212 Teachers Corner
“AI may make schools more human.” – Dan Clark
Will AI break schooling? That was the question Dan Clark, Principal at Queen Elizabeth School opened with, and it set the tone for the morning. The numbers make the question harder to dodge. 86 percent of young people have already used generative AI, most of them well before any school had a policy in place to guide them. Exam boards are scrambling to catch up. Assessments have been disrupted almost overnight. Students adopted the technology before schools had the expertise, or in many cases the appetite, to respond. The conversation moved quickly past the technology itself and landed on something more pressing: the skills, behaviours and human qualities young people will need to thrive in an AI-driven world. History suggests every generation faces a major technological disruption. Schools have never known exactly what the future will demand of their students, yet the most successful ones have always prepared young people by focusing on transferable skills rather than fixed knowledge. “Every generation has had a grand disruption to manage.” – Dan Clark For Clark, the real question isn’t whether AI exists. It’s how schools choose to respond to it. AI May Make Schools More Human, The Paradox Most fears about AI in schools start from the same place: that a machine doing more means a teacher doing less, and eventually mattering less. Dan Clark’s panel spent a good part of the morning making the opposite case, and made it stick. However, one of the strongest ideas to emerge from the briefing was a paradox. The fear is that technology will edge out teachers. The panel argued the opposite may prove true.
Any AI solution entering a school should be judged against a single standard, “Personalisation.” – Astrid Kirkland, Founder of Kudos For SEND learners and students who need differentiated support in particular, AI could become a genuine lever for better outcomes and greater accessibility, rather than a one-size-fits-all add-on. The Risk: Cognitive Debt The panel was just as clear that AI carries real risk. One of the most discussed concepts of the morning was “cognitive debt”, the idea that leaning on AI too heavily can quietly erode the deep thinking and problem-solving that learning is supposed to build. “Children need to be comfortably That philosophy sits at the centre of how Queen Elizabeth’s School approaches learning. Resilience, expertise and confidence are built through challenge. If AI removes too much of the struggle, schools risk producing students who can produce the right answer without ever developing the thinking that should sit behind it. stuck.” – Dan Clark
If AI takes on repetitive administrative work, generates resources, supports planning and assists with assessment, educators are left with more time for what only they can do: building relationships, holding real dialogue, mentoring, and supporting wellbeing. Clark suggested future schools will likely place greater weight on authentic assessment, student dialogue, relationships and judgement, critical thinking, and independent learning and what matters more than ever for the students is whether they can answer the below questions: Can students explain their thinking? Can they defend their conclusions? Can they apply understanding in unfamiliar contexts? The panel agreed these human- centred skills become more valuable, not less, as AI gets better at producing answers and content on demand. Personalisation Offers An Opportunity For many in the room, AI’s greatest promise is personalised learning. Every child learns differently. Every teacher knows it, and every teacher has also spent a career bumping up against the same limit: thirty students, one adult, not enough hours to give each of them what they individually need. That gap is where the room’s optimism actually lived. Not in AI as a flashy add-on, but as the thing that might finally close it. Clark pointed to AI’s potential to help schools solve one of education’s oldest problems, supporting more individualised learning experiences and identifying specific needs earlier and more accurately.
Dan Clark, Principal of Queen Elizabeth’s School Dubai Sports City,
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