Alasdair Harris: How AI can create better teachers

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere at the moment. 

It permeates conversations about health, slips into discussions on climate and bounces off the walls of classrooms as teachers strain to halt the proliferation of artificially generated work in schools.   

And it’s not hard to see why the technology has so much appeal. Just imagine the time savings that AI can bring to a university student. It’s never been easier to just throw an assignment brief into ChatGPT, ask for a quick rewrite to sound less like AI and submit the piece before heading off to the pub.   

But what happens when teachers use this forbidden fruit of immediacy in their own work? 

According to Alasdair Harris, the founder of LingoTeach.ai, the results can be transformational. 

“AI is making it much easier to work efficiently and be a better teacher,” says Harris. “Because it's giving you access to complex resources that could take you an hour to make but would only last for two minutes in a lesson, which is just not a good deal for teachers or students at all.” 

LingoTeach.ai, which has received support from the Scottish Government’s Techscaler programme, is designed to allow language teachers to create lesson plans in as little as 90 seconds. The technology works by taking request for specific worksheets or quizzes from teachers and generating a fully-fledged result in seconds. Currently the system has the capability to create lesson plans and content in over 30 languages and has a user base of over 11,000 teachers. 

“Writing the content ourselves can be an exhausting thing because you might have this great idea, but you just don't have time,” says Harris. “Teachers need to get home, feed the kids, or beat the traffic and so on. That’s where AI can step in and do that lesson creation instead.”   

But what is stopping wiley young pupils from deploying the age-old trick tactic of whataboutery? It does seem more than slightly hypocritical for a teacher to use AI when students are discouraged and even punished for using it.   

“My attitude is that AI should be for teachers, because pupils already have teachers, and we know what we're doing and they have our support,” says Harris. “But teachers only have each other in a shared area by the school computers, which is usually absolute chaos. So, AI should be used by teachers to support us and allow us to give the students what they want, which is a good education.” 

Before starting LingoTeach.ai, Harris worked for 15 years as a teacher in London, where he saw firsthand the “crushing workload” that many teachers were accepting as part and parcel of their day job.   

A 2025 survey by the Educational Institute of Scotland, the largest education union in Scotland, showed that 44 per cent of its members said they usually work more than 7 hours extra per week. More than a quarter of respondents to the survey said that they work more than 15 additional hours per week, the equivalent of more than two full working days.  

Five years ago, the SNP's election manifesto promised to cut class contact time by 90 minutes a week to give teachers more time for activities such as lesson preparation and marking. This is yet to happen and the EIS is in the process of gathering votes on the subject to see whether the union will take industrial action.

“The best teachers are the ones that have a positive feedback loop in their classroom where the teacher turns up refreshed and with energy so the kids vibe off that,” says Harris.

“But as you get into winter or you get into exam season, everyone's just shattered and that can spawn lots of other difficulties around discipline and engagement. Then it's overwhelming and the teacher isn’t looking forward to teaching a class or not going to work because of exhaustion. In the worst-case scenario, they quit after three to five years with no one there to replace them.”  

Teacher retention is a growing problem in Scotland. Earlier this year the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) responded to a freedom of information request that revealed there was a 66 per cent increase in the numbers of teachers leaving teaching in Scotland in 2024-25 for those aged 55 or younger. The data also showed a 96 per cent increase in teachers leaving aged 21 to 25 and a 106 per cent increase amongst those aged 41 to 45.  

If lesson plans are being created by AI, some may say that a potential solution to fix this growing crisis would be to replace teachers with AI. This could create an almost unbreakable education system in theory, where AI teachers are never too tired or distracted, always turn up with a virtual happy demeanour and never strike for better wages.    

Unsurprisingly, Harris thinks this is a terrible idea.   

“The best teachers are the ones who have nurtured positive relationships with their pupils,” says Harris. “But it's not just the subject matter that you pick up from teachers. In reality there's a lot of different lives that children are living. Teachers can be anything from just a teacher to a social worker, a parent, a big brother or a sibling to their students. And that's something, the relationships and the touch, that can't be replaced by a robot.”