1.1 Potentials & Risks

If you remember only one sentence form this page: AI has made its way into schools like a medicine that comes without a patient information leaflet. As a teacher, you don’t know when to use AI, you lack dosage instructions, and there is no information on the side effects. This chapter serves as the patient information leaflet for the Playbook.

Take-home message

Should AI come with a leaflet like a medicine?

You know that slip of paper tucked inside every medicine box? The one you likely toss aside without a glance? It may seem dull, but this little paper is a quiet triumph of the last century. That leaflet spells out four essentials: what the medicine treats, how much to take, the surprises it might bring, and who should steer clear.

Behind every line on that leaflet stands a whole machinery: clinical trials, regulators, and a responsibility to reveal mistakes. No one believes the leaflet itself heals you. Its real power is making the medicine safe for anyone. That is the magic we are missing when we let AI teach without guidance.

The AI tools now quietly settling into your school arrived with no instructions. In the UK, a review found that only 7 out of 100 education technology companies had ever put their products through a controlled trial, and only 12 out of 100 had sought outside certification. The classroom tells the same story. Only 11 out of 100 school leaders and teachers across 17 American states had ever requested peer-reviewed proof before adopting a new tool.

The result, in many cases, is wasted money. In the US, two-thirds of school software licenses gathered dust, and 98% saw almost no use. The EdTech Genome Project looked at about 7,000 teaching tools worth 13 billion dollars and found that 85% were either mismatched or misused.

This chapter may look like the dry, necessary section, but it reveals the hidden stories behind the rules. It tells what really happened, who was affected, and shines a light on the side effects, even those that quietly reached children who never signed up.

Potentials of AI

Let's make this clear right from the start. Most studies on AI's potential focus on university students. School pupils have so far featured relatively rarely in these studies. Most studies relate to short-term interventions lasting from a few hours to a few weeks. Consequently, the so-called novelty effect may have positively influenced the results. Last but not least, the test used to assess effectiveness was often devised by the very people who delivered the lessons. This, too, may have confounded the data.

(1) Explaining a new topic

Imagine this. Tomorrow, when a pupil misses a topic or needs that tricky concept explained yet again, let an AI tutor handle the first explanation. Reserve the hands-on exercises for your lesson, where real learning comes alive.

Why this matters. In a Harvard study, 194 physics students learned two topics. For one topic, they used an AI tutor developed for this purpose. For the other topic, they learned in a traditional class. Each student completed both approaches, so no one can claim that the stronger group received the better treatment. In a test conducted immediately afterward, the students taught by the AI achieved significantly higher results. The researchers recorded a median time of 49 minutes to complete the task, compared with the 60 minutes allocated for the lesson in the timetable. The authors are cautious in their interpretation of these results: the material was new to the students, and much of the task simply involved explaining it well. They expressly reject the idea that the same would apply to tasks requiring the integration of multiple ideas. Furthermore, these were undergraduate students, not Year 8 pupils.

Go deeper. Kestin, G., Miller, K., Klales, A., Milbourne, T., & Ponti, G. (2025). AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: An RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting. Scientific Reports, 15, Article 17458. Free access, DOI 10.1038/s41598-025-97652-6. The article describes how the tutor was designed and controlled. This is useful for anyone wishing to develop an AI tutor themselves.

(2) Making better use of lesson planning time

Imagine this. Save some of the time you need for lesson planning by using AI to draft your first lesson plan and then revise it thoroughly.

Why this matters. No one disputes that teachers’ workloads are heavy. Therefore, one potential benefit of AI is using working hours more efficiently. A UK study investigated the extent to which the targeted use of AI for lesson planning can help to reduce teachers’ workload. Researchers randomly assigned 259 science teachers at 68 schools to either a group using a chatbot alongside brief written instructions or a group that continued lesson planning as before. The weekly planning time for science lessons in Years 7 and 8 fell from around 81 minutes to around 56. A panel of subject experts assessed the quality of the lesson plans. They did not know whether the plans had been created with or without the aid of AI. The experts found no evidence to suggest that the quality of the lesson plans differed. However, two points must be highlighted. (1) The teachers used the tool less and less as the weeks went on, meaning that the time saved does not occur automatically and does not sustain itself. (2) The trial measured the time spent by teachers on lesson planning, not their pupils’ learning outcomes.

Go deeper. Roy, P., Poet, H., Staunton, R., Aston, K., & Thomas, D. (2024, 12 December). ChatGPT in lesson preparation: A Teacher Choices Trial. NFER, commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Hg Foundation. Free at educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk.

(3) Providing better support for learners who do not benefit fully from standard lessons

(4) Teaching learners how AI fails

Risks of AI

(1)