Artificial Intelligence and Education

Adapting the reading age of texts, making handouts, and writing emails to parents were cited as popular uses, with a “small number” saying they used it for grading and feedback.

Teachers said it gave them more time to do “more impactful” work.

But the report also warned that AI can produce unreliable or biased content.

The Department for Education (DfE) report is based on 567 responses to a call for evidence about AI in education, including schools, over the summer. Most submissions were from England.

It found that most respondents were “broadly optimistic” about the use of AI in education, but almost all had some hesitations.

They worried about AI producing false information including when marking assessments, for example.

The report will inform future policy on AI, the DfE said – adding that the government was already helping to “realise the potential of AI in education”.

Ben Merritt, head of modern foreign languages at King Ecgbert School in Sheffield, recently used AI to generate a cartoon for an exercise with his class.

In the lesson, he wanted to ask children to label parts of the face in German, but he could not find the perfect illustration on the internet.

“It was very easy to find pictures of smiling children of all different ethnicities, genders, and so on. But none of them particularly had the teeth visible… by typing in precisely what I wanted, I got the exact image that I ended up using,” he said.