From search engines to movie recommendations, computer games to TikTok, artificial intelligence (AI) is already woven into children’s everyday lives.

It’s also reshaping many of the industries where their future careers will be, so it makes sense for them to learn about it early, guided by teachers who can help them understand the opportunities and the risks it brings.

AI also has the potential to transform education more broadly, whether by simplifying and speeding up a wide range of routine tasks, giving feedback as part of lesson delivery, tutoring or marking. 

Given all this, talk of an AI education revolution is commonplace - yet it’s important to weigh up what is likely to remain the same so we can think about how AI can be used in a purposeful way. The list of considerations is long, but here are my top three:

1. How we learn

AI is evolving fast, but the science of learning remains remarkably stable. Prior knowledge, retrieval practice, spaced repetition and worked-example modelling all underpin effective teaching and learning. 

These are not just classroom techniques; they are evidence-based principles grounded in decades of cognitive science. AI can enhance and work alongside this, but it will never replace what works.

2. The need to know what we’ve learned

Testing is certain to change, becoming more digital and more dynamic, with feedback faster and more frequent. 

But there will always be a need to assess what pupils know and understand, and what skills they have.

3. Deciding what we need to learn

As a society, we seek broad agreement on what children should know. We want them to have access to a common body of knowledge to set them up for adulthood - a shared understanding of the culture they live in and our place in the world. 

What that may be, though, is not set in stone - what is taught needs to be updated to reflect new knowledge and skills children need to learn, or to reflect the best evidence on learning. The review of the curriculum in England points to exactly this idea. 

The risks of AI to learning

AI doesn’t change this - in fact, it makes it even more important. As access to information becomes easier and knowledge appears abundant, there is an additional and pressing reason why curriculum is particularly important in the era of AI. 

The potential of AI to enhance education is vast, but it will only enhance teaching and learning if it is fed the right information and reflects effective pedagogy. 

Currently, most AI tools draw on the general internet, which is extensive and full of information. But it is not structured knowledge. It reflects popularity, bias and commercial agendas, including at times misinformation. 

Some content is outdated or inaccurate, and even as models improve, they still make basic errors. And it is certainly more US than UK, so spelling, phrasing, tone and cultural references can sometimes be distracting or even misleading. 

Ensuring accurate information 

To make sure AI for education is useful, safe and of high quality for both teachers and pupils, tools must have access to digitised and high-quality data, with an agreed, local curriculum as its backbone.

Oak can help here. By this autumn, we will have finished publishing one of the first digital models of a national curriculum for all key stages, fully resourced down to the lesson level. 

This will see the final resources go live across our total of more than 13,000 lessons, covering every national curriculum subject.

What’s more, because Oak is publicly funded, all content is available on an open government licence,  maximising our public benefit. That means all schools, trusts, public services, publishers and developers - as well as AI models - have equal access to it, to use or innovate with. 

This is something we are already doing with thousands of prisoners in the youth and adult estates who are now using Oak content on secure devices in their prison cells following a collaboration with the Ministry of Justice and HM Prison and Probation Service. 

We are also working with a range of organisations that want to use our curriculum content for their AI innovations for the same reason. It will also be accessible via the Department for Education’s Content Store. 

There’s still much we don’t know about where AI will take education. But as technology advances, the value of a brilliant, well-designed curriculum will only grow. It’s what will keep education grounded, purposeful and human - and we are all in favour of that.

John Roberts is the interim CEO of Oak