The government plans to introduce AI “hackathons” in schools to get more girls interested in the topic. Firms that have won a share of £1 million to develop tools to save schools time have also been named.
Prime minster Sir Keir Starmer this week unveiled a new “AI opportunities action plan” to help rejuvenate public services. He said it would help “give teachers their Sunday evenings back”.
A new digital centre of government will be set up within the Department for Science, Information and Technology (DSIT) to focus on how AI can be deployed in the public sector to improve teaching and make aspects of school life more efficient.
AI adoption and growth is now a “top priority” for government departments.
Hackathons and marking
The digital centre will “scan for new ideas, pilot them in public sector settings, then scale them as far as they can go”, according to the government.
One pledge is to “increase the diversity of the AI talent pool” through “scaling up” extra-curricular activities for girls in schools.
It adds that “hackathons and competitions in schools have proven effective at getting overlooked groups into cyber and so should be considered for AI”.
The Department for Education and DSIT will publish a plan to “facilitate significant and sustained progress on improving the gender balance across digital education, training and employment”. The date to achieve the commitment is autumn next year.
The AI plan notes AI can be “a useful tool” for assessment in education, citing the DfE’s AI marking tool which showed 92 per cent accuracy in a pilot with teachers on year 4 literacy work.
“High quality teaching is the single biggest driver of high standards in schools and, through harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence, we can get teachers at the front of classrooms doing what they do best – teaching,” said education secretary Bridget Phillipson.
£1m edtech winners revealed
The government also revealed the 16 winners of a £1 million DfE grant to develop tools to support marking and generating feedback. Each firm received between £50,000 and £66,000.
The tools, to be developed by April next year, will use the government’s £3 million “content store” to ensure accuracy. The store will pool curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work – which will then be used by the AI firms to train their tools.
They will all be targeted at a specific age and subject, ranging from marking handwritten English and languages work to providing feedback on maps and diagrams drawn by geography students.
Developers estimate that some tools could save time spent on formative assessment by up to 50 per cent.
One company receiving funding is Stylus, founded by Dominic Bristow, a physics teacher who left the classroom ten years ago to create a software solution for marking papers.
The tool, LearnCycle, uses AI to mark and analyse paper-based assessments at scale. Teachers then scan the papers in bulk, processed through AI-driven marking, with freelance teachers moderating the work.
Feedback can then be delivered in English or a secondary language – meaning ESOL parents can participate more in their child’s education.
Meddicle will build an AI tool to analyse science papers and provide feedback. Its founder, Dr Alexander Young, said: “The time it takes for teachers to grade and give students relevant and personalised feedback is very challenging.
“That means people don’t go on to do subjects like medicine because they didn’t get the right feedback to get the right grades.”
He plans to create an AI chatbot to help students and teachers with lesson plans, coaching, personalised feedback, and even senior teacher leadership coaching.
AI warning
Almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their work, according to a TeacherTapp survey.
But a separate survey of 600 teachers, done by Bett, found that while 89 per cent of schools increased their technology adoption during Covid, just 46 per cent have fully or mostly integrated the tools into their teaching.
Duncan Verry, portfolio director at Bett, said: “This gap between investment and implementation carries real costs. Schools are spending money on tools that sit partly unused.”
Former teacher Mark Anderson, director of ICT Evangelist, added: “Safeguards in AI are essential to address bias, ensure ethical use, and provide transparent oversight that centres on the public interest.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary at the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said that AI tools “cannot replace the judgment and deep subject knowledge [of] teachers”.
The 16 firms winning £1 million to develop AI tools
Kita, Code Word, Corduroy Dinosaur, Covailent, FFT Education, Iungo Solutions, Kings College London, LanguageMate, Learnanything Education, Learncycle, Lettingsowl, Meddicle, OpenKit, Redpen, Summatic, Ugrapht.
