Reading the room. Part 1. How not to do it:
Teachers walked out of a speech by Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, on Wednesday in the latest sign of deteriorating relations between the Government and the profession.
Attendees at the annual Bett education technology conference in London said there was a “mass exodus” when Mrs Keegan started speaking. Photos shared on social media showed people standing up and then filing out of the room.
Mrs Keegan was speaking about how teachers’ workloads could be slashed in the future by artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
In a statement released ahead of the speech, the Education Secretary said: “AI will have the power to transform a teacher’s day-to-day work. We’ve seen people using it to write lesson plans, and some interesting experiments around marking too.
“Can it do those things now to the standard we need? No. Should the time it saves ever come at the cost of the quality produced by a skilled teacher? Absolutely not. But could we get to a point where the tasks that really drain teachers’ time are significantly reduced? I think we will.”
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Frances Akinde, a special educational needs and disabilities consultant who was in the audience, said: “It’s going to make teachers even angrier because they are rejecting a pay offer and she seemed to be saying, ‘we don’t need you, we have AI’. It was poor timing.”
Ms Akinde said people started walking out after Mrs Keegan arrived on stage. Her speech was delayed by around an hour because she was stuck in traffic.
‘Left with purpose’
Another attendee at the conference said “about three-quarters of the room left with purpose,” during the speech.
Earlier this week, a primary school teacher had urged people at the conference to walk out as the Education Secretary spoke.
news.sky.com