Category: Research Updates

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #3

    CAISE Notes – Issue #3

    This week: consultation papers, a range of actual and possible student AI use, and teachers who just have to get on with it.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    This week the UK’s social media consultation came out (finally)! I took a close look at the children’s survey and found a design that, however unintentionally, may well end up excluding meaningful contributions from the young people it most needs to hear from.

    Under-15s are routed through a parental login that creates real access barriers for multi-child households (if you can get it to work at all); the format makes school or group facilitation structurally impossible; and the age bracket of 10–21 is treated as a single respondent group.

    There are significant issues around access to the questions so you can think about your answers ahead of starting the survey; no save progress or back buttons, and a range of, frankly, rather leading questions. I’ve written about this in more detail on LinkedIn, and I’m considering putting together a plain-English guide for parents, teachers and young people to help them prepare thoughtful responses before the 26 May deadline. Let me know if that would be useful.

    Separately, the government’s Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper arrived with £4 billion for SEND reform and broadly welcomed proposals around inclusion and specialist support. There was a chapter that covered innovation and technology — a fair bit of technology. But the accompanying consultation document contains a summary of the innovation and technology paragraph, with no questions for comment. The direction of travel on SEND seems appropriate. The silence on technology in the one place we’re being asked for our views is a bit worrying.

    Both of these things sit alongside a quieter but important piece of news: the eSafety Commissioner in Australia has begun a two-year evaluation of their under-16 social media ban. Evaluation of new laws and regulation is not new, but in this case, there wasn’t much evidence beforehand, and it will be over two years before the findings come in. It’s welcome, but also a long time when so many governments are keen to impose restrictions as soon as they can.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. An AI that goes to school for you — 404 Media

    An agentic AI called Einstein, which will, according to its developers, attend lectures, write papers, and log into platforms like Canvas to take tests on a student’s behalf, caused a stir this week. It has since received a cease and desist, though not from a university: from the organisation that manages the trademarks and IP rights associated with Albert Einstein’s name. The underlying story is worth considering carefully. Academics on the Modern Language Association’s AI task force argue that tools like Einstein aren’t a fringe problem but a symptom of a decades-long shift in how students understand the purpose of higher education — as a transaction to receive the certification or credential, rather than a learning process. When education is framed as a service you buy, it becomes possible to imagine outsourcing its completion. Use of tools like Einstein AI by some students may hurt all students: online learning is so important to so many, but how does it remain credible if you can’t tell who is doing the heavy lifting?

    2. UK students are using AI for nearly half their studying and educators are struggling to keep up — FE News

    Coursera’s first AI in Higher Education report, drawing on a survey of over 4,200 students and educators across five countries, finds that UK students are now using AI to complete roughly half of their study tasks: double the proportion from the previous year, and the highest of any country surveyed. Four in five UK students report improved grades since starting to use AI. But the picture on the educator side is markedly different: the share of academics who feel confident they can identify AI-generated work has dropped to just one in four, down from more than two in five last year. Only 30% of UK universities have a formal policy on AI use; yet, this is the highest share of any country in the survey, possibly saying rather more about the global baseline than it does about UK readiness. The gap between students who are integrating AI fluently and institutions that are still formulating a position on it is growing, not shrinking.

    3. “You just have to get on with it” — The Guardian

    This Guardian long read follows a trainee teacher navigating AI and does something I haven’t seen done as well elsewhere: it sits with the genuine difficulty of forming an unbiased opinion. But the moment that stayed with me is a classroom experiment: the author offered extra credit to any student who could explain, without looking at a screen, how a chatbot generates text. Nobody could. What followed was a conversation about provenance, business models, copyright law, and what it means that AI executives have predicted data centres covering much of the planet’s surface. Exactly the kind of lesson that will stick. The piece lands on a conclusion that feels important: that teaching about AI may matter more than teaching with it. Worth reading alongside the Coursera data above and the report below.

    🔁 ICYMI

    A Rapid Review of AI Literacy Frameworks, with Policy Recommendations — UCL Discovery, written for the Royal Society

    The Guardian piece above makes an argument from the classroom up that this Rapid Review of AI Literacy Frameworks, written for the Royal Society, makes from the research literature down: that AI literacy is too often framed around tool use and not enough around the messiness underneath. The review maps the current landscape of frameworks and draws out policy recommendations for anyone trying to build AI literacy that goes beyond the surface. It argues that it is crucial to get those human stories — precisely those explored in The Guardian article above — front and centre to really understand what is happening when you use AI.

