Teachers in England have been given the all-clear to use AI to help them in low-level tasks that are part of their duties, the BBC reports.

Guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) says AI can be used by school teachers in England, but it should only be for ‘low stakes’ tasks, such as writing letters to parents and marking homework.

This move to allow the technology in use is a result of a survey among teachers in 2023, which was conducted on behalf of the DfE. According to it, the majority of respondents were claimed to be generously optimistic concerning the use of AI as a part of their job. Back then, the representative of Teacher Tap (the firm involved in producing the software on which the survey was conducted) stated: It is becoming quite normal, it seems now, as a maths teacher, not to mark maths homework any more … because we have such chronic shortages of maths teachers that nobody really feels aggrieved.

Answers to the 2023 survey quoted teachers claiming that AI can be rather helpful when they should find suitable teaching materials and in the process of typing reports to parents on the performance and mannerism of their children.

In today announcement, the DfE also stated that the introduction of AI by teachers will also alleviate the amounts of unpaid overtime that the teachers have to work and can potentially result into an increase in work-life balance and job satisfaction.

By allowing staff to use AI tools, it’s hoped that the statistics around teachers’ mental health in general should improve (36% of teachers have experienced ‘burn-out’ according to the charity Education Support [PDF]), and will have the effect of attracting more graduates to the profession.

The lack of qualified teachers also contributes to part of the stress that many teachers receive in a day, something that can be improved by the usage of AI. Whereas, the UK government has cited that more teachers were hired in the whole of UK than a decade ago, the pupil to teacher ratio still keeps getting wider as the population of the UK increases. Classes of 33 and above are the norm in the English state schools and more than a million pupils in UK schools are taught in classes of more than 30.

Attrition rate of career rated teachers in the UK is at approximating 8.8 percent according to SecEd, an industry publication that targets teachers working in secondary schools (aged 11-18 year olds). SecEd likewise pointed out the gap in the number of openings in the industry rose to six and 1,000 teachers in the year culminating in 2022.

Since local authorities and schools have limited funds, the vacant teaching positions that are available will normally be filled by temporary supply (substitute) teachers obtained by employing agencies, a practice that is highly expensive to schools compared to paying lifetime salaried teachers.

Similar to today, one of the blog posts by the UK government on Education Hubv blogsays that AI can be used by the teachers to aid tasks such as lessons planning, resource creation, marking, delivering feedback, and administrative work. It also contains the caveat that it is left to the discretion of the individual teacher to “make sure anything AI produces is correct and suitable they have the last say and responsibility, as well as their school or college.”

The DfE has also given the government’s seal of approval for the use of AI by companies that conduct curriculum and assessment reviews of UK schools, the outcomes of which determine schools’ rankings in the so-called league tables. These are classifications given to schools by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) such as ‘special measures’, ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. The approval for the use of AI in this context comes despite opposition from teaching unions.

The longer-term issue that has pervaded the English school system for several decades is not the sector’s use of technology, but its chronic under-funding. The NAHT (National Association of Head Teachers) states that between school years 2009-10 and 2021-2022, capital spending on schools saw an inflation-adjusted reduction of 29% over the decade. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that school spending per pupil in England has seen a real-terms decrease of 9% in the same period.

Equipping teaching professionals with technology tools may help teachers with some of the burden of administration placed on them, although whether marking homework can be considered what the Department for Education terms ‘low stakes’ is debatable. Investment in school-age children in the form of an education budget increase is expensive.

while subscriptions to AI models can be as little as a few dollars a month, on paper, the lure of AI helping teachers manage their workloads a little more efficiently must be attractive to DfE officials. But what is apparent is the consistently low value placed on childhood education by successive UK governments.

Deciding to allow AI to help staff in a criminally under-funded education sector is largely irrelevant and will have little impact on the quality of education offered to another generation of English children.

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