UK Government Commits To £4m Data And AI Package for Education

Today, the UK government unveiled a £4m investment to improve the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in education to help ease teacher workloads.

The initiative includes the creation of a data store, which will hold documentation and data like national curriculums, lesson plans and anonymised pupil assessments, which can be used to train AI systems.

The project's main goal is to create sophisticated AI education tools that will assist teachers with creating lesson plans, and workbooks and also help with marking work. This will allow educators to concentrate more on student learning and reduce their out-of-hours workload.

On top of the £3m data store, the UK government will give £1m to AI companies that develop tools for feedback and marking.

According to a survey from TeacherTapp, half of teachers are already using AI tools such as ChatGPT to help with their work, but these tools are not specifically trained for education-focused documents.

Stephen Morgan, the Minister for Early Education, said AI "represents an exciting opportunity to give our schools leaders and teachers a helping hand with classroom life."

He said: "Today's world-leading announcement marks a huge step forward for AI in the classroom. This investment will allow us to safely harness the power of tech to make it work for our hard-working teachers, easing the pressures and workload burdens we know are facing the profession and freeing up time, allowing them to focus on face-to-face teaching."