VIEWS & OPINION


Investment in AI is essential to modernise


the education sector Comment by JAYNE WARBURTON, CEO EMEA, 3P Learning


According to a new report AI in Education Market, AI in the US is set to grow by 47.5% by 2023. Here in the UK, the government has


announced ambitious plans to invest in AI, with a £1 billion investment in the industry declared in April 2018. Matt Hancock, former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport asserted in a statement that artificial intelligence is “at the centre of our


plans to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a digital business”. Despite this, investment in AI within the UK education sector


appears to have been missed from the government’s agenda and with it a huge opportunity to modernise teaching and learning, with no mention made of either AI or investment in education technology in the 2018 Autumn budget. AI is neither a comprehensive solution, nor a threat. As with all


technology, AI won’t resolve issues which rely on funding and policy from central government, or replace teachers in the classroom. What it does offer is the potential to make teaching easier for skilled staff and aid the recruitment and retention of education professionals. One of the areas in which AI is increasingly being used – and has


the potential to expand hugely – is in data-driven solutions to improve learning experiences. For example, AI can be used within programs to identify a pupil’s strengths and weaknesses and to assess areas for improvement, truly differentiating learning for each child – a task with which many time-pressured teachers struggle. Embedding AI within an education resource would enable a


pop-up to recommend an activity to a child with the activity tailored to their own learning style, helping them in an area in which they need to improve. Not only will this help teachers differentiate pupils’ learning, it would allow children to drive their own personalised learning pathway. Additionally, AI has the potential to handle many of the


administration jobs undertaken by teachers and could be used to significantly reduce marking, enabling teachers to spend more time directly helping children achieve greater learning objectives. AI could also be used to automatically register children walking through the school gate, removing this tedious job for teachers. This, in turn, could potentially aid the recruitment of other professionals into the sector, including much-needed STEM graduates, who may wish to enter teaching but are dissuaded by the current volume of administrative duties. Ultimately AI will not solve the education sector’s problems by


removing workload in its entirety and AI robots will not replace high-quality teachers at the front of the classroom. On the contrary, I believe AI has a part to play in personalising the learning experience and in modernising an education system that hasn’t truly changed in the last 100 years – children may now have tablets in place of a chalkboard, but our style of teaching remains largely unchanged. In order for advances to take place, investment in AI must be


taken seriously by the Department for Education and central government. By investing in AI, we have the opportunity to make the UK a world leader in modern teaching practices – something which everyone in the education industry can truly celebrate.


February 2019


Can we not make the study of History more


relevant? Comment by FELICIA JACKSON, Chair of the Learn2Think Foundation


History is a compulsory subject from ages 5-14, but in 2018 only 6% of the GCSE’s taken were in History and 5.9% of the A’ levels. So why the drop off in interest? Our Primary school children seem


to have great fun building papier- mâché pyramids, pretending to row Viking long-ships, and dwelling upon the un-fortunate baker of Pudding Lane, whilst our Secondary schools are accused of over- emphasising ‘the Henrys and Hitler’.


Surely we can be far more relevant and ambitious in the


teaching and study of History, asking, as Will and Ariel Durant did, “of what use have your studies been? Have you derived from history any illumination of our present condition?” Human behavior changes but not human nature and so the


study of history is the most reliable path to understanding the present and anticipating the problems of the future. As Simon Schama said, “unless they can be won to history, their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of eternal Now…They will thus remain, as Cicero warned, permanent children, for ever innocent of whence they have come and correspondingly unconcerned or, worse, fatalistic about where they might end up.” A recent event at the House of Commons provided an inspiring


example of History at its boldest. It was hosted by the Forum on Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge as part of their Westphalia for the Middle East project. It brought together the unlikely bedfellows of politicians and bureaucrats from the Middle East, Europe, and the US, and historians of early modern Europe. Their ambition, simply put, is to see how the framework used to achieve the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 can be applied to resolving the current conflicts of the Middle East. This year as part of their schools programme to mark the UN


International Day for Tolerance on 16th November, the Learn2Think Foundation is asking pupils to consider, ‘what can we learn from the study of History to inform current day geo- politics?’ The original UN International Day for Tolerance was established


on 16th November 1995 in response to the racial and religious wars in Bosnia and Rwanda. Its intention was to learn from these, to educate people about the need for tolerance in society and to help them understand the potentially devastating results if a society fosters and feeds off bigotry and intolerance. It is impossible not to see the resonances between the language


of early 20th century Nazism and fascism and the national populism of the politicians successfully being elected now, by promising to put their country and its people first in Hungary, Italy, Brazil, Austria, the Philippines and the US. Recognising patterns such as these can surely help us in trying to


address the world’s most pressing social and geopolitical questions, and provide the scaffold for building mutual dialogue and understanding and a more tolerant world. The Learn2Think Foundation runs a free programme in schools


to mark the International Day for Tolerance on 16th November each year. We would love to hear from anyone who would like to receive information or get more involved. E-mail the learn2thinkfoundation@gmail.com or sign up at www.toleranceday.org.uk.


www.education-today.co.uk 21


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