Tutors are calling for the government to engage with them before rolling out an AI tutoring programme, amid concerns that the tools will lack human oversight and pose risks to safeguarding. The Department for Education (DfE) announced it will trial “AI tutoring tools” in schools this year, with the aim of levelling the playing field for pupils who cannot afford private tutors. It said the scheme could benefit up to 450,000 disadvantaged children in years 9 and 10 within two years. A contract for developing the tools has now been awarded to eight bidders including Google and exams giant Pearson. There is little detail so far on what the tools will look like, or what the safeguarding standards will be. But the DfE has insisted it will “complement” face-to-face teaching rather than replace it, and that the tools will be “robustly tested” before wider rollout. The Tutors’ Association, which represents more than 1,500 individual tutors as well as 500 corporate members, is calling for the government to engage with them urgently before rolling it out widely. John Nichols President John Nichols recognised that many tutors use AI themselves and that it “has a place in education as a valuable tool”. But it “would be irresponsible to give AI tools to children with no oversight”, he added. Carl Morris, the association’s vice-president, said: “In the current proposed model there is no guarantee that an educator will be in the loop when a child actually sits down with these tools. “Co-creating a product with teachers is not the same as having an educator involved in the learning itself. With proper oversight there is real potential. Without it, this risks doing more harm than good.” ‘A different way of engaging’ Nichols added that one teacher in a classroom would not have the “capacity to be able to look at every single interaction in detail”, and that there needed to be proper safeguards in place in case a child revealed a safeguarding concern to the AI tool. The association is also concerned about the fact that the scheme is being targeted at disadvantaged pupils, and wants the DfE to test the tools on a smaller scale before rolling the programme out nationally. While the tools are being co-designed with teachers, Nichols and Morris said tutors were more likely to have used AI innovatively for educational purposes. An NEU survey found 76 per cent of teachers who responded used AI. Of those who did, 61 per cent used it for resource creation, 41 per cent to plan lessons and 38 per cent for administrative tasks. “When [teachers] do use AI in the classroom, they are largely using it for administrative tasks, which is completely different from an AI chatbot,” Morris said. “It’s an entirely different way of engaging in education […] and, given that the Department for Education is essentially saying we’re trying to recreate that one-to-one tuition provision with an AI chatbot, it doesn’t make sense to not engage with people who are doing that.” Nichols added that the Tutors’ Association was keen to work with the DfE to help develop the tools. ‘Complementary’ to good teaching The DfE was contacted for comment. Susan Acland-Hood, the DfE’s permanent secretary, recently told the education committee government was not testing AI tutoring because “we expect the whole of education to be replaced by a bunch of robots” and human connection “remains spectacularly important”. She said it would be “complementary to really good-quality, teacher-led classroom teaching”. “We would not expect lots of students sitting in rows in the classroom interacting with their screen. This is about out-of-classroom things, such as homework support, that support and complement what is going on in the classroom.” Although at an early stage, Acland-Hood said government had seen some “quite promising evidence that both good quality AI tutors and good quality AI support for tutoring that integrates the work that humans are doing can have what look like positive results”. “But what we are doing is testing some people who have some promising products, and we will evaluate that incredibly carefully and thoughtfully, and look at what works. If it does not work, we will not do it, because that would be silly.” Google and Pearson among successful bidders The contract for the AI tutoring programme was awarded earlier this week, with each successful bidder getting an equal share of £2.88 million. The following eight companies were chosen as suppliers: Google Pearson Eedi Ltd ElevenLabs Flint Learn Anything Education Ltd Medly Ai Zero Gravity Tech Ltd The contract award notes that the AI tutoring tools currently on the market “are limited in quantity, scope and evidence base with few providing full tutoring capacity”. The DfE said the tools would be “robustly tested” from this summer under teacher supervision and co-designed with schools. The tools are set to be rolled out nationally by the end of next year.