Artificial intelligence promises to reduce workload, improve outcomes and revolutionise education. Yet as a trust leader, I’ve learned that enthusiasm must be tempered with strategy, and I know that it is my job to balance innovation with safety and ethics.
The pressure to get it right with AI - from both trustees and colleagues - led me to sign up for Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) AI strategy programme, an executive education course based at MIT Sloan School of Management and focused on the implications of AI for business strategy.
It includes a technical review of what AI actually is, the science behind the development and an analysis of each form of AI and how it could be applied to work and business environments.
AI strategy for education
Here’s what I learned.
The fundamental question we need to answer isn’t “how can we use AI?†but “what problems are we trying to solve?â€
At E-ACT we have identified clear opportunities: reduced workload; administrative efficiency; data-driven insight; personalised learning; and mental health support.
Equally important was recognising where AI can be problematic. For example, bias in algorithms, reducing pupils’ ability to think critically, outsourcing pupil research to AI resulting in only surface-level understanding of key curriculum content.
Schools and machine learning
Having this clarity is the cornerstone of any effective AI strategy.
Next, you need a broad understanding of AI. While everyone talks about ChatGPT and other language models, the most transformative AI application may be somewhat old-fashioned machine learning.
Machine learning excels with predictable datasets - attendance, behaviour, reading scores, prior achievement, socioeconomic factors. Trained properly, it reveals meaningful relationships and provides timely interventions.
Pupil premium funding
Could this help us to catch pupils before they fall?
At E-ACT we recently used machine learning to identify pupils who were eligible for pupil premium but not yet registered. AI scoured Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI) data and our MIS data, then helped us to identify pupils we would otherwise not realise needed our help.
Thousands of pupils this term have been identified and accessed their free school meal and additional pupil premium funding to the tune of £1.4 million for the schools in our trust - and that’s since September alone.
Another compelling application for machine learning is curriculum gap analysis. By analysing curriculum resources, pupils’ work and assessment data, machine learning can identify content gaps and automatically generate targeted learning materials.
Administration gains
But it’s not just pupil-focused activity where AI can be of assistance. While imagining robots in schools can feel dystopian, repetitive process automation (RPA) offers genuine benefits. Business analysts now help trusts to map and automate workflows through “digital labourâ€.
At E-ACT we are focusing on back-office functions: payroll, admissions, staff onboarding. These laborious, time-consuming processes can be automated to increase efficiency and reduce errors -something many trusts are exploring, often driven by financial pressures.
We have deployed AI in our finance function, enabling leaders to more quickly deep dive cost structures. Meanwhile, a new HR information system is giving quicker people insights into things like attendance and professional development engagement.
Government help needed
However, this is still very early days. Implementing AI properly requires time, training and investment. And this is where the government needs to step up.
Without coordinated investment, schools and trusts will waste millions of pounds and thousands of hours on disparate solutions and replicated effort.
We need to agree as a sector what we need from AI, and we need to then have a clear sector-wide strategy about how we achieve that, with government leading the way and investing to make sure not just that it happens, but that it happens in the right way.
Whether it’s robotics, RPA, generative AI or machine learning, the potential for our sector is enormous. But only if we do this together, strategically and with proper support.
Tom Campbell is CEO of E-ACT multi-academy trust
You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get ÌÇÐÄVlog magazine on and on
