The Department for Education (DfE) has announced a £2 million investment to support the Oak National Academy in developing a new lesson planning assistant for school teachers.
It said the aim is to provide every teacher in England with a personalised AI planning assistant free of charge.
This follows a pilot of an AI powered quiz building and lesson planner, and thousands of teachers having signed up in advance to use the tools, which help them to create individualised content based on Oak’s curriculum content.
DfE said the investment will help Oak National Academy – which was established to support teachers with high quality online resources – improve the existing tools before making them widely available.
It added that teachers have provided positive feedback from the initial testing, noting the tools’ ability to help them speed up planning and refine existing materials.
The project will also provide access to Oak’s curriculum resources for edtech companies experimenting with AI. DfE said this should ensure any school, publisher or AI developer can be confident that any content produced with the tools will be accurate, safe and high quality.
Cutting workloads
Oak’s chief executive Matt Hood said: “Teachers spend hours each week searching for resources and planning their lessons. Oak National Academy is already helping cut workload with our free, high quality teaching resources, but we believe we can supercharge this by harnessing safe AI, giving teachers even more scope to adapt their resources and freeing them up to spend more time directly with their pupils.
“We’re excited to build on our initial work and start to develop improved AI lesson planning tools, bringing the benefits to even more schools, and to help other organisations to innovate and create their own AI products, built off our safe, high quality educational materials.”
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said: “Throughout my career, I have seen the positive impact that technology can have, which is why it is great we’re harnessing the potential of AI and supporting Oak National Academy to develop new resources for teachers.
“Whether it’s drafting lesson plans or producing high-quality teaching resources, I am confident that by tapping into the benefits of AI we will be able to reduce teachers’ workloads so that they can focus on what they do best – teaching and supporting their pupils.”
The announcement coincided with the start of a two-day hackathon, hosted by the DfE with Faculty AI, the National Institute of Teaching and the AI in Schools Initiative, bringing together teachers and school leaders to experiment with AI.
Next month, the Department for Education will also publish the results of its call for evidence on generative AI, launched to gather views from educational professionals on the risks, ethical considerations, and possibilities of AI in education.
