If you missed last week’s AI-in-education announcements, AI ‘Testbeds’ will share £1 million across colleges. Yes, the Department for Education – which couldn’t set up the Multiply website with £110m – thinks £5,000 per college will have us competing with Silicon Valley.
What’s more, the government launched ‘Techyouth’ – basically ‘I Call App Britain’ from The Thick of It. And finally, the DfE’s embarrassingly-overdue AI guidance arrived.
I asked Gemini (Google’s AI) to estimate how many hours England’s colleges, schools and training providers had spent drafting their own policies while waiting for the DfE.
“They may have collectively spent around 1 million hours,” it replied. Don’t hold your breath for back pay.
It’s pretty obvious AI will increase teacher workload. Here’s why:
1. New technology never reduces workload
One word: Email. It’s consistently criticised for adding to teacher workload and stress.
The march of technology is rarely managed well. Early in my career in the 2000s, I saw energy drain from an exceptional English team as the unsustainable expectation of producing new Powerpoints every evening stole away their joy of teaching.
In the 2010s I worked in an ‘Apple School’ where smashed, locked, or low-battery iPads were a far trickier barrier to overcome than a forgotten pen ever was.
2. AI has already devalued teacher time
When I saw the Curriculum and Assessment Review asking for respondents to engage with over 40 huge questions in its consultation, I realised two things: First, there was no way anyone would read the inevitable thousands of submissions.
Second, the perceived value of teachers’ time had fallen off a cliff.
In 2021 when I was working on education recovery policy for the DfE, we were not allowed to put out a short survey to ask how long school days were, because the 30 seconds it would have taken to reply was seen as too great a burden to put on teachers.
When the DfE confirmed AI was to be used to read the Curriculum Review responses, the shift suddenly made sense. With civil servants no longer doing their own jobs, they assumed everybody else was dialling it in with AI too.
Those assumptions will soon filter down. It doesn’t matter if you are a skilled, conscientious teacher. Your AI-enthusiast colleagues are busy convincing everyone that you don’t need non-contact time because AI can do your planning, marking and feedback.
3. Government wants to cut costs, not workload
Government defences of piss-poor education funding have focused on the possibility of “efficiencies”; a euphemism for cuts and redundancies.
Let’s imagine the dream of AI is realised and teachers find it saves them 10 per cent of their time. We’re not going to find ourselves with increased leisure time that machines have always teased. Either the 10 per cent will be filled with the things on your list you never got to before, or – given widespread deficits – one in 10 teachers will be let go.
There are already concrete examples of AI adding to workload without any compensation. The new DfE guidance demands a CPD focus “on identifying and responding to online risks, including AI-generated sexual extortion”.
Teachers are also expected to navigate a data privacy minefield, which one college leader says is now an inset focus itself because “it would have been easy for [teachers] to think it would be OK to put a class set of data into the open source models”.
So what gives way to make time for AI CPD? Do we cut the time spent on subject specialism, or safeguarding, or actual pedagogy? No. Experience tells us that it will be an additional expectation.
AI is a shiny distraction from college funding. Workload is not the issue. The issue is 16-19 year olds aren’t funded for three months of the year, and consequently colleges struggle to match school contracts. So bring on the workload! Increase study programmes to something less internationally embarrassing, like 1,000 hours.
It’s important to remember that over the last decade of decline in funding for post-16 students, the DfE has doubled its headcount. Having been both a teacher and a civil servant, I know well which profession could actually be replaced overnight with the Windows 95 paperclip. Let’s get that money back into classrooms.
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