Update 28: Going for gold

Today marks the beginning of our collaboration with Nicky Parrott, a highly respected and experienced education leader, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Nicky brings decades of experience in Special Educational Needs (SEN), Inclusion, and safeguarding and is passionate about fostering inclusive environments and driving positive educational outcomes for all pupils. Like us, she believes that technology, particularly AI, can transform the way schools coordinate and deliver support for special educational needs (SEN).  

She was one of the first SENCOs we interviewed and was exceptionally generous with her nonexistent free time, going out of her way to enlighten us to the subtleties of a SENCO’s workload and the myriad challenges they face. 

Our work together will initially focus on creating “calibration sets”, which are essential for the automated evaluation of the AI-powered products we are building in collaboration with select schools from across the UK. We’ve touched on this aspect of our process in a previous post. In simple terms, Nicky will review a product’s AI-generated outputs, amend them as she sees fit, and, in doing so, create a set of reference outputs (aka “gold”), against which subsequent outputs can be measured.

Though this is just the start. There are numerous other aspects of our rapidly evolving product development process that will be supercharged through having an expert of Nicky’s calibre to hand.

Research is one example. We’ve spent the summer painstakingly creating a balanced sample of more than 3,000 schools from across the UK, and now aim to interview as many as possible over the coming months. Being able to review the generated insights with Nicky will enrich our understanding of the problems schools face and what they want and need from a solution.

Exciting times indeed!

Author: Benjamin Colchester