Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Bishop of Portsmouth Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate my most reverend friend on initiating such a profoundly helpful and timely discussion. I wish to add a few reflections in my capacity as the Church of England’s lead bishop for education and the chair of the National Society for Education, which serves more than 1 million of our country’s young people and supports Church schools, MATs, and further and higher education institutions countrywide.

In responding to AI within the space of education— it is nothing short of a fourth education revolution, as Sir Anthony Seldon has argued so powerfully— we will need to act with purposeful and collective determination. We will need to build strong alliances and, at every point, own our own agency in shaping the impacts of AI on a generation of children and young people.

The healthy navigation of AI in the nation’s schools, colleges and universities is a responsibility for all of us, not simply to be left to multinationals or content creators. I warmly welcome the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Teather, about the wideness and spaciousness of the conversation we need. Only yesterday, I had the great privilege of participating in a conference that brought together educators and academics, school and MAT leaders and governors, drawn from eight diocesan boards of education, with many of their colleagues and teams. Well aware of the opportunities and challenges presented by AI in the schools and universities within which we have the responsibility of leadership, we gathered to discern together and to seek wisdom together.

Three related themes emerged, and I think they are apposite. The first theme was the need for those in leadership to lead at this moment and, in the face of seeming powerlessness, to claim and not give away the agency we have; to play our part in encouraging parents, teachers, governors and children to discover and exercise their own agency; to draw out or lead out the insight, skills, confidence and multiple intelligences of children in the context of pressures that might reduce, limit, miss or diminish them.

The second theme was the vital need for alliances. Pope Leo made something of this in his first encyclical in response to this great fourth education revolution. For as it takes a community to raise a thoughtful, curious, confident and corrigible child, so it will take alliances across civil society and with those who develop technologies to ensure that AI becomes the best and good contributor to the flourishing of children, young people, their teachers and families.

As we gathered, we were very mindful of the downsides in our educational space. For example, the very speed and ease with which answers can be accessed can bypass that slow, patient and steady need for curiosity, tenacity and learning to ask the right questions. I commend to noble Lords an example of the kind of alliance and collaboration we need, that between the National Society for Education, Wellington College and the OECD, in which a vision for human flourishing in education is being shaped in the context of conversations within and beyond the UK.

The third theme was that as we address the question before us, we need to develop, as so many noble Lords have noted, a stronger sense of the purposes of education. I commend and argue for a vision of human flourishing that addresses the kind of human beings our education system is preparing our children to become in this rapidly accelerating age of AI. I believe that flourishing children in flourishing schools offer society the best long-term opportunity to enact social change and community transformation, to raise aspirations, dismantle oppression, pursue diversity, rebalance inequalities and rescue the environment.