    Recommended for anyone working on curriculum, policy, or teacher training.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    Last week I met with one of our partner schools. The agenda wasn’t about research design or interview questions. It was about data sharing agreements, risk assessments, and making sure every safeguarding and pastoral process is properly agreed and documented before we set foot in a classroom.

    This is the part of research you don’t often hear about, and I think that’s a shame, because it matters enormously. Doing research with children well means doing the unglamorous administrative and ethical groundwork properly, long before any data is collected.

    That said: we are keen to talk to other schools. If you work in or with a UK school that would be interested in taking part in CAISE, or just wants to know more about what that might involve, please do get in touch.

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know — or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #2

    CAISE Notes – Issue #2

    This week: corporate accountability, AI in classrooms, and the questions that follow a tragedy.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    The story that’s stayed with me this week comes from Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, where eight people, including students, were killed in a school shooting on February 10th. The suspected shooter had, months earlier, described violent scenarios to ChatGPT. OpenAI’s systems flagged those conversations automatically. Several employees raised concerns. And then the company decided the messages didn’t meet their threshold for alerting authorities, banned the account, and moved on.

    As someone who has done a lot of research into the importance of user privacy, I am alarmed at the thought of a world where AI companies routinely pass user conversations to law enforcement (although we know this is happening ever more in other datafied settings). These are genuinely hard calls, and false positives can have significant negative consequences.

    To bring it back to children, though: we are deploying generative AI that young people will use — in schools, in their pockets, in expensive private institutions — with institutions determining their own answers to difficult safeguarding questions. Who decides when a young person’s AI interaction warrants intervention? Who sets that threshold, and on what basis? And who is accountable when it goes wrong?

    In child safeguarding in schools, these questions have established (if complex) answers. Anyone involved in a school setting has a legal duty of care to raise safeguarding concerns. There are designated safeguarding leads. There are multi-agency frameworks. None of that infrastructure has followed AI into children’s lives. We are, in effect, treating children as early adopters of a system that hasn’t yet worked out its responsibilities to them.

    Issue #1 made the case that excluding children from technology isn’t the answer. But inclusion without protection isn’t the answer either. The work needs to be in building the frameworks, and genuinely understanding how children navigate these systems, that make both possible at once.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Meta knew parental supervision wasn’t working — and didn’t tell anyone — TechCrunch

    An internal Meta study called “Project MYST,” produced with the University of Chicago, surveyed 1,000 teens and their parents and found that household rules and parental controls had little measurable association with whether teens used social media compulsively. It also found that teens facing the most difficult life circumstances — bullying, difficult home situations — were least able to moderate their use. This didn’t come to light through publication (although it tracks with a lot of academic research): it emerged through testimony in an ongoing social media addiction lawsuit in Los Angeles. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said he couldn’t recall the study, despite a document suggesting he’d approved it. The finding matters because parental controls are consistently what legislators reach for when they want to look like they’re acting. This study suggests they’re not the lever they’re presented as, which should surprise no-one who has talked to children or parents about them.

    2. “Students are being treated like guinea pigs” — 404 Media

    A leaked investigation into Alpha School, a US private school that charges up to $65,000 a year and promises students can complete their core curriculum in two hours a day, thanks to AI, reveals a significant gap between the marketing and the reality. Internal documents show the school’s AI-generated reading comprehension questions were assessed by employees as doing “more harm than good”: questions with illogical answer choices, questions answerable without reading the article, and a hallucination rate high enough that the AI was deemed unsuitable for one key task. The company relies on AI to test the quality of its AI-generated lessons, which, predictably, doesn’t catch the problems. Meanwhile, student surveillance is pervasive: an app called StudyReel monitors screen activity, webcam footage, mouse movements and app usage, and hours of video recordings of students’ faces are stored in a Google Drive accessible to anyone with the link. One employee noted internally that they needed to get better at “selling” the surveillance to parents. Former employees credit students’ strong test scores not to the AI, but to the human tutors who cared about them.

    3. ChatGPT flagged the Tumbler Ridge shooter — and didn’t alert police — The Verge

    Months before the February 10th attack, the suspected perpetrator’s conversations with ChatGPT, describing gun violence, triggered OpenAI’s automated review systems. Employees debated escalation. Leadership concluded the posts didn’t meet the bar for an imminent, credible threat, banned the account, and took no further action. OpenAI has since said it proactively contacted the RCMP (the Canadian police force) after the shooting, though the provincial government noted that OpenAI met with a provincial representative the day after the attack without disclosing it held potentially relevant evidence. Canada’s federal AI minister has raised concerns about OpenAI’s safety protocols. There are no easy answers here, and I think that’s the point: this is hard, it requires policy, and no one has built that policy yet.

