Your school is more efficient than it was a year ago. Is it any better for it though? That is a harder question, and most of us are still not asking it. We are too busy enjoying how much quicker the dancing is to notice not everyone has been asked to dance.
You may be a head, or perhaps a senior leader, so AI arrives at your desk from multiple directions: the news, the staff room, the next conversation with governors, this website. And still the questions tend to remain rather prosaic. How much more quickly can we get things done? How much time can teachers save? How much money can the school save? How do we do more with less?
These are fair questions. Budgets are tight and workload is real. So you do the sensible thing and ask your director of IT to look into it, or perhaps ask the resident enthusiast to lead a working party. They meet, they come back with a policy, the policy goes on the website. Job done.
Or is it? Teachers are using AI, but you are not quite sure how exactly. Something about drafting lesson plans in minutes. Some relief with marking. Perhaps even a few reports of teachers using it in truly novel and exciting ways. Meanwhile, the working party has met three times this year. There is a policy, saved in the right folder. And you cannot honestly say any of it has made anything better. Only faster.
Efficiency is not improvement
Those two words are not the same, and the difference matters a great deal. A teacher can draft a lesson plan in half the time. That is efficient. But if the plan is generic, untethered from the actual children in front of them, and asks for no judgement about what those children need, then nothing has improved. The teaching is no better, and the pupils are learning no more. We have made mediocrity faster.
AI today can make almost anything quicker. Making it better is still our work, not the tool’s. That is the gap that leadership needs to fill.
A hundred small things
The thing is, technology does not change one big thing. It changes a great many small ones. Education technology has always promised one big transformation; what it delivers is smaller. A little in assessment, a little in planning, something else again in safeguarding. But small gains compound, and compounding is what eventually transforms a school. Because the changes are scattered, it’s hard to join the dots that reveal the bigger picture.
Which calls for a different question: who is actually thinking about how the school is changing?
If your staff are not thinking carefully about how they use AI, it amplifies whatever was already happening. Used without thought, it makes a weak task quicker to produce. Give it to a teacher who treats it as a sparring partner, pushing back and refining until the work is better than it could otherwise have been, and that’s a different story. The tool is the same in both hands. What differs is the thinking around it.
”AI amplifies the thinking you bring to it, for better or for worse.
That shift only happens when someone leads it. Right now, most heads have handed that job to a working party or to the one enthusiast on the staff, which is really the equivalent of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.
The questions only you can ask
So what does leadership look like here? It starts with a different set of questions, asked of yourself and of your staff.
Are teachers using AI to think, or to skip the thinking? Are pupils learning to use it with discernment, or only to bypass the desirable difficulties that learning requires? Do your safeguarding procedures account for where the data actually goes when staff paste pupils’ work into these tools? Is the technology in front of you improving outcomes, or merely arriving at the same ones faster?
Each of these is a leadership question that no IT policy can answer on your behalf. Answering them means being present to how AI is really used in your school, rather than trusting that a document on the website has it covered.
Where to start
The reassuring part is that you do not need to become an expert in the technology. You need to become curious about the thinking behind it. Ask your staff how they are using AI, and for what purpose. Ask what they are refining, and what human judgement they are adding. Then listen to the answers.
The leaders I work with who are getting this right are rarely the ones with the longest policies. They are the ones whose staff can tell me how they are thinking about a tool, and why. The rest will get very good at doing the same thing they have always done, perhaps a little faster.
So the first question to ask is not, in my view, about efficiency. It’s about value. In your school, who is doing the thinking, and to what end? Until you can answer that, efficiency is all you get. The better school you were hoping for is still sitting at the edge of the room, waiting for someone to ask it to dance.
Who is doing the thinking?
It is the question I keep coming back to. So I have written a short briefing around it.
Who Is Doing the Thinking? sets out a bearing to guide school leaders’ thinking on AI, whatever the technology does next, with two practical tools: a six-question self-check to take to your senior team, and six moves for next term.
Photo by Tara Winstead
