Parents: Schools' Forgotten AI Stakeholders

Imagine being the coach of a football team and forgetting to register one of your key players. The player with a track record of consistently helping the team and coming up trumps when it's important. The player who you know quantifiably makes the team better when they play. But for some reason they were completely forgotten when the team's registration was submitted. That would be quite the mistake.

It's the same mistake that schools are making right now as they introduce their approaches to AI. Schools are consistently forgetting one of their most important stakeholders: parents. As we covered in our last newsletter, 68% of the schools we've surveyed regarding AI are currently in the phases of either responding to AI issues at the school or introducing AI into the curriculum to ensure students develop AI skills. The majority of these schools have wisely started their strategy rollout by surveying students and teachers to understand how they are using AI and their perceived needs, problems and challenges. Our response whenever we hear this is “That's fantastic! What about parents, have you surveyed them?” And do you know what the total number of schools we surveyed who have engaged parents in this process was? Zero. Parents are the forgotten stakeholders when it comes to AI in schools.

The questions that schools need to be asking are:

•    How are parents currently disposed to AI, and more specifically, AI in their children's education?

•    What do parents want, and what are their concerns when it comes to AI and their child's education?

•    How do schools collaborate with parents to achieve their AI outcomes, including reducing AI misuse from students?

In this article, we'll go through the answers to these questions based on a separate survey of parents from 50 high schools. The most important finding from our survey is that the opportunity is significant for schools. Currently only 6% of parents surveyed considered their children's school to be excellent in its approach to AI. Effectively partnering with parents on AI has significant upside for schools seeking to increase parent satisfaction, improve the school's brand, and most importantly, achieve the school's AI outcomes.

How are parents currently disposed to AI in their children's education?

From our survey, we've seen there are 3 key data points schools need to consider with their parent body.

• Only a minority of parents currently use AI themselves. Our survey found that only 32% of parents use AI regularly. The risk for schools with parents who don't use AI regularly is that with less personal knowledge and buy-in around AI, they're more susceptible to being influenced by media extremes on both the positive and negative side. On the positive side, a lack of operating knowledge means parents risk being too gung-ho on AI and blind to its significant risks, whilst the impact on the negative side is obvious. This lack of operating knowledge means there's an important vacuum for the school to fill in terms of explaining why AI is being introduced and the short-term and long-term benefits. Communicating a compelling vision, mission and why for AI is likely to move parents into the cautiously optimistic and supportive camp.

• AI has been flagged as a concern. 42% of parents say they have a concern over AI. As per the above, this means proactive and regular communication with parents about the school's mission and why is highly advisable, and failure to do so could mean parents' concerns increase to the point the school faces significant resistance.

• Opinions around AI are polarised. This shouldn't come as a surprise, as it mirrors staff and student attitudes. 30% of parents said they were cautious of AI and encouraged their child not to use it, and 18% saw it as a significant concern and actively discouraged or banned their children from using it. As noted in the first point, it's likely these positions are dynamic and can change, but doing so again requires communication, and the school communicating a compelling position for parents.

What do parents want, and what are their concerns?

Most parents are open to AI being used in their children's education, but they also have significant concerns. The concerns are:

•    Data and privacy: 62% of parents

•    AI misinformation: 60% of parents

•    Bullying: 52% of parents

•    Not being prepared for an AI world: 48% of parents

Interestingly, you'll notice these concerns differ from the main concerns we hear from teachers, which are overwhelmingly about students either misusing AI on assessments or cognitively offloading in a way that hamstrings their learning and development. As a result, we tend to find schools are prioritising a very different set of AI literacy skills to what parents are actually demanding. Schools need to expand their AI skills inventory to ensure the skills above are included, and they need to communicate and demonstrate to parents that these skills are being taught, to prevent parents moving from concerned but open to AI, to resistant.

How do schools collaborate with parents on AI outcomes?

All the research shows that educational outcomes are improved by partnering with parents and having parents actively involved in their child's education. AI is no different. In fact, for schools with outcomes around reducing AI misuse, enlisting parents as collaborators will be essential to achieving that outcome.

The Parental Mediation Framework provides guidance on how parents should collaborate with their children to develop effective use of a range of technologies. It posits that parents need to fulfil 3 roles at home:

• Active mediation: This means having conversations around AI with their children, discussing the pros and cons and how to use it effectively. Active mediation moments are effectively subtle coaching or teaching moments from parents.

• Restrictive mediation: This means having a set of rules that are enforced at home around how AI is used.

• Co-use: This means parents use AI with their children to model good AI behaviours and processes.

The data from our survey showed that right now, very few parents are playing these roles when it comes to AI. Only 30% of parents feel confident discussing AI with their children, and only 24% regularly discuss AI with their children. 18% of parents have never discussed AI with their child at all.

If schools want parents to play a role mediating their children's AI use, they need to do 3

things.

• Upskill parents. Schools need to take the leading role in helping parents upskill and understand AI enough to have meaningful conversations with their children. As noted above, only 30% of parents use AI regularly, presumably in their workplace. That leaves 70% who don't have a trusted source of guidance or information and who, like teachers, feel the topic is too complex to get started with themselves. Parents are therefore actively looking to schools to play this part, and as we've seen above, the return on investment for schools taking the time will be significant.

• Communicate the rules. Most student AI misuse will occur at home. As such, parents have a critical role to play in creating ground rules for AI use. The starting point for this is the school's AI policy. Unfortunately, 80% of parents are unaware of their school's AI policy. This means schools need to be front-footed, ensuring they not only have a publicly facing AI policy, but a concise version parents can quickly understand and apply.

Key steps schools should take now

Communicate, communicate, communicate. In the first 12 to 24 months, the school needs to be highly communicative. This includes:

•    Having a mission statement for why AI is being used, and circulating it to parents.

•    Running AI information nights, with the first focused on the why: bring in employers to discuss how AI is changing the workforce.

•    Discussing the benefits of AI in education, covering both the cases for and against.

Proactively address parents' concerns. Communicate exactly what their children are learning. Have a rubric or skills inventory showing the AI literacy skills the school is helping students build, so they can use AI effectively, ethically and safely. This will go a long way toward allaying parents' concerns and fears.

Upskill parents to be confident with AI. Treat parents like students and staff. Have a list of skills parents need to build in order to effectively mediate AI use at home, and provide this upskilling.

Actively communicate the school's AI policy. If the school doesn't have an AI policy, expedite its creation. Ensure it's publicly available on the school website. Have a concise version for parents, with explanations of how they can apply the rules at home.

Elevate Education has a range of parent in-person and online workshops designed to help upskill parents to mediate their children's AI use at home. Want to see exactly where your school's parent community sits? Try a free module of our AI Culture Snapshot, benchmarked against the schools we work with, covering parent AI literacy, awareness of your policy, and the concerns you most need to address: Try a free module