    🔁 ICYMI

    UNICEF’s Tinkering with Tech — UNICEF Digital Education

    Against the week’s heavier stories, this is worth sitting with. UNICEF’s Tinkering with Tech initiative uses micro:bit devices (or similar) and design thinking to bring hands-on AI and STEM learning to children, with a deliberate focus on girls, and on building skills rather than consuming technology. From mid-2025, AI literacy was added to the programme, which is now expanding from its initial four-country pilot to Lao PDR, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. The approach is meaningfully different from “here is an AI tool, use it”: students identify a real-world problem their community faces, build something, reflect. Worth bookmarking for anyone thinking about what AI education that centres children, rather than the technology, can look like.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    Last Tuesday I was back at the University of Kent’s Institute of Cyber Security for Society (iCSS), where I did my PhD, talking about children’s use of generative AI. My talk, “Canaries in the AI Coal Mine”, drew on Project CAISE to argue that we need to shift the conversation from what we’re keeping children away from, to what we’re equipping them to deal with.

    The numbers keep moving: over 75% of UK 13-18 year olds are already using generative AI, and in one recent survey, over half had confided something serious to an AI companion. They aren’t waiting for permission. The adults are still arguing about whether to let them in while they’re already through the door.

    I got some excellent tricky questions from the audience, including what happens if your research participants suddenly get banned from a large number of the platforms you’re studying…I guess we will find out if and when it happens!

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know — or share this with someone thinking about these questions.

  • We’ve submitted our ethics application!

    We’ve submitted our ethics application!

    There’s a particular kind of energy that comes with hitting ‘submit’ on a document you’ve been working on for weeks – equal parts relief, excitement, and uncertainty about whether you’ve got the balance right.

    Over the weekend, we submitted our ethics application for Project CAISE. It’s been months in the making, and it’s one of our first significant milestones.

    Submitting an ethics application is always a daunting prospect. It forces you to think – really think – about all the aspects of your plan. What are you really doing? Why are you doing it? Is that really the best way to do it?

    Done right, it allows you not only to make sure your “why” is crystal clear, but it also allows you to do a lot of the hard thinking ahead of time: yes, you’re going to interview people – but what, precisely are you going to ask them? You say you’re going to survey people, but with what tool and how do you know it’s GDPR-compliant? You’re going to video record that activity? Cool. How do you square keeping the meaningful visual interactions with the fact you’ve inadvertently recorded everyone’s faces? What even is the university’s infrastructure for storing things for the entire 10 year post-research retention period?!

    For a qualitative researcher, a lot of the above comes up every time. One thing that’s really hit me this time around, though: how do you meaningfully assess risk when the technology itself is evolving faster than our understanding of it? CAISE is a long(ish)-term project with 13-14 year olds navigating AI in their everyday lives. Not only do we not know what AI will look like this time next year, but we are aiming for an unvarnished and judgement-free exploration of this to really support open communication and understanding.

    In a world where it seems to be ok to produce non-consensual graphic images of people – including children – using AI on social media, and where banning children from spaces rather than working to make those spaces safer, as we would offline, the findings we will have are more important than ever.

    The ethics process asks us to anticipate and mitigate risks. But when the risks themselves are emergent and fundamentally uncertain? That’s trickier. We’ve made our best judgments based on current evidence and built in reflexivity, ongoing consent and a series of tiered pastoral and safeguarding processes. But there’s honesty required here too: we’re researching precisely because we don’t fully understand what’s happening yet, no matter how innocuous, or awful, it might be.

    We’ll be here with fingers crossed, full of nerves, until we hear back – which won’t be for a while…!

  • Welcome to Project CAISE!

    Welcome to Project CAISE!

    Welcome to Project CAISE! We will be investigating how young people aged 12-14 engage with generative AI across different contexts in their lives.

    Over the next three years, we’ll be working alongside young people, their families, and their teachers to understand:

    • How AI fits into young people’s everyday lives
    • What happens when they move between home and school
    • How different contexts shape their AI experiences
    • What AI literacy actually means in practice

    This blog will share updates throughout the research journey, including:

    • Progress milestones
    • Methodological reflections
    • Publications and presentations
    • Opportunities to engage with the research
    • Insights from the field (always anonymized and with consent)

    We’re currently in the setup phase, working on ethics approval, developing research protocols, and beginning conversations with potential partner schools.

    Stay tuned for updates, and please get in touch if you’d like to learn more or explore involvement!