Your School’s AI Lead Needs Permission To Change Things

This week I wrote an article for Forbes about a role I think organisations are missing. Someone who understands AI, but who also knows how to help people change the way they work.I wrote it for business leaders. Here, I want to dig into what it means for us in schools.The article began with something I came across while working with a client in Europe. A member of staff had three points to send to a colleague. They put them into AI, which turned them into a formal email with a greeting, three paragraphs and a polite sign off. Their colleague saw the length, decided they didn’t have time to read it and asked AI for a summary.Back came the three points.Both could say AI had saved them time. Yet the message had been ready to send before either of them opened an AI tool. When we talked about it, we ended up discussing why staff felt they had to write formal emails to each other.Giving people permission to send the three points would have solved the problem.Are We Making Unnecessary Work Quicker?Take a school that asks teachers to upload detailed lesson plans every week. AI could make filling in the template much quicker. Before celebrating that, though, I’d want to know who reads those plans and what they do with them.Perhaps they serve a useful purpose. Perhaps parts of the template could go. Either way, the requirement deserves some attention before we invest time in automating it.Preparing to teach a lesson involves important thinking. We should be able to explain how the paperwork helps.Of course, there is useful evidence for AI supporting preparation. A 2024 Education Endowment Foundation trial involved 259 teachers in 68 English secondary schools. Teachers given ChatGPT and guidance spent 31% less time preparing the Year 7 and 8 science lessons studied than the comparison group. An expert review found no apparent reduction in resource quality.That is encouraging. It tells us something about preparation time, although it doesn’t establish an improvement in...