Posted on by Dr James Shea

Revolutionise Learning with National Education Service AI Technologies

Imagine glancing into the near future of education. In Sweden, Lexplore uses AI-powered eye-tracking not just to assess reading, but to actively screen children for potential difficulties like dyslexia, identifying needs often before they become entrenched problems. What’s striking isn’t just the technology; it’s the philosophy. This feels less like conventional testing or inspection, and more akin to a proactive health service identifying risks and enabling early support. Could this preventative, diagnostic approach be a model for England’s Department for Education?

The UK’s National Health Service operates on a foundational principle: catch health issues early through reliable and inexpensive screening. Interventions triggered by timely screening are invariably more personalised, cheaper, more successful, and less intrusive. Think about developmental checks for babies or targeted screening programmes for adults based on age and risk factors – it’s not a one-size-fits-all annual exam for everyone simultaneously. What if we applied this proven, preventative philosophy to education, but converged with the power of AI?

We stand at the cusp of an explosion in convergence between artificial intelligence and educational technology. AI is rapidly moving beyond simple automation; it can increasingly ‘observe’ and analyse the process of learning. Imagine systems that don’t just mark a final answer, but watch how a pupil reads – tracking eye movements for fluency and comprehension indicators. Picture AI analysing handwriting formation for potential motor control issues or even just letter formation; identifying patterns in mathematical problem-solving that might suggest dyscalculia or misconceptions; observing collaborative interactions in virtual environments; or even assessing biomechanical efficiency in PE. While acknowledging the critical ethical considerations around data privacy and algorithmic bias that must be addressed, the potential for deep, nuanced understanding of individual learning is immense. And it will arrive. Don’t think the tidal wave of AI is going to miss education. It’s going to cover every single bit of it.

This capability of AI allows us to envision a shift away from assessing children primarily to measure school performance, towards screening individuals to understand their specific needs. Contrast this with our current reliance on blunt, mass-approach strategies. Pupil Premium funding, while well-intentioned, often lacks the granular data to target underlying needs effectively. Large-scale EEF randomised controlled trials dictate averaged-out ‘best practices’ that may not suit every child or context. Rigid, centrally mandated phonics schemes meet pupils at varying developmental stages.

Consider the annual phonics screening check – the infamous graph plotting average scores by birth month, a near-perfect downward slope from September to August-born children, is a stark illustration. It highlights the absurdity of assessing every child at the same chronological point, ignoring months of developmental difference. The check itself may have value, but the one-size-fits-all process is flawed. It’s a system designed for cohort-level data collection, not individual diagnosis. Similarly, high-stakes standardised tests often narrow the curriculum, induce stress, and provide only a snapshot in time, failing to capture progress, promote creativity, or cultivate critical thinking.

Imagine, instead, dynamic, AI-powered screening. Phonics checks could be triggered by birth month, not school year cohort. Algorithms could identify children needing earlier or more frequent screening based on a growing profile of risk factors – perhaps language delay, family history, or early indicators from those AI observations of reading or writing. A five-year-old wearing an eye patch for 18 months wouldn’t just potentially ‘fail’ a single test; their progress could be sensitively tracked via regular screening against national benchmarks for learners with similar challenges.

The data generated wouldn’t primarily serve to rank schools, a practice often misleading given the vast differences in intake, funding, and context. Instead, it would empower precise, personalised interventions. AI analysis identifying specific phoneme difficulties could trigger targeted support from a school’s in-house reading specialist. Real-time assessment of maths understanding could dynamically adjust adaptive learning software. Observed motor control difficulties could lead to specific occupational therapy recommendations. This approach allows resources – human expertise, tailored software, specific aids – to be channelled effectively, supporting a child directly.

Scaling this vision creates a powerful national dataset focused on children’s learning needs and progression trajectories, not crude school comparisons. This brings us back to the idea of a “National Education Service.” While the term was politically championed by Labour in recent years with a focus on universal access and lifelong learning, this technologically-enabled vision offers a different emphasis: a service philosophy built on proactive, individualised screening and support. It uses AI not for judgment, but for deep understanding, enabling interventions that are early, cost-effective, successful, and minimally intrusive where possible.

Isn’t it time the DfE seriously considered shifting its focus from ranking schools through mass assessment to truly nurturing every child’s potential through intelligent, personalised screening? Perhaps a reimagined NES, powered by ethical AI, is the future. It’s already happening at an elite sport level, so why not be bold and have a plan to use it for every child in the country.

