London school leaders have called for children to be taught about artificial intelligence, comparing fear of the technology to that initially felt about calculators in classrooms.
Jane McLellan, deputy head pastoral of the £21,000 a year St Dunstan’s College in Catford said AI has the potential to allow people to access “vast amounts of information” and to free teachers up from menial, data crunching tasks.
Graeme McCafferty, head of Rosemead Preparatory School in Dulwich, which already uses AI, said schools must “be brave and experiment.”
It comes after the Department for Education published a report on AI in schools, saying teachers are already using it by “automating tasks”, such as adapting the reading age of texts, and making handouts.
A small number of schools said they are using the technology for grading and feedback.
Ms McLellan said: “‘There is certainly a trend from some within the educational sector to see AI simply as a threat to the conventional paper and pen forms of teaching, learning and assessment that still persist in the British educational system, despite having been long left behind in the majority of professional workplaces.”
She added: “Forward-thinking educators need to teach children how to use AI as a tool, looking at the risks but also the benefits of having such a powerful operator, for now at least, within our control. I imagine that purists were similarly against the use of calculators when they first arrived, in favour of mental arithmetic and long form calculations.”
She said that children in schools today could be working alongside AI colleagues when they enter the workplace. She added that they should be taught about the ethics of AI development, just as they are taught about other “contentious societal issues.”
Mr McCafferty said: “AI has the potential to become a very powerful tool in education, and it has already started to transform various aspects of what we do at Rosemead. Leaders need to allow teachers and students to fail and embrace the failure as a learning experience.”
He added that at his school AI is being used to personalise learning and target gaps in children’s knowledge.
The Department for Education’s report is based on results of its first ever call for evidence on artificial intelligence in education. It found teachers are also using AI to create more interactive lessons and to give extra support to pupils for whom English is an additional language.
The report will be used to inform future policy on AI. It comes after the government announced in October an additional investment of up to £2 million to create new teaching tools using AI.
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said: “Artificial intelligence is here to stay and it’s already changing the way we work and learn. To take advantage of this transformative technology, it’s crucial we get our approach to it right.”
But the report also warned that AI can produce unreliable or biased content.
It found that most respondents were “broadly optimistic” about the use of AI in education, but almost all of the 567 respondents had some hesitations, including concerns about AI producing false information when marking assessments.
According to the survey tool Teacher Tapp, four in 10 teachers are already using AI in their schoolwork.
Prof Becky Allen, the app’s co-founder and chief analyst, told the BBC: “It’s really quite normal now as a maths teacher, that you don’t mark maths homework any more,” adding: “One of the reasons why we’re OK with it in maths is because we have such chronic shortages of maths teachers that you know nobody really feels aggrieved.”
