Educational Technology

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who has set out the parameters for today’s short debate so powerfully and with her customary expertise. It is a great pleasure to see a number of other noble Lords in the Chamber who I have spent quite a long time debating online safety issues with so far in 2023. I mention my honorary position as a member of the political advisers panel of AI in Education. I shall come back to that in a moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, set out a very clear case for standards and oversight of tech in education. I know that this is not a new issue; it is something that my noble friend the Minister and the Department for Education have been looking at for quite some time. When I was Secretary of State for Education, quite a long time ago now, I remember being invited to a number of edtech conferences and events, where I was told how technology was going to revolutionise the classroom, make everybody’s lives so much easier and cut workloads. I still think that all those things are possible and that we should see both the risks and opportunities of technology in education. My former constituency of Loughborough experienced, many, many years ago, the Luddites, as they came through and smashed up the cotton frames. I do not think we want to be Luddites about technology in education or say that we need to put the genie back in the bottle. I will be very interested to hear from the Minister how much the department is already doing in this particular space.

Of course, it is not just about government. As with so many other things, government Ministers, officials, and advisory groups can do so much, but there are many other organisations. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talked about one; AI in Education, led by Sir Anthony Seldon, is another; the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who cannot be here today, has talked about the Institute for Ethical AI in Education. I very much hope that the department is calling on all those institutions, as well as many others in the space, to gather the best expertise, because I do not think that in this fast-moving world government can possibly be expected to solve the issues that today’s short debate will highlight on its own.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, this issue of tech in education has been only accelerated—as so many other things relating to technology were—by the pandemic. The Covid-19 Committee that this House set up in 2020, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, took evidence on the specific issue of technology in education during the pandemic. While, of course, there were issues—technology adopted very quickly, issues relating to privacy and other things thought about later than they should have been—I was also struck at the time by the evidence from parents and others working with, in particular, children with special needs, for whom the opportunity to learn online in a quieter environment had, for many, been something that they welcomed. I think it is fair to say that we all now live in a hybrid world. While there is no doubt that children learn best in a classroom—we all learn and communicate better face-to-face—there will still be times when the hybrid option is suitable.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talked about safety tech. The first message I urge my noble friend to take back to the department and others is that I really hope that we are not going to play catch-up on all these issues, as we have done with internet regulation. We now have the Online Safety Act, and are all now waiting for the regulator to do what it needs to do, but there is no doubt that we—and not just us but Governments around the world—have been playing catch-up with the growth of the internet. The issues relating to technology and education, and how we keep our young people safe, are not new; we need to think them through and try to keep as ahead as we possibly can of the challenges.

In the time available, I will make two points. One relates to the curriculum and the other relates to character education, my favourite subject. It seems to me that, over the course of the past nine years, since I had the fortune to become the Secretary for Education, which is a fantastic role, our curriculum has slipped behind somewhat in being relevant for the 21st century. Knowledge is very important, but the world has changed, along with the way that we all access that knowledge—that genie will not go back in the bottle. As the noble Baroness said, getting young people to understand the risks of sharing their data but also being confident about broader issues relating to data analysis and the use of statistics are things that our curriculum does not accurately teach now. A lot of the rest of us, who are not in school or college, could also benefit from lessons in these things, so a programme of adult education on these matters would not go amiss either.

I used to get a lot of lobbying about the taking of exams: why do we still ask young people to sit in rooms for three hours scribbling on a piece of paper? Again, the recall of knowledge is important, but there are ways of designing the use of technology in exam settings that would stop people accessing information on the internet to help them but also reflect the fact that, when you get out into the big wide world and the workplace, people will be using technology. I say this not as somebody whose handwriting is abysmal, but the fact is that I type every day and do not write that much anymore. We have to reflect that fact.

The other point is being sceptical about what young people are finding out from artificial intelligence and the internet. Again, all of us could benefit from lessons in that. But if young people and those who are teaching them are going to use artificial intelligence in education, let us work with them to make sure that they are confident in how they use it, how they check what it is and any underlying biases in the AI that they have been using.

My final point is on character. I firmly believe that our education system is for teaching not just knowledge but characteristics—values, virtues, things such as integrity, honesty, curiosity and the desire to constantly learn. That is more relevant than ever when you have the influence of technology in our classrooms. I would really welcome my noble friend’s comments on the need to update the curriculum to reflect the use of data and AI technology in the modern world, but also how schools will teach character skills to help young people to really use AI and technology in a way that benefits their education.