Dr James Shea @englishspecial

Image of elite sport using AI to ‘watch’ a player’s perfomance

Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

Internal School Avoidance- how pupils avoid paying attention

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In the classroom, a pupil uses attentional control to learn. They suppress their other thoughts and instead focus wholly on the thing being taught. Well, that’s the idea. Unless they don’t. And we’ve all been there. Sitting up, listening, tracking the speaker, nodding and wholly zoned out. We are as guilty as any other when it comes to not offering attentional control from time to time.

There are a variety of reasons pupils do this. Sometimes they are quite open about why they are doing it. ‘I’m tired.’, ‘It’s boring’, ‘I already know this’, ‘It’s too hard’ and ‘It’s too hot’ are all things pupils say to us. Sometimes they are discreet about it. They are are slow to get ready, slow to write, only answer questions in simple terms, make little effort in their spoken or written work. They are not paying attentional control. They can do it habitually in every lesson, or only in some lessons and indeed sometimes only for one teacher. There is a ceiling to how much behaviourist approaches to learning can improve this situation. But an issue it is. Because every educator you know will say they see this lack of attentional control on a regular basis from pre-school to post grad. And I want to personally honest here. I’ve been in meetings and talks where I am sitting up, listening, tracking the speaker, nodding and I’m actually away with the fairies. Sometimes my thoughts just go off on tangents. Sometimes I have other things on my mind. I’ve written before about anxiety and the way this affects our working memory and capacity to provide attentional control. If it affects us as adults it most certainly affects children. I have to be clear. I’m not focused on children who are trying hard to provide attentional control despite challenges. Those who have anxiety or other needs which are impairing their attentional control are not the subject of this blog. It is the many who could, but don’t. They waste time, they work slowly, they participate less than they could and they don’t focus their executive function on the learning happening.

A child not paying attention, avoids offering the attentional control required to make learning happen effectively. That avoidance can be space physical (a pre-school child might not want to move from one zone to the carpet zone), it can be subtle physical avoidance (a child might make getting ready to work take so long that the “Do Now” activity time has finished before they started) or it can be mental avoidance (they sit quietly, look at the teacher, track, nod, but make no effort to focus on the actual learning). One of these three things happen in pretty much every lesson I’ve ever observed. It’s incredibly common. However, I want to focus on attentional control avoidance because this countermands everything we are doing as teachers.

Using Baddeley’s model of working memory, the central executive brings together the visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop to form memories. However, this happens at a variety of levels. Imagine I am walking down the street thinking to myself. I don’t pay that much attention to the environment around me or the familiar route I am taking. However, I then get to a point where the road is closed blocking my normal route. I then need to find an alternative route in order to continue, it is the central executive that enables me to do this as it ‘switches’ attentional control. Pupils are doing similar things in lessons. They can glide through activities and teacher talk on autopilot – seemingly there, but not paying the level of attention required for strong learning.

We’ve all heard about the new focus on internal truancy. First there was external truancy where pupils skipped schools in unauthorised absences. Then we noticed they were dawdling between lessons, going to the toilets a lot – internal truancy, so we’ve cracked down on that and had numerous debates about locking toilets. But there is a swathe of pupils habitually and frequently not paying attention that are flying under the radar. They use classic avoidance strategies to appear compliant whilst keeping their learning minimised through not paying attention. It is a form of truancy that is so subtle, but it has a similar impact on lost learning. Why are we not cracking down on this as much as external or internal truancy? Because it’s really hard to force someone to pay attention if they don’t want to. It’s why a good teaching assistant is so helpful in a classroom. They can get through to the passive child and help them start to pay attention again. If they pay attention for the child that is not so good as a teaching assistant should not be doing the teaching. But they can intervene to help the child pay attention again.

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And are there answers? Well, yes.

I’ve written before about episodic curiosity. When a pupil wants to learn in your subject they apply maximum attentional control to every aspect of learning in your lesson. It absolutely supercharges their progress. You could take the same child and move them to a different teacher or school and they would still be making awesome progress due to that level of attentional control. I recall a pupil bumping along at sub 4 for all of Year 10 and at the end of the academic year they told me they wanted to be a solicitor and asked what English grade they’d need to make this dream happen (needless to say, my answer was a shock to them). What happened next astonished me. They started paying attentional control to every aspect of every English lesson. They asked for and completed extra work. In the exam they scored an 8. I can’t take credit for that learning. But it taught me about the power of having a pupil motivated to learn in my subject. It taught me about epistemic curiosity and how important that is. When I really want to learn something, I really pay attention and the same is true for pupils!

