Educational Technology

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Grand Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her work in establishing standards for online safety and privacy, and for securing this debate. Her speech highlighted many of the risks inherent in these technologies as well as some of the opportunities. My noble friend Lady Harding felt daunted after just a couple of your Lordships’ speeches, but I feel even more daunted coming at the end after such expertise and insight from your Lordships.

I am pleased to say in response to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, about our work with AI in Education that we have been working and liaising with it, and I share the noble Baronesses’ respect. I also spent time on its website recently, and I was stunned at the range of resources that it has created. I was fortunate enough to be part of its conference yesterday, which was an incredibly vibrant event bringing together many teachers and educators from around the country.

My noble friend Lady Morgan suggested that the Government need to avoid playing catch-up; I am sure she will recognise that it feels particularly hard for government, which is perhaps not generally famed for its agility, to operate and not play catch-up in an area where the pace of change is so extraordinarily fast. The way I would try to characterise this for my noble friend is that we are looking at this through two lenses. The first is to stay very close to teachers and work closely with them to understand what their immediate needs and worries are in relation to these technologies, and make sure that we can respond to those where appropriate. However, this is also about working very hard on the medium and longer-term issues—I will touch a little more on that in my remarks, but I do not want to underestimate the scale of the task because I know my noble friend Lady Morgan does not either.

We want to create an environment where all schools and trusts can use technology to improve access to education and outcomes, reduce staff workload and run their operations more efficiently. Technology is certainly not an easy solution to all this, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, raised important questions on the role of government in protecting students from the harms of technology. She asked whether we will introduce a data protection regime design for school settings; we are developing the Education Privacy Assurance Scheme—or EPAS to its friends—to work with education settings to help them understand and deliver their obligations and responsibilities in relation to data protection legislation. However, I will look more closely at the points she raised about the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, and I will of course come back to the noble Baroness in writing with an update on that.

In relation to whether we will introduce standard procurement contracts, we are currently looking at the ways in which we can make the procurement of technology easier for schools. We have five ICT frameworks in place, which are accessible via the find a framework service, and we are looking at how we can support schools beyond the framework, such as providing support developing specifications.

In relation to the peer review of education technology, we have the same expectations for robust evidence for education technology as we do elsewhere in education. I think the House would acknowledge that we are genuinely world leading in our quality of our education research, and so only where there is robust evidence of the impact of technology will we go further in actively encouraging adoption of that technology in the classroom. We have provided £137 million to the Education Endowment Foundation. Its upcoming research trials will explore teaching approaches that use educational technology, including which features of the technology, and how they are used, may support academic attainment—or not, as the noble Baroness suggested.

In relation to filtering and monitoring, we have published standards to help schools understand their responsibilities and statutory duties to safeguard children online, and we have embedded these standards in our Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance. That update was launched in March of this year and the standards have had over 100,000 views, so this is clearly touching something that feels very relevant to schools. We have also provided useful links to training materials and guidance to support schools, including commissioning the UK Safer Internet Centre to create and run a series of webinars.

We have set technology standards on connectivity, cybersecurity, filtering and monitoring, use of the cloud, and servers and storage. We want all schools to meet these standards, which is one reason why we have provided £200 million of investment to upgrade schools that fall below our wifi standards. We are also piloting a digital service to help schools to benchmark their technology, identify areas of improvement and implement these recommendations. We are currently testing those in Blackpool and Portsmouth, and will open it up to more schools next year.

We know that technology evolves at pace and that adoption of generative AI is ever more widespread. We must work very closely with the whole education sector to provide support on how best to use the technology, maximising opportunity while minimising risk. My noble friend Lady Harding asked what the department is doing in relation to LLMs and some of the points she raised are certainly on our radar, or are things that we are actively working on. We began by launching a call for evidence on generative AI in education over the summer. We had 567 responses from practitioners, edtech companies and AI experts across all stages of education, and we will publish the responses this autumn.

In October, we began work with Faculty and the National Institute of Teaching to understand the possible uses of generative AI in education, in a safe setting, exploring the opportunities that this technology presents to reduce teacher workload; to improve outcomes, particularly and explicitly for children with special educational needs, as referred to by my noble friend Lady Morgan, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds; and to use the technology to run school operations more efficiently.

We have held our first hackathon, which was huge fun as well as very insightful. I hope that we can expand some of that work in the new year, and we will publish the findings in spring 2024.

I absolutely agree with the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, about AI becoming a co-pilot with teachers. There has perhaps been a focus on using technology to substitute things that teachers already do rather than using it to enhance what they could do.

We have worked closely with Ofqual, Ofsted, the Office for Students and the Education Endowment Foundation as we develop our thinking. We are exploring the role of the Government in relation to the aggregation and curation of content, which the noble Lord, Lord Knight, referred to. We are also exploring our regulatory approach, including the role of a regulatory sandbox for looking at the behaviour of individual products, helping us understand what our regulatory approach should be and, as also picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, looking at how we can maximise the value of our educational IP.

The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, talked about the importance of children socialising. There are rightly concerns about tools that are serving children directly but, as the Committee has heard, our initial focus has been more on working with teachers and looking at some of the back-office functions. There is a tension and a need to hold on to the short-term pressures that teachers face in relation to the risk of plagiarising, for example; the medium-term issues about curation of content and regulation; and the really big-picture philosophical issues about how we think a classroom will look in five, 10 or 15 years.

My noble friend Lady Morgan and the noble Lord, Lord Knight, asked about and challenged the current curriculum. I remind the Committee that our focus on numeracy and literacy and a knowledge-rich curriculum has helped us to be ranked the highest country in the western world for the reading ability of nine and 10 year-olds. We rank fourth out of 43 countries that assessed children at the same time for the PIRLS 2021 survey. Similarly, we have seen significant improvement in maths. I am happy to write to noble Lords with more detail on the digital content in our curriculum.

My noble friend Lady Harding asked about the exception from the age-appropriate design code. There are exemptions for low-risk services, which include those managed by education providers, that are already subject to regulatory frameworks such as the Keeping Children Safe in Education framework.

Finally, in the last minute—which I do not have—I turn to the questions from the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden and Lady Twycross, about the role of Oak. Oak has been established as an arm’s-length body and is working very collaboratively with the education system and with teachers across the country to develop free curriculum resources.

I end by crediting the hard work and tenacity shown by teachers and leaders up and down the country, and by reassuring the Committee that the Government remain committed not only to supporting schools and students to achieve the best possible results but to consulting and working closely with the sector as we develop our work on the technology that will touch every child and teacher.

Committee adjourned at 4.59 pm.