AI is Giving the Non-Professional Classes a Voice – and Institutions Are Feeling It

There is a quiet revolution under way in how ordinary people communicate with schools, airlines and the NHS – and institutions are only beginning to feel its force, writes Joanna Gray.

“Usually such parents barrel into school, have an incoherent shout in the playground, swear at me and whoever is close, tell me their child is an angel and barrel out again. Now in the age of AI this has all changed. Such parents are now sending in AI generated emails of complaint and they are brilliant.” So explains the Head of School of a large London primary. He says that take-up of AI has accelerated in the past half term, giving voice to a section of parents previously unable to reasonably articulate their concerns. What this means positively for parents has varied ramifications for teachers. Best-case scenario, it should improve the classroom experience; worst-case scenario, it adds a massive extra workload for teachers with spurious but legally accurate demands.

The Head shares with me two examples from the summer term of this year. “A Year One student [six-years-old] wet herself. This is not unusual. This child arrived in reception still wearing nappies. It is not unusual for Key Stage One children to wet themselves. We have great teaching assistants who know what to do in these instances. She changed into her PE kit and at the end of the day the class teacher told the parent what had happened and gave her daughter’s wet clothes in a plastic bag. So far so routine. The following week I received a beautifully written email from the mother, copying in the Chair of Governors and the CEO of our Education Trust. The email insisted that she see the school’s CCTV footage around the time of the incident because the mum did not believe her daughter would have wet herself unprovoked. She also issued a subject access request whereby any time her daughter’s name had come up in school communications, she could read the paperwork. I had to spend a considerable time pulling up the CCTV and then anonymising all the other children featured, the same with the paperwork, manually retracting all other children’s names. It took hours.

“The following week we had an incident with a very challenging student from Year 4. He has a one-to-one SEND support worker but the child picked up his chair and attacked him. He then ran into the toilets and turned all the taps on. I was called to assist and the student ran out of the toilets and dodged both of us; he continued to run around the school throwing furniture. My colleague and I are well trained in this sort of thing and to prevent him doing further damage to himself or anyone else we had to catch him. We did and safely got him sitting on a chair in the corridor. His mum was called and collected him. Similarly, a few days later, I received another AI-generated email, copied in to the governors and the school trust, alleging an inappropriate use of two adult males in the ‘violent restraint’ of a child. Again she demanded to see the CCTV and issued a subject access request. Again, this required hours of my time.”

In both instances nothing whatsoever untoward was revealed and the school trust took over the correspondence with the parent. However, such incidents are bound to increase as parents share with each other the wonders of AI-assisted emails. My friend Rachel works as a cleaner and, by her own admission, ‘is no friend to learning’ – she has similarly benefited from the democratisation of fluent literacy. Fobbed off by Emirates when her holiday of a lifetime involved a cancelled flight and two days being marooned in Dubai, Rachel was glum when her initial requests for a refund were ignored. With the help of AI, however, she generated a pitch-perfect complaint, again copying in the group CEO, and received an immediate apology and a full refund.

So too my neighbour, the elderly wife of a builder who is suffering from tongue-base cancer. The NHS has, according to her, been “dog shite” – but she’s “all over AI” and has found a number of medications that would help her husband. She kept badgering the oncologist to prescribe oxycodone, the oncologist did and the spasms subsided.

Such uses of AI are giving a tremendous sense of agency to whole swathes of people who have previously felt excluded from worlds dominated by written communications. How this pans out will be interesting to see. Will Britain descend into a litigious society where businesses and the public sector become paralysed dealing with easy-to-access – if not so easy to process – complaints? Or will businesses and the public sector increase levels of friction and seal themselves off from an enthusiastically AI-assisted customer base?

How disappointing it would be if, like emails, AI simply became a massive bureaucratic nuisance.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.