There is an urgent need within the Scottish education system to address the rapid emergence of generative AI technologies, and to consider the ethical and educational issues raised as teachers and students experiment with its capabilities.
The AI futures for Scottish education project created the Imagining AI Futures for Education resource for secondary schools, launching this in June 2025 as part of the TRAILS.scot web site: AI Futures Toolkit.
In the course of developing the resource, we worked with teachers to design, develop and pilot the resource, built teachers’ capacity to work with young people around AI futures and advocate for their voices to be heard in their schools, and engaged school leaders and policymakers to build future visions around young people’s perspectives. Working closely with our project partner, Goodison Group in Scotland, and with Scotland’s Futures Forum at the Scottish Parliament, a highlight of the project was bringing our findings and approaches together in an education leaders’ workshop at the Scottish Parliament in March 2025. Read a summary of the workshop here: The Role of Responsible AI in Scottish Education.
Graphic recording of the Scottish Parliament event, 25 March, created by Jenny Capon
The project was funded by the ESRC Impact Accelerator fund, developing further impact from the team’s existing research, including outputs and findings from the BRAID project (2024), together to show how speculative and futures methods can support AI literacies and futures literacy in schools, encouraging ideas that may be hard to imagine or express through more traditional engagement methods.
