Mental health issues are surging among children. It emerged this week that children as young as six were being treated in A&E for mental health problems.
The issue of overdiagnosis has also become a talking point. At the end of last year, Wes Streeting, who was health secretary at the time, ordered a review of the services providing support for people with neurodevelopmental conditions, such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and mental health problems, after concerns were raised about a steep rise in demand for these services.
‘Parents need guidance on AI’
The research by the Parent Voice Project, conducted by Public First, also found that reports of AI being used in homework, especially by teenagers, had increased substantially. It found that 48 per cent of affluent parents said their child regularly used AI for homework, compared with 31 per cent of those who were less well off.
One mother of children aged 13 and 9 said: “I used to go up to my grandma’s and she had a set of encyclopaedias, and I would go through the alphabet, find it, and then read up on it, and then use that information. AI isn’t that much different to that, apart from the fact that you can then take that information and ask AI to write it for you.”
The father of a 12-year-old said: “If you’ve just got an easy option in front of you, then you just fire that off and go play Fortnite. It’s not ideal but when everything else is so completely broken, using AI isn’t actually as big a deal as you think it is.”
Some 39 per cent of parents said their child regularly or occasionally used AI tools such as ChatGPT or Grammarly to help with homework. This figure was up from 30 per cent in 2025. The proportion who said their child “never” used AI for homework dropped from 41 per cent to 35 per cent.
Fiona Forbes, founder of the Parent Voice Project, said: “How are schools supposed to understand pupils’ learning if up to 50 per cent of homework is being completed by AI?
“Parents clearly need guidance on this, and schools need to think extremely hard about what the rise of AI means for homework policies. Unless some deep thinking on this is undertaken at pace, the threat to homework as we understand it is surely existential.”