The government’s announcement of the creation of an AI content store will potentially unlock a huge opportunity to address the workload crisis among teachers while simultaneously opening up new ways of increasing student attainment.
The government’s work in the lead-up to this investment explored 12 use cases including lesson planning and assessment. These are the right areas to focus on; we have seen thousands of teachers across the country use tools for those specific purposes this year.
Indeed, AI is already being used by nearly half of UK teachers according to the government’s own research.
Quality in, quality out
AI engines – including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and many others – are built on vast databases, pulling in content from a wide range of sources, including books, websites, research papers and more.
These databases serve as the foundational knowledge base from which AI systems generate remarkably high-quality responses. The scope and diversity of the content these engines process enables them to provide answers in many different domains, including education.
It’s not just about creating resources. AI can support teachers in other ways, for example to understand the difference between a good and bad essay about Romeo and Juliet, or the most successful ways to teach democracy and dictatorship in 1930s Germany.
However, the available data could be better and more focused. By creating their own content store, the government has not only identified a practical barrier, but come up with a workable solution to overcome it. It won’t just optimise AI models for schools but provide a tool AI companies can use to develop new and better ways to support them.
Real-world benefits
The development of this content store is very welcome, and we can already see four ways that it will directly drive and improve AI usage in schools.
First, by improving the outputs through high-quality data. Our own experience has been that getting accurate curriculum information and particularly marking criteria has been arduous, taking hundreds of hours of engineering to get to our high-quality outputs. The DfE content store will simplify this.
Second, by boosting confidence among teachers. Currently, many schools are confused about whether they should be using AI at all (ie. whether there is or will be regulation to block it) and simultaneously struggling to manage students who use AI for their assignments. This government action shows AI is here to stay and schools should lean into the best use cases to bring benefits to teachers and students.
Third, in driving process and regulation. In sponsoring AI activities, the DfE will be required to identify and resolve pain points in implementation, including conflicts with other educational guidance which are difficult for either schools or AI companies to resolve from the outside.
Finally, the £1 million development fund will act as a catalyst for innovators to bring new ideas to and solve challenges for schools, while driving incumbents to up their game.
A year of change
Last academic year, the UK saw a surge in interest in AI among schools and trusts. This led to experimentation, training courses and a flurry of ‘skinny front-ends’ which provided an educational veneer on top of ChatGPT.
But frequently, use was patchy and the benefits limited to early adopters. This will remain the case until the big pain points are addressed and the tools are embedded in school processes.
This year, we can now be certain that we will begin to see the adoption of deeply embedded AI tools which fundamentally change teaching.
Can we reduce an English teacher’s weekend marking from four hours to four minutes? Can we cut the termly moderation process from three weeks to three hours? Can we deliver consistent and quantified marking on humanities subjects and personalised lesson plans for classes needing to focus on character development?
I believe AI tools can deliver this and more. To do so, they must be built around real-world input from teachers and school leaders. With this datastore, the promise of dramatically improved teacher wellbeing, deeper insight into student performance and a boost in student attainment is a step closer.
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