What do school leaders do when mystified by AI and its impact on education?

Well…what I did is…invite Priya Lakhani OBE, founder and CEO of CENTURY Tech to deliver a keynote and workshop.

It all started at the COBIS conference in May 2025…anxious to make the most of the platform we’d introduced, I was keen to meet with the CENTURY Tech team to ensure we were doing all we could with the technology to support our students. It was at this event that I was lucky enough to meet Priya. There was an immediate connection - both passionate educators, both determined to make a difference and both full of love for Kenya.  Before I knew it, I had invited her to Braeburn School and back to the land of her birth. Fast forward five months, and here we were!

Priya is incredibly insightful, as you would expect from the presenter of the BBCs ‘AI Decoded’, Member of the Prime Ministers Council of Science and Technology, and Member of the AI Council. But Priya is more than just an AI expert, she is a passionate educator who wants students and teachers to THINK. She is concerned that we are losing the ‘struggle’ required to learn in education, with AI being used in the ‘wrong’ way, to short cut critical thinking and ultimately, unskill the next generation. If we use (and encourage our students to use) AI as a tool, it's powerful - if we use it to bypass the critical thinking and learning process - it will remove power, our power of cognition and the ability to build skills and knowledge. 

AI will never replace teachers, or hard work. It will not help us grow in our intelligence because it isn’t for that - it’s for information - giving us the ‘most likely’ or the ‘best fit’ - it doesn’t help us think through the problem and it can dupe us, it can help us but it can’t replace the questioning, critical thinking that is an essential 21st Century skill. 

Ask your children…how do you know the answer is correct?  AI makes mistakes because it relies on what is already available - it isn’t creative (despite the cute and cuddly version of me) …but when used correctly it can free up time to help us do the really important stuff, like high quality teaching and learning. 

Above is  the AI version of me that Priya created as part of her presentation…I definitely prefer it to the real me…and maybe that’s the issue…AI as a tool will often provide the answer which it thinks is most likely to be accepted. 

Thanks to Nick Magnus MBE, for your warm welcome and introduction for Priya,  and for all your support. Thanks to John Herbert and Raja Ali for honouring my original invitation, to Puja Khagram, and Dan Kador, together with the usual suspects who make these events so seamless at Braeburn School. 

Liz Borwell MA (Oxon) FCCT

Headteacher