UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to bring AI into every classroom in the country, with a £2m grant towards funding an AI tool for teachers.
The tool will help teachers save time by creating lesson plans and tests for students, following a pilot scheme which tested how much time AI could save teachers earlier this year.
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The money will go towards Oak National Academy, a resource provider for teachers, to develop the tools and roll them out into schools across the country.
Prime Minister Sunak stated that the investment would play a “defining role” in the next generation of students and help create a better future for education.
“AI has extraordinary potential to reform our education system for the better, with considerable value for both teachers and students,” Sunak stated.
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By GlobalDataHowever, not everyone is convinced about the UK government’s allocation of the grant.
General secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, Geoff Barton, questioned the spending in a post to Schools Week. Pointing out that Oak National Academy had already been pledged £43m to deliver online lesson resources, Barton asked for transparency in where the money was being spent.
“These are important questions because schools and colleges are struggling to stay afloat as a result of a decade of government underfunding and they deserve to have clarity on exactly how and why this money is being spent on Oak,” Barton stated.
Professor Dilshad Sheikh, Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor at Arden University, provided some different perspective on AI within education.
Sheikh stated that using AI in the classroom, and including it within a syllabus, would be giving pupils vital AI skills that they may need in their future jobs. Something which may even help their future earning potential according to recent research by the Oxford Internet Institute.
“Teachers were once afraid of letting students use calculators for exams- but [calculators] allowed students and workers to solve more complicated questions,” Sheikh explained, “The debate behind AI usage is the same.”
Sheikh stated that the education sector should embrace AI and not be slow to adopt it into the classroom.
Accelerated by the need for distant learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, research company GlobalData forecasts that the global edtech market will be worth around $538bn by 2030 growing at a compound annual growth rates of 14% between 2019 and 2030.