We seem to be focused on cleaning up the cognitive landscape to remove extraneous load. We are using knowledge of studies from psychology to make remembering easier. We are very focused, rightly so, on behaviour. And then we watch child after child, in lesson after lesson, not pay attentional control. And we, as teachers, see it very often. There is a ceiling to CLT in lessons and a ceiling to behaviourist approaches. Those ceilings are that a child can simply withdraw or mute their attentional control. They might as well have 60 days a year off school instead, because that is the impact on the learning of some of those with the most reduced attentional control. There are lots of answers already out there and each pupil is unique and their personal solution might be complex. But until we start focusing on this area, then we are consigning a huge amount of learning hours to the dustbin of internal school avoidance.

Posted on by Dr James Shea · 4 Comments

A new modern language is coming to your school soon. Are you prepared?

When I go over to Europe, like many other travellers I’m astounded at the amount and diversity of people who can speak in English. I have schoolboy French, cafe Spanish and a strong enough grasp of language theory to read signage, but there’s no denying my lack of fluency and in particular my inability to hear what they say back to me in another language. And that’s not because I can’t understand what they are saying it’s because I can’t hear what they are saying to understand them. Being profoundly deaf means relying on a narrow range of exceptionally unclear and underpowered sound frequencies alongside lipreading. Throw in another language with its nuanced sounds & new phonemes and the processing load is so much that I’m still trying to decipher their opening ‘estoy’ by the time they’ve finished their speech.

Which brings me to the idea of introducing a GCSE in British Sign Language (BSL). I have a confession: I don’t sign – mainly because I wasn’t brought up in a deaf community. I was one of the first in the country to attend mainstream school when all others with my ‘condition’ were shunted off to special school. It wasn’t much fun. Being in the top set for every subject should have gifted me the Education Endowment Fund confirmed top set uplift. However, the downside was no Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENDCO), no teaching assistants, teachers who mumble, teachers who sat you at the back, teachers who only taught in one channel (my thanks to the dual coders of today – you are helping the deaf pupils) no fellow deaf people and most certainly no BSL anywhere. Which is why I don’t sign. I’m a hearing person in a hearing world who doesn’t hear well rather than have what the deaf community call an ‘I am deaf’ identity.

Today, signing is still uncommon. If a deaf child comes into the school then an Educational Health Care Plan can pay for a signer. Good luck with getting one of them. Better learn to be a lawyer at the same time as signing. And then finding a school that wants to pay the first £6,000 of your support. And then you’ve still got to contend with bearded mumbling teachers teaching in front of brightly lit windows (just because the deaf pupil has a slow, asynchronous second channel doesn’t mean they don’t need the first channel – ever watched live out of sync subtitles?).

Which brings me back to my opening bit about the Europeans being so good at speaking English. Nick Gibb has recently supported the introduction of GCSE BSL. You can imagine it would be quite a popular take up. Modern Languages would benefit from having this socially inclusive newcomer in its midst. A language that learners can use at home and abroad.

BSL is a modern language in its own right and one which is unique. Not because it is signed, but because it lives in perpetual fear of death. Most deaf pupils have hearing parents. They all have to learn BSL as a second language. BSL is only taught by deaf parents to deaf children if the hearing loss is passed on. That’s a very small proportion of the people who are deaf. The language is also struggling due to the migration of deaf children from special schools where deaf communities operate to mainstream schools where deaf communities are not in operation. If they are lucky, they’ll meet a few other deaf people and have access to a signer (as well as a career in law).

If BSL GCSE gets introduced and indeed if the take up is strong this changes BSL as a language. I saw a video where the MP Angela Rayner was talking to her constituents and when one of them was deaf she switched to signing (she has BSL level 2) seamlessly. That’s the vision of BSL – it helps the deaf person access the hearing world. That’s how we should look at Special Needs and Disabilities (SEND) theoretically. I’m only deaf if I can’t access the societal thing which I am experiencing. Disability has liminality. It comes in and out of existence depending on the context. That liminality can be affected by making the context more inclusive – which is why we love all the Europeans speaking English (even though we make our own efforts to learn one or more European languages). When everyone is speaking English we can, as monoglot English speakers, access their society. They even speak English to each other in multi-national cosmopolitan areas – it’s the unifying lanaguge for them all.

There we have the reason for introducing BSL GCSE (and maybe even some at a younger age?) – we can bring that European experience for the monoglot English to the deaf – and keep BSL alive at the same time. And it’s happening – the GCSE will come in, we will find teachers for it and pupils will learn it. It will be fascinating to see it unfold. Mind you, I really ought to learn to sign…