Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

I shall speak very briefly, because the previous three speakers have covered the ground extremely well and made some extremely powerful arguments. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, put her finger on it. The default position of departments such as the DfE, if they recognise there is a problem, is to issue guidance. Schools are drowning in guidance. If you talk to any headmaster or headmistress or the staff in charge of technology and trying to keep on top of it, they are drowning in guidance. They are basically flying blind when being asked to take some quite major decisions, whether it is about purchasing or the safeguards around usage or about measuring the effectiveness of some of the educational technology skills that are being acquired. There is a significant difference between guidance and a clear and concrete code. We were talking the other day, on another group, about the need to have guardrails, boundaries and clarity. We need clarity for schools and for the educational technology companies themselves to know precisely what they can and cannot do. We come back again to the issue of the necessity of measuring outcomes, not just processes and inputs, because they are constantly changing. It is very important for the companies themselves to have clear guardrails. The research to which the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, referred, which is being done by a variety of organisations, found problems in the areas that we are talking about in this country, the United States, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and France—and that is just scratching the surface. Things are moving very quickly and AI is accelerating that even more. With a code you are drawing a line in the sand and declaring very clearly what you expect and do not expect, what is permissible and not permissible. Guidance is simply not sufficient.