I have just come back from an exciting trip to that technological powerhouse, the Republic of Korea. The country has been blazing a trail in innovation, where developers, designers and engineers all work together to push the boundaries of what is possible.
Digital technology is transforming the way we live at lightning speed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionised medicine and farming for instance, but here in the UK we still haven’t seen it live up to its huge potential in education.
I believe that we must act now to take advantage of what AI can offer the education sector if we are to give children the best start in life, a start that is already taken for granted in the Republic of Korea.
We look to you – our superb teachers and support staff – to give them that start. And to do that, it is vital that you have access to the kind of tools that save you time, yet still deliver high-quality teaching materials.
I know that you go above and beyond every day for your students and I have heard from you first-hand that too often this is in your own time. I want to harness AI to relieve you of some of the workload that goes with marking and feedback, or creating resources that you do in your evenings and weekends, leaving you fresh for the most important work you do in the classroom with our young people.
I’m not talking here about hacks or shortcuts for the sake of convenience. What I mean is reliable tools that can support you and your colleagues and that will lead to better outcomes for your pupils.
We must act now if we are to give children the best start in life
So, together with the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, we have announced the £3 million Content Store. This is a library of AI-ready, pre-processed education content that is already in the system. It will include our national curriculum, as well as other high-quality educational content, guidance and evidence.
I know that parents are understandably nervous about safety and how their children’s work might be used by AI. That’s why we are committing to set out minimum safety expectations for AI products for education. Pupil work will only be used in the content store if anonymised and with permission (from parents for under-18s).
We will work with industry experts who will be able to draw on this bank of knowledge to build safe, effective and high-quality AI tools for education. These tools could mark work, do routine admin and create teaching materials for classroom use.
And as a special incentive we are offering a share of £1 million to those who come up with the best ideas to put this rich seam of data into practice by creating tools specifically for feedback and day-to-day marking. This will help to ease workload burdens that I know many in the profession face.
No one really knows how the digital universe is going to evolve.
Tim Berners Lee once said “The web as I envisage it? We have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”
For me, we will only start to create that bigger future when we grasp what we have right now. I firmly believe that these two projects are going to surprise us in ways we can barely imagine. I cannot wait to see where they take us and how they will support us to break down the barriers to opportunity for our children and young people.
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