BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, has said that the use of digital technology, including AI in the classroom, should be more prominent in teacher training programmes.

The measures will help teachers use AI tools and other packages for lesson planning, creating worksheets and marking – and to better understand how students are using AI at home, BCS said.

Schools should also be asked to publish digital strategies covering areas like cyber security, backed by professional IT staff, it added.

Concerns have been ramping up in recent months that education facilities are not equipped to deal with the more advanced era of conversational AI ushered in last year by ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is a large-language model chatbot which can answer questions in a seemingly natural way and is trained on a massive data set.

A BCS survey in February found that 62 per cent of education professionals believe that chatbots will make it harder to mark students’ work fairly.

It has...