LONDON, UK (AFP) – Britain’s first teacherless AI classroom may be an “outlier”, but it underlines the potential benefits and risks of a UK government drive to roll-out artificial intelligence in education, experts say.

David Game College, a private school in central London, is nearly six months into a trial in which students are taught core curriculum subjects for the GCSE state exams sat by 16-year-olds by AI platforms.

“Teaching and education will be transformed by AI. There is no doubt about that, and AI is not going to go away,” said co-principal John Dalton, urging people to become “agile and adopt it”.

The AI systems “monitor” how the students respond to course material and provide the school with “feedback information about their learning habits”, he explained.

The government says the technology could help educators with lesson planning and correction, and has developed its own AI lesson assistant called “Aila” aligned with the UK’s national curriculum.

Instead of teachers, the class at David Game College has real life “learning coaches”, who are qualified as teachers but do not necessarily know the content of subjects and instead guide students through using the AI systems. They also mentor them in soft skills like debating and financial literacy.

The pilot, which currently has seven students and plans to have one coach for them, is a “leap of faith”, Dalton admitted.

Dalton, a biology teacher, told AFP the AI platforms can assess a student’s knowledge “with a greater degree of accuracy than your average teacher” to enable more personalised teaching.

“I believe that AI will augment and it will change the role of teachers,” he said.

National Education Union — one of the two main UK teacher unions — said it was “pleased to see the focus on training for teachers in the use of digital tools” by the government.