The way ahead for primary schools in the age of AI is like trying to stir a sauce together that has separated. It’s time to make a new sauce...

Pasi Sahlberg in the latest ‘Ai In Education Podcast Sahlberg opened with a chart that should stop every education minister mid-sentence.

We are investing more, researching more, and putting more devices in more classrooms, and yet the trends for achievement, engagement, and wellbeing have been sliding for twenty or thirty years.

Not since COVID, but since long before COVID. And it is not just his reading of it. The OECD, the World Bank, and UN bodies are landing on the same uncomfortable conclusion.

His point, which is also in my paper ‘The Primarai School’ is that the fix is not a bit more of the same. It’s like trying to fix a sauce that has separated. Time to start again…

Not longer, not harder, not one more strategy day with a new acronym. His polite version is that we have tried almost everything and it still is not working. The less polite version, which is mine, is that the model itself is the problem.

My paper puts it like this: you cannot reform a building when the ground beneath it has already swallowed the foundations. AI did not break the industrial school. It just turned the lights on so we could finally see the cracks.

As a teacher, I have sat through enough “this year we are really going to lift outcomes” launches to recognise the genre. We announce it with great fanfare, change the font on the data wall, and carry on exactly as before.

Sahlberg’s call, and mine, is for an honest redesign rather than a fresh coat of paint.

Read about my new Australian version of the Alpha school here

www.primarai.com.au/theprimaraischool