They will be used to set out content children have missed, for instance after being absent or suspended.<\/p>\n
![\"Shane](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Shane-Ierston.jpg\" "\\"Shane")
Shane Ierston<\/p>\n
The videos will point children to catch-up resources on Google Classroom. Children can access the videos through their Chromebooks, which are handed out in year 7.<\/p>\n
The academy trust insists the work will never replace teachers, but should cut workload around having to deliver catch-up interventions.<\/p>\n
Teachers are \u201cpassionate about changing our communities for the better and leaving the world in a better place than we found it. Otherwise, what\u2019s the point?\u201d CEO Shane Ierston told Schools Week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think the technology gives our staff agency and capability to do those things. It takes away the reasons why people leave.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Not removing teachers, but putting time into the system\u2019<\/p>\n
The trust, which runs eight schools in the north west, expects to roll the avatars out fully in the next 12 months, and intends to seek government or philanthropic funding to make the system available to other schools. But teachers won\u2019t be forced to create one.<\/p>\n
They also won\u2019t be used for regular lessons, but will serve as a familiar video introduction to resources for children who have fallen behind.<\/p>\n
Ierston described the avatar scheme as a \u201cdirection of travel, not to remove teachers, because I know that\u2019s what unions will be worried about, but to augment and act as an adjunct in the classroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo put time into the system that we wouldn\u2019t have had otherwise, and to get rid of all this crazy practice of hours of intervention.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using software with a \u2018bad reputation\u2019 for good<\/p>\n
Video-generating, or \u201cdeepfake\u201d AI is controversial<\/a> because of its ability to create likenesses of real people. School leaders have warned it is increasingly used to make malicious images of staff.<\/a><\/p>\n But Ierston said the trust had \u201ctaken software that\u2019s got a bad reputation, and we\u2019ve used it for the betterment of education and society\u201d. It is using \u2018HeyGen\u2019, which describes itself as \u201cstanding out as a powerful deepfake maker\u201d.<\/p>\n Ierston said the \u201cmost pressure\u201d when pupils returned from periods away from school was on the teacher having to bring them up to speed.<\/p>\n Staff may \u201ctry and do intervention after school. And that\u2019s all bonkers, because it\u2019s just more weight on the teacher. All this intervention time is draining.\u201d<\/p>\n Absent pupils \u201cmiss their friends and they miss their favourite teachers. I think what it does is it creates a bridge. It creates a stepping stone to bring a child back into the teaching environment\u201d.<\/p>\n Pupils will be able to submit questions in writing to the avatar, which can respond with pre-programmed answers.<\/p>\n But Katie Sharp, the trust\u2019s director of education, said despite some parents post-Covid wanting more online lessons \u2013 this is not the plan.<\/p>\n \u201cStudents need to be mixing together and having that wider opportunity,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re not here to become an online school. That\u2019s the opposite of what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n An avatar lesson intro video created for Schools Week\u2019s Freddie Whittaker by Great Schools Trust principal Benjamin Barker<\/p>\n What about copyright?<\/p>\n But the plan is likely to be controversial, particularly among the wider teacher workforce. One issue is copyright of the videos \u2013 something GST\u2019s trustees also raised when being informed about the plan.<\/p>\n The trust said it will own the intellectual property in the AI avatar videos, but they will only use them with the teacher\u2019s \u201cexplicit consent and in-line with data protection law\u201d.<\/p>\n The trust added that when a teacher leaves, their personal data is removed and their avatar deleted to \u201cprotect their privacy and integrity\u201d.<\/p>\n They said this would comply with relevant laws including the copyright, designs and patents act, biometric data guidance and GDPR.<\/p>\n Trust moves to AI mock marking to cut workload<\/p>\n Great Schools Trust is also seeking to cut teacher workload by gradually replacing human marking of mock exams with AI, which it says is much faster and more accurate.<\/p>\n A trial will use AI to mark GCSE mocks, which the trust estimates could save some teachers up to 80 hours over the course of three sets of tests when fully rolled out.<\/p>\n Teachers have marked papers alongside the AI for the past three years so the trust can identify issues with the system.<\/p>\n From Christmas, however, some subjects in some of its schools will switch to 100 per cent AI marking.<\/p>\n Papers are scanned in and converted to PDFs and uploaded to the trust\u2019s own interface, \u201cCredimusAI\u201d.<\/p>\n Each page has a barcode unique to a pupil, whose name is removed by the trust. The papers are then fed into external AI assistant \u201cClaude\u201d.<\/p>\n AI marking faster and \u2018more accurate\u2019<\/p>\n AI can mark hundreds of papers simultaneously, taking around four minutes for the longest scripts. The AI can then generate lesson plan suggestions, gap reports and further exam questions.<\/p>\n The trust said the AI\u2019s marking is more accurate.<\/p>\n Benjamin Barker, principal of King\u2019s Leadership Academy, Wavertree, which is run by GST, said an initial trial in biology found the \u201cAI was harshly marking the pupils by 15 per cent\u201d.<\/p>\n But \u201cwhen you went into all those questions where a teacher disagreed with the AI, the AI was right on about 13 out of 15 of those marks\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was only when we went back and we realised that there was a bias,\u201d Ierston added. \u201cThe staff were marking the children overly positively.\u201d<\/p>\n He added AI was \u201cnot a gimmick \u2013 it\u2019s a catalyst for our mission. Great schools are built by great people. AI gives them back time and energy to do what they do best: inspire, teach and lead.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More from this theme Recent articles Teachers will use \u201cdeepfake\u201d technology to create an AI avatar of themselves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,50,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-190218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-news","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Katie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Katie-Sharp.jpg\" "\\"KatieSharp")
Katie Sharp<\/p>\n![\"Benjamin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Benjamin-Barker.jpg\" "\\"Benjamin")
Benjamin Barker<\/p>\n