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BusinessCloud has published a profile of the work we are doing at STAR21 as part of its EdTech Founders series. You can read it here: https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/meet-the-assistant-head-building-a-coaching-platform-for-teachers/ Interviews are a useful discipline. A journalist asks you to explain, in plain terms and to a general audience, what you are doing and why, and you discover quite quickly which parts of your thinking are solid and which you have been getting away

On 9 September I'm speaking at the SecEd and Headteacher Update AI in Schools conference on why build versus buy is rarely a binary choice. Here's what I'll cover, and the nine questions I'd put to any AI tool before a school commits.

This year I led the writing of a five-year digital strategy for the secondary school where I work. I want to share the process, because the way we built it changed my view of what a school strategy document can be. We used AI throughout. Not to invent the strategy for us, but as a research assistant, drafting partner, critical friend and institutional memory. The result is a strategy that is more evidence-based, more coherent and dramatically easier to keep up to date than an

What Satya Nadella’s thinking on AI means for the future of schools Satya Nadella has made an argument that should matter to every school leader thinking seriously about artificial intelligence. His point was not that AI is powerful. That much is obvious. Nor was it that every organisation should start using it, since most already are, formally or otherwise. His deeper claim is that the future will belong to organisations that build their own learning systems around AI, rathe

“AI readiness is now mainstream.” That is the headline from the latest Bett UK Education Priorities Report, and on the face of it, it is good news. Sixty per cent of educators put AI near the top of their concerns. Policies are being written. Working groups are meeting. Schools are, by their own account, getting ready. I want to offer a slightly uncomfortable thought. Readiness is not the same as change. And in our hurry to look ready, we risk repeating a mistake this profess

Most discussion of AI in education is a classroom discussion. Can teachers plan with it? Can pupils use it safely? Can it cut marking time? Can it generate quizzes or model answers? These are useful questions, but they are not the most important ones. The more important question is now a leadership one. How should headteachers, deputies, assistant heads, CEOs and directors of education actually be using AI to think, decide, communicate and lead? How that question is answered

On research, AI, and the coming premium on taste In her Day 2 keynote at the BERA TEAN conference in Sheffield this week, Professor Eline Vanassche shared a comment that someone had left under one of her LinkedIn posts. Seven words: "Reality is soup. Research is a fork." I haven't stopped thinking about it. It's the kind of throwaway line that quietly rearranges a small filing cabinet in your head. In seven words it captures what I've spent years of school leadership trying t

There is a tidy line doing the rounds at the moment that large language models are making us stupid. Outsource your thinking, atrophy your mind, and so on. It is a comfortable thesis if you have not actually changed how you work in the last eighteen months. It also happens to be wrong. What the evidence I see, in classrooms and in my own work, points to something quite different. Used carelessly, LLMs flatten the output. Used well, they sharpen it. The variable is not the mod

There is no shortage of AI tools being marketed to schools right now. Lesson planners, marking assistants, behaviour trackers, feedback engines. The pitch decks promise transformation; the demos look impressive. But spend ten minutes looking under the bonnet and the same question keeps surfacing: what evidence are these products actually built on? Too often, the honest answer is very little. The model is clever. The interface is polished. But the pedagogical assumptions under

In 1999, Sugata Mitra cut a hole in the wall of his office in Kalkaji, New Delhi. On the other side of that wall was a slum. He embedded a computer in the hole, with the screen facing into the slum. He turned it on. He walked away. Within hours, children who had never seen a computer were browsing, drawing, playing games. Within weeks, they were teaching each other. Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments, and the work that followed, the Self-Organised Learning Environments (S

When ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, the public conversation in education quickly fixated on the wrong question. Will students cheat? Will essays survive? Will teachers be replaced? These are surface anxieties. The deeper question, the one that should now be reshaping curriculum and pedagogy, is this: in an age when machines can generate plausible answers to almost anything, what is the value of knowing how to ask the right questions? This is not a new problem. It is a philosop

Teachers are quietly building second brains. Who should pay for them?

A practical guide for school leaders on internal championing, change management, and making technology actually stick. The research is clear: technology in schools thrives or stalls based on the quality of internal leadership around it. A well-chosen tool with poor change management will underperform a modest tool with excellent local championing. This is not a comfortable truth for senior leaders who have just signed off a procurement decision. But it is a useful one, becaus

There is a version of this blog post that opens with breathless predictions about AI transforming education. This is not that post. If you are a school leader reading this and your instinct is that AI is overhyped, I understand that reaction. Much of what has been said about artificial intelligence in schools over the past two years has been vague, speculative, and disconnected from the reality of running a school. The gap between the conference keynote and the Monday morning

Data doesn't gather itself. The schools that will thrive in the next decade of accountability are the ones quietly building their digital core right now. When a school has built its digital core, an inspection is no longer a sprint to gather evidence. It becomes a structured conversation with data you already own — and AI can help you shape that conversation with precision and speed. Last week, a school I work with faced an imminent inspection. Not Ofsted — a Section 48 Catho

Parliament is asking the right questions about AI in education. This week, the Education Select Committee launched an inquiry into the use of artificial intelligence and EdTech across the education system, from early years through to universities. They want to know how AI is reshaping teaching, what the risks are, and whether the Government has an adequate framework to steer adoption responsibly. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/news/212112/a

Artificial intelligence is entering schools at remarkable speed. In the last two years, teachers and leaders have gone from curiosity about generative AI to real experimentation in classrooms, planning, assessment, and professional learning. Yet beneath the enthusiasm there is also confusion. School leaders are trying to answer fundamental questions. What is AI actually good for? Where should it be used and where should it not? How reliable are the outputs? What are the safeg

Many schools are currently drafting an AI policy. Some are producing lengthy procedural documents. Others are waiting. A few are experimenting informally without any written position at all. In my view, the strongest AI policies are not long. They are clear. At St Augustine’s, our Artificial Intelligence Policy is deliberately principles-based and fits one side of A4. That is not accidental. It reflects a belief that policy should be accessible, readable, and rooted in first

This week I had a constructive conversation with a senior national education body about artificial intelligence in schools. I will keep the individual and organisation confidential. What matters more than the names is the signal. The signal is this: the profession is not asking whether AI will arrive. It is asking how it should be handled. Across the system, three themes are emerging. 1. Teachers Do Not Want Hype. They Want Clarity. There is very little appetite for grand cla

Recently, I had the privilege of a searching and generous conversation with colleagues from a leading UK university about the future of AI in teacher development. They were enthusiastic about the potential of transcript-based lesson analysis to deepen professional reflection. They were also clear-eyed about the risks. Their central question was subtle but profound: If AI works by identifying patterns, does it quietly push us towards the middle of the bell curve? And if so, wh