Workload is one of the defining challenges in England’s schools. The Department for Education has acknowledged it and our own data at Edurio confirms it. Only about a third of staff respond positively to questions about workload, making it the lowest-scoring area of the staff experience across our national dataset. And into this context, a wave of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has arrived, each promising to ease the burden. A headteacher can receive tens of emails a day on the wonders of AI. The technology is genuinely extraordinary – it is allowing us to do things that we couldn’t before. We are gaining a superpower, but the primary impact will not be on workload. Saying AI will solve the workload crisis is a bit like saying Superman has super speed so he can finish his newspaper reporting job at the Daily Planet in five minutes and go home early. That is not what Superman does. He uses his powers to take on challenges nobody else can. He still has a full day saving the world. To-do list Anyone who has used AI to speed up their work knows this is not how it plays out. It is easier than ever to start new projects, draft new policies, generate new reports. We are limited only by our ambition and capacity – and the to-do list keeps growing. This is why every school and trust urgently needs something we hear far less about: an HI strategy. Human intelligence. The ability to organise our work, decide what we want to do and, just as importantly, what we choose not to do. It is the judgment to know which problems require a human in the room and which ones a good tool can handle. Additionally, it gives us the capacity to properly relate to the people around us, understand the unique context we’re in, and act on it purposefully. The deeper challenges facing schools are fundamentally human. Serving the needs of our pupils better. Understanding them. Creating better environments to work in and to learn in. These require people working with people and making judgments that no algorithm can make for them. A plethora of tools is flooding the education market. Most of them solve operational problems. The strategic ones – what should we prioritise, what should we stop doing, how do we look after our people – remain stubbornly human. Even within the implementation of AI, we need human intelligence. Too often we treat AI as another piece of technology to bolt on. Listen and understand A useful test: when something in your organisation is not working (staff morale is dipping, a team is struggling, something feels off…) what do you reach for first? If the answer is a new tool or process, you need to pause. In most cases, the answer lies in listening more carefully and understanding what the people involved are experiencing, then creating the conditions of psychological safety for conversation about what needs to change. That is a HI problem, and requires a HI response. This is something we think about a lot at Edurio. We run stakeholder surveys for school trusts, and we could position ourselves as a data tool. But you can have the world’s best tool and if it is not embedded into a genuine school improvement process, it becomes just another way of avoiding what you were not going to do anyway. Our commitment is to bring our human intelligence alongside the data by helping leaders understand where they are and figuring out what to do next. The AI-powered analysis is exciting and genuinely useful, but it does not replace the need for people to get under the skin of the findings and decide on action. Just like in learning, if the answer comes too easy from the tools, we may struggle to understand the working out and commit to meaningful action. We are working to understand the AI/HI dilemmas better. Edurio is running a national technology and AI in education survey to build a clearer picture of how schools and trusts are approaching AI strategies. My hope is that alongside every AI strategy, leaders will ask themselves: do we have an HI strategy? Budgets are tight, compliance demands are relentless and there is constant pressure to react to the latest thing. What leaders need is the space and support to think well, listen well, and act on what they hear. That is a human intelligence challenge and it deserves at least as much strategic attention as the artificial kind.