models and products draw on trusted, high-quality education content.
Last week education minister Stephen Morgan announced the government’s approach to meeting this challenge: a project to bring together high-quality education resources from across the sector as source material for future AI tools.
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Today at Oak National Academy we have released our new AI-powered lesson assistant - the first publicly available AI tool to exemplify this approach. Teachers can use it to create lesson plans and teaching resources in minutes, without compromising on quality and safety.
“Aila”, our AI Lesson Assistant, draws from our high-quality teaching resources, helping to increase the accuracy of the generated lesson plans and resources, improve their suitability for schools and, in turn, reduce overall workload.
These resources have been developed by a range of schools, publishers and other subject experts. They are created by hundreds of teachers and then thoroughly checked by dozens more.
While we use the latest OpenAI GPT-4o model, our prompts are carefully engineered to align with our curriculum principles, tailored specifically for UK lesson content and draw on Oak’s existing high-quality resources to make sure outputs are aligned with the national curriculum.
But that all takes place hidden, behind the scenes. Teachers experience an accessible, education-specific tool that allows them to create personalised resources tailored exactly to their pupils’ needs.
Cutting teacher workload
So far, it’s been tested by thousands of teachers and their feedback has been very encouraging.
Many report that Aila could save them an average of three-and-a-half hours a week, and that the tool creates resources that pupils and parents would be happy with.
We are a public organisation but we have an important role in supporting wider innovation, too. Our resources are published on the Open Government Licence, allowing any tech firm or commercial publisher to use them as a launchpad for their own AI products.
The code and the prompts for Aila are open-source, too.
Future innovations - including those which will result from the Department for Education’s new content store - will probably far exceed our first steps, but offering free, high-quality, UK-specific content to underpin them is an important safeguard for our schools, teachers and parents.
There is room for both the public and private sectors to work alongside each other. And if we are serious about harnessing new technologies to address long-standing social problems and challenges in vital public services, all types of organisations need to deliver them.
John Roberts is director of product and engineering at Oak National Academy, the government’s curriculum resources body
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