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Written by Iona Kelliher, Managing Director at Edurio.
Iona leads the work of turning Edurio’s national datasets into impactful insights for trust and school leaders. A national keynote speaker and leading voice on stakeholder feedback, she has led major reports on staff experiences, pupil wellbeing and parental engagement, helping schools build more inclusive, supportive environments where staff and pupils thrive.
There is a version of the conversation about AI in education that I find deeply uninteresting. It tends to go one of two ways: either breathless optimism about everything technology is about to unlock, or anxious hand-wringing about everything it threatens to take away.
What I want to talk about instead is something that I think is more important: the question of what we are actually trying to achieve when we use technology to shape how we lead our organisations, and whether the tools we’re reaching for are genuinely fit for that purpose.
The promise of AI
The case for AI in education leadership is, on its face, compelling. Faster decision-making and delivery. Broader pattern recognition. Insight at scale. For trust leaders navigating complex organisations across multiple sites and thousands of staff, pupils and families, the idea of having better information more quickly is an obvious good.
And yet, in conversations with school and trust leaders across the country, I keep hearing a version of the same concern. They have access to more information than ever. They are less sure what to do with it.
Having access to this intelligence and having the capacity to turn it into purposeful action are two very different things. The latter is what means improvement either happens or doesn’t.
What machines can and can’t do
AI is extraordinarily good at processing what already exists. It finds patterns. It synthesises. It returns answers at speed. These are genuinely useful capabilities, and any organisation that isn’t exploring them is probably leaving something on the table.
But there are things AI cannot do. It cannot pick up what has shifted in the mood of a staff room over the past half-term. It cannot tell you that the pattern showing up in your latest wellbeing data looks a lot like something that surfaced in similar trusts eighteen months ago, and here is what they tried, and here is what actually worked. It cannot challenge an assumption your senior leadership team has been carrying unchecked for years, possibly without even being aware of it.
These things require the kind of judgement that comes from sustained engagement with the sector, from relationships built over time, and from a genuine understanding of the human dynamics at play inside real organisations.
The risk, as the sector accelerates its adoption of AI-driven tools, is that we conflate information with intelligence. They are not the same thing.
The two kinds of human intelligence
At Edurio, we have come to think about this through the lens of human intelligence, and there are two distinct parts to it.
The first is the collective intelligence that already exists within the communities our schools and trusts serve. Staff, pupils, families: they know things that no model captures. They have experiences and perceptions that, when gathered carefully and interpreted well, reveal what is actually happening inside an organisation rather than what the org chart suggests should be happening. To generate this intelligence, we must create the conditions in which it can surface honestly, and then actually do something meaningful with it.
The second is the intelligence of the people working alongside school and trust leaders to help them make sense of what they find. Partners – internal or external – who know the sector well enough to ask the right questions, who bring genuine expertise without retreating into academic language, and who are still present six months later when the real work of embedding change is underway. Not advisers who arrive with pre-packaged solutions, and not rigid software that ignores your organisation’s context.
This combination – the wisdom of the community and the expertise of a trusted partner – is, I would argue, the thing that actually moves schools forward. The new technology we have at our fingertips is the tool, and the human wisdom and relationships that encircle it is what will turbo-charge the impact.
A thought for leaders
If you are in the process of evaluating how to use this new capability more effectively in your trust, I would offer one provocation.
Before you ask what tools you should be using, ask what question you are trying to answer. Ask who in your organisation has the capacity to do something with the answer once you have it. Ask what kind of support would actually help you turn this into action, rather than into another slide in another presentation.
The answers to those questions will tell you a lot about what you actually need, and whether what tool or solution you are being offered is genuinely fit for that purpose.
Information is plentiful. The ability to use it well is harder to come by.
Our CEO, Ernest Jenavs, also wrote about Human Intelligence for Schools Week, making the case for why every school needs an HI strategy alongside their AI one.
