January 24th is the International Day of Education, and it’s a relatively new entry in our calendars. The day was first proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 and was soon impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down schools, colleges, universities and workplaces. On a more positive note, it’s also coincided with a rethink on the education of young people in this country. In September 2021 the Additional Learning Needs Code for Wales came into force, protecting the rights of young people aged up to 25 to access additional support to meet their educational needs.
This new code has a welcome focus on co-production, putting learners and their priorities at the heart of the process. An estimated one in five school-aged students in Britain has Additional Learning Needs. In Wales, we recognise the importance of paths outside mainstream education, and we make allowances for the different ways people absorb and share knowledge. The People’s Library is proud to partner with Community Lives Consortium, a universally respected name in the support and empowerment of disabled people. Service users of all ages constantly surprise and delight those around them with their individual views of the world, and the creative skills they draw on to share those views. Members of the organisation’s Camera Club, for example, are set for a memorable 2025, with plans to celebrate their city, its beaches and the surrounding countryside on a wide-ranging project that will include a photography exhibition. Many of our friends in supported living are sharing their talent and commitment in the workplace and in their communities. The education they get and give benefits them and those around them, and we want to see this positive trend continue.
Disabled people are hungry for new knowledge, new experiences and new challenges. They prove it every day. For all the progress we’ve seen in recent decades, it’s not only the education of disabled people we need to focus on. We also need to take our share of responsibility for the education of decision makers in our wider communities. That includes universities, colleges and employers.
Over the past fifteen years we’ve seen welcome adjustments in schools that, for example, offer young people with autism something closer to a level playing field. The 2010 Equality Act has guided our schools in respecting sensory differences, in many cases creating sensory profiles that can give pupils a more positive classroom experience from day one. Helpful adjustments that alleviate stress and encourage self-stimulatory problem-solving are an obvious wellness boost and can lead to academic achievement that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. But what happens when young people with additional learning needs leave school? They may well have the skills to thrive in higher education and in the workplace, but without an equitable recruitment process, they could be denied the chance to prove it. Latest available figures tell us that the unemployment rate for disabled people in the UK is 6.9%. That represents progress; in 1989, the year Community Lives Consortium was founded, that rate was 20.5%, four times higher than the rate for non-disabled people, but it also indicates distance still to travel. A disabled person in this country today is twice as likely to be unemployed as a non-disabled person.
The theme of this year’s International Education Day is “Artificial Intelligence and Education: Preserving Human Agency in a World of Automation”. It’s a topic that needs discussion and action, because admissions officers and recruiters seeking to narrow down a field of applicants by making the process AI-driven might unintentionally be discriminating against disabled learners and job applicants.
Tech pioneers have argued that they seek to eliminate discrimination by providing equal treatment for all. One of the key points to remember here is that equal treatment and equitable treatment can be two very different things.
Equal treatment might ask everyone to climb 100 steps to reach their goal, regardless of some people’s inability to take physical steps. Equitable treatment, on the other hand, will offer everyone an achievable path to the same goal. It’s unsettling to imagine an AI programme that positions an educator or an employer on a pedestal that only the non-disabled can aspire to. In addition to the injustice to disabled applicants, the educators and employers are doing themselves no favours, missing out on people whose talents could propel them to far greater heights. What form could these misguided attempts at “equal” treatment take?
· Facial recognition software that asks students or job applicants to prove their identity carries a risk of excluding people with (eg) uncontrolled muscle movements.
· A programme that judges a person on their eye contact may not make allowances for people with impaired vision.
· And, more generally, AI models that haven’t been supplied with sufficient data on the accessibility needs of people with different types of disability will inevitably fall short when taking those needs into account. If you decide to plant a flower garden and are directed to a shop that only sells white rose bushes, you’re going to end up with a garden full of white roses. There’s nothing wrong with white roses, but there’s nothing wrong with red or yellow roses either. There’s nothing wrong with any of the 2,500 or so species of flower that bloom in the UK every year. I feel sorry for the gardeners who never get to find that out for themselves.
Is it harsh to ask if AI creators are failing to protect disabled applicants? Not when authoritative reports tell us AI decision-making tools include far too little data on disabled people (which they do). And not when AI creators aren’t legally bound to demonstrate that their software doesn’t discriminate (which they aren’t).
Educators and employers who use AI models have greater accountability, but if they put their faith in technology that only encourages us to nurture certain kinds of flower, how can we be confident of positive outcomes? How can our garden grow? And if universities or employers are found guilty of inadvertent discrimination against disabled applicants two or three years after the event, we can applaud justice being done but we can’t give the applicants back the lost years and lost opportunities, and we can’t give the university or the employer back the benefit they might have gained from choosing the best candidates. It’s a lose-lose scenario that we should be fighting hard to avoid.
There are hugely positive elements to AI adoption, of course. SORA, OpenAI’s video generation model, is a dazzling breakthrough in text-to-video technology. Using this software, we only need to create a paragraph of text to see our ideas become a vivid, realistic film in a matter of moments. If we can conceive it, we can achieve it, and our friends and partners at Community Lives Consortium see daily evidence that service users have the imagination to thrive with advanced creative tools.
Any football supporters reading will be familiar with constant arguments over the use of Video Assisted Refereeing (VAR). Like International Education Day, this technology was introduced in 2019. Fans who claim it spoils the game and sucks the enjoyment out of live sport may have a point, but it’s not the technology we should be complaining about; it’s our imperfect use of it. VAR should be used to support the judgement of referees, not replace it. In a similar way, AI should be used to support the judgement of educators and employers, not give them a licence to do their jobs with their eyes closed. As we celebrate International Education Day 2025, the People’s Library and our partners are excited about the doors to accomplishment that technology can open for us, and we’re vigilant about the pitfalls ahead. We want an equitable future, and we want win-win scenarios. That’s the least our service users and our communities deserve.