Schools are facing a “completely unsustainable” barrage of AI-generated complaints, leaders have warned.
Trust senior leaders told Tes that schools are not only getting an increasing number of complaints generated by AI but they are also having to dedicate more staff time to dealing with them. This situation is compounded by AI-generated complaints often containing references to the law, which are sometimes entirely incorrect.
“We’ve now reached a point where it’s completely unsustainable,” said Lawrence Foley, CEO of Future Academies, which runs 10 schools in London and Hertfordshire.
“For example, last week we had a permanent exclusion hearing for a pupil, and the parent had sent a 45-page letter, which included some tells of AI generation and was loaded with legalistic language.
“Our schools are getting five or six of these a week and then, as a trust, we’re receiving AI subject access and freedom of information requests.”
Parents’ AI-generated complaints
Claire Pannell, director of governance at Anthem Schools Trust, which has 16 schools, said her trust’s leaders had observed a “significant increase” in the proportion of complaints “clearly” written by AI.
While this had not led to an increase in the total number of complaints, individually they were taking the trust longer to deal with.
“The issue for us is that it’s led to a more complex style of complaint coming in, which is harder to deal with. We’ve been getting these complaints coming in which you can tell straight away are written by AI,” she said.
“They’re often longer, and the longer it is, the longer it takes to read and unpick. But probably the hardest thing is they often don’t make sense, and there will be references to random legislation.”
The legal references that AI tends to generate in complaints make them more stressful and complex for staff to respond to, added Ms Pannell, despite the fact that the legislation referred to can sometimes be irrelevant.
It means schools will often require more support to respond to complaints, and be forced into a more formal complaints process.
Dr Foley said AI seems to be opening up avenues into complaints that parents would not previously have considered.
“Sometimes you will receive a complaint, investigate it in good faith, send a considered response that has taken hours, and within 24 hours it feels like those are getting uploaded to an AI chatbot by parents, who are asking what they can do to take it to the next stage,” he told Tes.
AI escalates complaints to DfE
Dr Foley added that he has increasingly seen parents going directly to bodies like Ofsted and the Teaching Regulation Agency, as AI can generate complaints to them within minutes.
“We end up getting letters from the Department for Education and other bodies seeking assurances about these, and that really multiplies the workload,” he said.
Schools had already been warning about the increasing rate of complaints and their associated workload. Tes revealed last year that more than eight in 10 school leaders had seen a rise in “vexatious” parental complaints over the preceding three years.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has previously said she shares this concern and, according to a recent report in The Times newspaper, is planning to overhaul the complaints system.
Minutes on ChatGPT ‘generates weeks of work’
James Bowen, assistant general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “AI is undoubtedly making this easier for parents to do. In a matter of minutes, large language models such as ChatGPT can produce long and complicated letters of complaint that can then be sent to different agencies at a click of a button.
“A few minutes on ChatGPT can generate weeks of work for schools. This is why it is so important that the government looks to reform the current complaints process.”
Dr Foley said he would like to see the complaints system changed so it is necessary to demonstrate that you have gone through a school or trust’s policy and exhausted that process before you are able to go to a regulator, unless the complaint is about a headteacher or CEO.
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