Navigating Ofsted’s AI Guidance: How CENTURY’s AI supports schools and colleges

Ofsted recently published guidance on how they are approaching Artificial Intelligence (AI) during inspections and regulations, alongside early research findings into AI usage in schools and colleges. This new guidance clarifies that Ofsted does not evaluate AI as a standalone element or directly assess AI tools. Instead, inspectors will consider the impact of AI on the outcomes and experiences of children and learners. This blog post explores these publications and demonstrate how CENTURY’s AI can make a positive impact in line with Ofsted’s considerations.

Integration of AI with Pedagogy

One significant finding from Ofsted’s discussions with educational leaders was that many “had not yet thought systematically about integrating AI with pedagogy because of the rapid pace of change and because there are still not many AI tools tailored to individual school or college contexts.” For over a decade, CENTURY Tech has been at the forefront of ensuring AI benefits the education sector. Our platform, built by teachers, technologists, and neuroscientists, understands how learning happens and empowers teachers to work more efficiently to achieve optimal outcomes.

Ofsted’s research review cautions that “adaptations [to the curriculum by AI] can be ultimately unhelpful where they provide ‘workarounds’ to immediate barriers, but fail to address these barriers so pupils can access the curriculum in full and in the long term.” CENTURY addresses this directly by breaking down the curriculum into manageable “nuggets”. Our diagnostic tools pinpoint specific areas where a student needs improvement, recommending targeted nuggets to close those gaps. 

As Claire Coates, Executive Headteacher, and Helen Bethell, Assistant Headteacher, from Griffydam Primary School, attest: “We’ve seen a clear link between completing nuggets on the platform and a mastery approach to maths, and also in developing higher standards in spelling, punctuation and grammar. CENTURY has helped give our children a new framework for them to talk about their learning, including how they learn and where they go to for support, and that can be really helpful supporting evidence when it comes to Ofsted.”

Demonstrating the Impact of AI on Pupil Outcomes

Ofsted’s research also highlighted that leaders hadn’t yet had the opportunity to evaluate the impact of AI, with most relying on staff and student feedback or monitoring staff usage rather than collecting data to measure AI’s specific impact on pupils. Furthermore, Ofsted notes “a lack of research that identifies the most effective ways AI can be used to adapt and personalise learning.” 

CENTURY has proactively addressed the need for impact evaluation. In secondary, we recently published an in-depth impact analysis report demonstrating a strong correlation between regular, consistent platform usage and higher student GCSE grades in core secondary subjects. We also have a primary report showcasing the impact on SATs outcomes and examples of the platform’s positive effect on improving English and maths resit results.

CENTURY’s commitment to professional development

Ofsted highlights the need for professional development around AI to address both the technical and pedagogical aspects of AI, so teachers can critically evaluate AI-generated outputs and manage ethical challenges. Every school or college that partners with CENTURY receives bespoke training on how to get the most out of the platform. This training includes understanding our data dashboards and using this data to inform interventions, ensuring a human teacher always interprets the results and delves deeper into the data.

Leaders also expressed concerns about the accuracy of AI in marking assessments, fearing that teachers might become less aware of their students’ work. We maintain that CENTURY empowers teachers to understand their students more quickly by marking assessments and showing student performance relative to their peers. Any teacher on CENTURY can always drill down to a student’s exact answer if desired in the Nuggets tab of our Teacher Dashboard which shows a question level analysis of the nugget.

For example, Gary Reddin, Leader of the Virtual Curriculum at Alt Bridge, highlights the power of the platform to provide evidence: “Being able to set nuggets for students who are isolating and asking them to spend a set amount of time on CENTURY is particularly helpful… I can simply go onto my Teacher Dashboard, click into [the] course, click on the student’s name and there it is: an overview of what the student has been doing, complete with their scores, time spent on each micro-lesson and so on.”

Generative AI tailored to education

A barrier highlighted by some Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) was that available AI tools lacked contextual understanding of their school or college and student needs. As one MAT chief transformation officer stated, “The OpenAI-type chatbots – ChatGPT, Gemini – do not know your curriculum. They do not know where your pupils are. They do not know what the misconceptions are typically for those topics.”

While generative AI is not the core of our platform, our popular TeacherGENie™ feature leverages its power to create tailored worksheets. What sets TeacherGENie™ apart is its contextual data. It leverages over ten years of CENTURY’s content, including high-quality learning content created by expert teachers, as well as data on how students interact with it. TeacherGENie™ guides and informs the generative AI model on the appropriate content and level, ensuring it receives enough context to provide accurate and trustworthy questions.

Reducing workload to enhance the role of the teacher

While leaders discussed how AI could reduce workload, they often clarified that it was about increasing the time teachers could spend on aspects with a more direct impact on learning. CENTURY has always been focused on reducing teacher workload, enabling them to dedicate time to more impactful activities. Our schools and colleges agree:

“CENTURY provides a more meaningful way of using time. It’s a much more effective use of time, because instead of you sitting and marking, you’ve got the scores in front of you with which you can do something. You’re just spending your time in a much more bespoke way for the students. It’s a better use of your time, because you can really dig down and get the information that you need,” states Karyn Taylor, Head of School, Consilium Evolve.

Safety of CENTURY’s AI

A key concern raised by Ofsted is data security and the potential for AI to perpetuate or amplify existing biases. CENTURY’s AI is built to be safe and secure.

Having been at the forefront of AI in education for years, we have accumulated prime data about how learners have interacted with our high-quality, teacher-created learning material and assessment questions. We use this data to train extremely performative models in house to perform specific tasks, such as predicting a user’s likelihood of answering a question correctly. These models require extremely large datasets to be effectively trained, and CENTURY is in a unique position where we have had over 1 billion questions answered on our platform. It means we can provide the best recommendations possible.

We take privacy and data security incredibly seriously and have robust policies, procedures and technologies in place to ensure all data is protected. Needless to say, we are completely GDPR compliant. We ensure at all points that schools and colleges have control over what data they share with us, so only essential data is shared. To ensure our AI does not reflect bias, student information such as date of birth, gender or SEN status, is held completely separately from learning and score data. This means our AI is only looking at the student’s performance, not details about who they are. For more information, you can see our privacy policy.

The CENTURY platform supports the delivery of the curriculum, prioritising data security and fairness, whilst empowering teachers to focus on the most crucial aspects of learning. Schools and colleges partners can be sure that it aligns with Ofsted’s core mission of improving the education of children.

To learn more about CENTURY, book a demo here.