Oak National Academy is to be given “up to £2 million” of extra government funding to invest in building artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help reduce teachers’ workload, the Department for Education has announced today.
The government said the new investment in its national online learning resource provider is the “first step” towards providing every teacher with a “personalised AI lesson-planning assistant”.
But union leaders have questioned the investment - which they say is equivalent to “employing around 40 teachers” - and warned that AI is not a “silver bullet” to fix teacher workload.
The £2 million investment is additional to the £43 million that Oak is set to receive in government funding over the next few years, the department said.
It follows an Oak pilot of an AI-powered quiz builder and lesson planner and will go towards improving the tools before making them available to teachers across England for free, according to today’s announcement.
The funding will be rolled out to the teaching resources quango as quickly as possible before the end of the year, the DfE said, although it has not confirmed when tools are expected to be made available.
Announcing the funding, prime minister Rishi Sunak said that AI has the potential to “reform our education system for the better, with considerable value for both teachers and students”.
Mr Sunak added that using AI to “free up the workload for teachers is a perfect example of the revolutionary benefits this technology can bring”.
The announcement coincides with the launch of the DfE’s two-day “hackathon”, which kicks off in London today, where teachers and school leaders are being “asked to experiment with AI to test its potential”.
Writing on the move for Tes today, director of product and engineering at Oak National Academy, John Roberts, said that Oak wants to help schools develop their own AI projects.
AI is not a ‘silver bullet’
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said that there was “no doubt that AI has potential to reduce teacher workload”, but warned of the need “to be very careful before jumping in head first”.
“AI is not a silver bullet, and we need to be mindful of its limitations,” Mr Whiteman said.
He also called for the government to work “far more closely with the whole profession when it comes to AI”.
Supporting teachers
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that while the union agreed with the “idea of developing AI” to support the profession, “we have to question the way in which this is being done”.
Mr Barton also questioned how the money would be spent and asked what efforts the government had made to develop this technology through the UK’s existing education technology industry.
“These are important questions because schools and colleges are struggling to stay afloat as a result of a decade of government underfunding and they deserve to have clarity on exactly how and why this money is being spent on Oak,” he added.
Education secretary Gillian Keegan said that she was “confident” that the use of AI would be able to reduce teachers’ workloads.
The government has said the project will also provide access to Oak’s curriculum resources for edtech companies experimenting with AI.
The DfE said it is due to publish the results of its AI call for evidence next month, which sought views on positive developments and risks, the ethical considerations of AI and its use in training for education workers.
