What is an AI School Report?

An AI School Report is simply a school report that has been written using the assistance of AI.

AI School Reports are typically written using the assistance of a specialist EdTech company. These companies design an interface specifically for teachers. Alternatively, teacher can write AI reports directly through an AI provider like Chat GPT, Gemini or CoPilot.

For the person receiving a school report, in other words a parent or student, an AI Report can look almost exactly the same as a report written entirely by a teacher. AI reports can still contain personal elements about a student which are included as ‘prompts’ by a teacher.

In this blog, we will provide an overview of the main benefits, weaknesses and characteristics of an AI School Report. We will also provide an example prompt you can try using an AI provider for free to generate your own reports.

Strengths of AI School Reports

AI School Reports have a number of benefits for teachers, schools and parents.

Benefits for teachers:

• Using AI to write school reports significantly reduces workload. Using an AI provider directly is an extremely cost effective way of reducing your workload for free. However, using a specialist tool to write AI Reports can significantly speed up the process.
• Using AI can make your reports grammatically correct. If you are a teacher who is dyslexic or feels anxious about extended pieces of writing, report writing can feel like a huge chore. 
• AI reports allow teachers to reduce their cognitive load. Report writing can be a stressful activity as you need to store lots of information. You have to retrieve information about lots of students in your working memory in order to write a good report. AI is now able to do the heavy lifting for teachers, leaving more space for teachers to do higher order thinking for their lessons.

Benefits for schools:

•  AI report writers allow schools to maintain a consistent tone to parents in terms of their report writing. Typically, when reports are written by teachers, senior or middle leaders are then required to proofread these reports. Using AI to assist teachers can remove grammatical and formatting errors from reports, enabling senior and middle leaders to have their workload reduced and reports to be consistent for parents.
• AI tools are extremely cost effective for schools. We know that there is a teacher recruitment and retention crisis right now with 44% of teachers in England wanting to quit by 2027. The cost for a school to readvertise a burnt out teacher is significant. AI can be used to support teachers either for free through AI providers or typically for a fairly minimal cost through an EdTech provider.
• AI also helps to prevent teachers from using templates – a strategy previously used by teachers to reduce workload from report writing. The issue with templates is that parents would often receive lots of similar report comments. AI works differently to templates in that you can use the same prompt several times, but you will always get a different result. There is still a risk of reports being similar if teachers use the same prompt on repeat which is where specialist EdTech tools can add value.

Benefits for parents:

• The main benefit for parents is that AI assisted school reports can be absolutely beautiful. Ultimately, a parent really wants to know how their child is doing in school and AI provides an opportunity to present an update to parents in a well written and well structured way. All AI reports should be personalised to every child to maximise the value for parents.
• It sounds counter-intuitive, but the likelihood is that schools that use AI will have more unique reports, just due to the prevalence of using templates in the profession to reduce workload. Obviously, if teachers write every single report without repeating things then the human touch will always be more unique. However, the reality is that many teachers face the daunting task of writing hundreds of report comments alongside their normal workload which is already unmanageable. In our experience, it is rare to find teachers that still do this. The excessive workload prompts most teachers to opt for paid templates, or at the very least to copy and paste statements for multiple students. Using AI irradicates this practice.

Weaknesses of AI School Reports

We are clearly biased, but we do not realistically see many weaknesses with using AI to support report writing.

The main weaknesses in our view are:

• Some parents do not like the idea of it. It is nice to feel like the report you are receiving has been hand-crafted for your child. Sometimes people assume that using AI means that there is no personalisation from the teacher. That the teacher clicks a button and everything is written for them – this is clearly not the case. This will always be a negative point against using AI. The same sentiment exists with most things, we would probably prefer all of our clothes to be hand-made by an artisan. However, many of us cannot afford this luxury.  Technology enhances everything we do, many years ago school reports would have been hand written and signed by a teacher. Now they are typically digitally produced with the ability to copy and paste. Once parents see school reports written by AI and understand how it works we find they are less opposed to it. The reality is that in our view AI actually enhances the personalisation and quality of reports, but also reduces workload.
• AI can make stuff up. This phenomenon is called a ‘hallucination’. The key to limiting the impact of this when using AI is through using careful prompt engineering and proof reading reports for errors. Hallucinations happen when a teacher is requesting more things than the AI has in order to fulfil the request. In this instance, the AI, like a dutiful student, will try its best to deliver its brief. This can result in sections being made up using its vast knowledge of what a typical school report looks like.
• Learning how to write good prompts is a task in and of itself. For a time poor teacher, training themselves on how to write prompts in Chat GPT probably feels like more effort than just writing the reports. This is where specialist EdTech tools which are designed for teachers like Vibbl can add real value. 

Example: Free AI Prompt to Write a School Report

Here is an example prompt you can try using with Chat GPT or any other AI platform to write a school report. Please note that there are sections you will need to customise (marked in bold) for each student to get good results..