Enquiry into AI - Southwark School Leaders

Aims

1. To build an honest shared picture of how AI is currently being used across participating schools (by leaders, staff and pupils) including use that may be happening out of leaders’ view.
2. To consider together what the emerging, and sometimes contradictory, evidence suggests about AI’s effect on learning. This includes where it may let pupils reach an outcome without doing the thinking that learning depends on.
3. To begin defining what good evidence from an AI trial in school could look like, including identifying where an approach should be stopped rather than scaled.
4. To identify the questions and priorities participants most want the working group to pursue across the academic year.
5. 5. To agree how the group will work together, and how its time and resources can best support careful, well-evaluated experimentation with AI in schools.

The sessions will be facilitated by Matt Beattie, one of the DfE's TechFirst school improvement advisors. Matt is an independent advisor on AI in education and an experienced teacher, trainer and Computing leader within the borough. Most training and school support currently on offer about AI is funded by vendors, which introduces can introduce partiality. Our aim with these sessions is not to promote AI, but instead to help schools experiment with care, and to build an honest local picture of what happens when they do, including what doesn't work or where it isn’t relevant. Working together, we can develop a knowledge base for best practice use of AI in Southwark schools, with school leaders in the driving seat.

There is scope for funded consultancy as part of this offer. We want participating schools to help shape the agenda. That might mean support for individual schools' projects, or regular meetings where colleagues share progress candidly. It might mean something we haven’t thought of yet! In our first meeting, we can decide how best to proceed.

Summary

AI is already finding its way into our schools: through staff planning, pupils' homework and everyday software. Often this happens in ways leaders can't fully see. Some of that use may be genuinely helpful. Some of it may be quietly letting pupils arrive at answers without doing the thinking that learning depends on. The evidence on which is which is still emerging, and in places it is contradictory.

We are setting up a working group of interested Southwark school leaders (Primary, Secondary and Special settings welcome) to investigate these mattesr carefully, together. We would like to invite you, or a member of your senior team, to our first meeting.

Who it's for
This group is for leaders and governors who have already spent a little time with AI, whether in their own administrative work, or through a trial in school. It is for people who want to think hard about what AI is and isn't doing for teaching and learning. It is not an introduction to, or sales pitch for, AI tools. Leaders who have tried AI and come away with reservations are as welcome as those who have seen early promise.