Tech Companies Urged to Develop AI Tools That Ease Teacher Workloads

To train AI models, the UK government is investing £3 million in building a “content bank” of educational materials. The goal is to improve tools that help teachers and make their jobs easier, but there are still concerns about AI’s role in education.

Ministers said they would give AI models special access to the Department for Education’s (DfE) bank of resources. This has prompted tech companies to make better AI tools to make teachers’ jobs easier. Stephen Morgan, the education minister, called the move “a huge step forward for AI in the classroom.” The government is spending £3 million to make a “content bank” with official tests, lesson plans, and other teaching materials.

Many teachers claim to already use AI to assist them, but our current AI tools lack training on materials designed or approved for use in English classrooms. The Government for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) says the new content bank will help developers train their AI models to make “accurate, high-quality content” like lesson plans and workbooks.

Developers who devise the best ways to use the DfE’s database to make teachers’ jobs easier will win an extra £1 million. By March 2025, each winner will have made an AI tool to help teachers give feedback and grade work. At an international education conference in South Korea, Morgan stated that the project was the first government-approved store of high-quality learning materials created to support the development of AI.

Morgan stated, “Once it is safe and reliable, artificial intelligence is an exciting way to help school leaders and teachers with classroom life.” “This investment will let us safely use the power of technology to help our hard-working teachers. This will relieve some of the stress and workload that we know they are under and give them more time to focus on teaching students in person.”

The DfE published a study on Wednesday showing that providing targeted content to an AI model during training could increase its accuracy from 67% to 92%. The head of the Association of School and College Leaders, Pepe Di’Iasio, said that AI could help teachers with their “overwhelming” workload if problems with its dependability could be fixed.

“However, it is important to remember that AI is just a tool and can’t replace the knowledge and interaction with students that can only come from our highly skilled and professional teaching staff,” Di’Isio said.

Teacher Recruitment Crisis

“The current issue is the inability to recruit and retain a sufficient number of teachers due to deteriorating pay and working conditions during the previous government’s tenure of 15 years.” We need to address this issue immediately. Chris Goodall, a teacher and head of digital education at the Bourne Education Trust, said that since November 2022, he has been using AI to make materials for the classroom. He now helps teachers in 26 schools across the trust use AI to improve lessons and cut down on paperwork.

“AI has helped me quickly make activities that build on each other, change materials to fit the needs of students with special needs, and make lessons more interesting for everyone.” “The extra time lets school staff focus on what matters: talking to students and giving them personalized feedback and help,” Goodall said.

The DfE and DSIT’s responsible technology adoption unit did a study on how people feel about AI in education. They found that most parents agreed with teachers using AI to help them with their work, but they were less sure about students interacting with AI directly. The people who participated in the study were worried about “losing key social and technical skills and having less time to interact with others, which could have unintended negative effects.”