Considered thinking on AI, pedagogy, and leadership — written for teachers and school leaders with a class to teach tomorrow morning.
By Alex Gray · 12 min read
Kerrie sent me a reel about couples and money, and GPT-5.6 had just launched with its new Work feature. So I set out to have AI build us a real app. The specs I would have written for a human engineer were not enough, and the gap between a document that reads well and one an AI cannot misread is the exact same gap sitting inside most school AI policies.
From one-pagers to living documents — what actually holds.
8 pieces02Infrastructure, literacy, and the uncomfortable audit questions.
8 pieces03For heads, HoDs, and the people carrying the weight of the decision.
14 pieces04What learners are telling us when we finally stop talking.
3 pieces05Field notes from shipping software for teachers, in the open.
5 pieces06A series on the adult skills — focus, rest, productive work — we never teach, and must model.
5 pieces
There is a word for the collection of skills that determines how well a person thinks, works and performs over a lifetime. It is not on any curriculum. The word is productivity, and the gap is one of the most consequential in modern schooling.
The conversation about student focus usually starts with the students. It shouldn't. Attention is a human skill, structurally degraded and developmentally learnable — and the adults in the building are where the work begins.
Some AI tools faithfully render what a student draws. Others quietly correct their work toward the norm. In creative subjects, that distinction matters more than almost any school procurement process currently acknowledges.
A ten-minute diagnostic built from two years of conversations with heads, HoDs and IT leads. Your result is a private, shareable score — plus the one place to start.
Head of Sixth Form & BSME Network Lead for AI in Education. Alex explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping teaching, learning, and the future of work — with honesty, clarity, and a focus on what matters most for educators and students.
Read more essays by Alex →
We publish a small number of guest essays each term from practitioners doing the real work. If you have a story from the classroom or the leadership team, we want to hear it.
