Lord Tarassenko (CB)

My Lords, Amendment 227 is in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. We started with AI during Oral Questions what is now yesterday afternoon. We considered the use of AAI in the debate on Amendment 209 yesterday evening. We are now back with AI within edtech. Amendment 227 is about ensuring that a minimum level of provision of software tools, including websites, is available to every pupil in England, regardless of the school they attend. Over the last six months, I have worked with Professor Peyton Jones from the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation to develop proposals for a level 3 qualification in data science and AI. This is being done in consultation with the relevant team in the Department for Education. Importantly, this level 3 qualification would not be just for those sixth-formers who will go on to read computer science at university but, first and foremost, for the professionals of the future, such as lawyers, economists and doctors. The aim is to give those pupils in the final two years of school sufficient knowledge and experience of up-to-date AI to enable them to use it properly in their time at university and at the start of their professional careers. If the UK is to have a workforce ready to take advantage of the opportunities that AI offers, AI education needs to begin at school. I know that His Majesty’s Government recognise this. They have just published a set of standards which generative AI products should meet to be considered safe for users in educational settings. However, these are intended mainly for edtech developers and suppliers to schools and colleges, not schoolteachers and administrators. During a workshop organised by the Raspberry Pi Foundation last November, I met teachers from all types of schools who were keen to learn more about a level 3 qualification in data science and AI. I soon discovered that IT departments in many schools today have a strict, if misguided, interpretation of the Online Safety Act. As far as they are concerned, the safest way to prevent pupils accessing harmful or inappropriate material while on school premises is to bar them from accessing any website, even and especially OpenAI’s. There are other schools, of course, where the staff in the IT department operate a more nuanced firewall policy. This amendment seeks to ensure that there is an irreducible minimum set of software tools, including websites, which every pupil in any school in England will be able to access during the school day. Pupils should be prevented from accessing websites which may lead to harm, but they should instead have access to websites with strong educational missions; for example, Code.org or MathsWatch. These would be included in a register of software tools permitted in schools and whitelisted by the school network firewall system. Schools would be free to add other websites if they wished to do so, but the amendment would ensure that all pupils in England had access to a minimum set of whitelisted software tools, enabling them to learn about data science and AI as part of their school education. I beg to move.