CENTURY case study: How Cognita is deploying AI in schools across the world

Cognita Schools is a group of 81 schools in 11 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. We spoke to Director of Education James Carroll to learn more about how they approached a large-scale rollout of CENTURY during the pandemic and what their plans are for the future. Here’s what James had to say.

Over the past 15 months, we have launched CENTURY’s AI-powered learning tools in 45 of our schools across Europe. While our journey with AI started during the Covid-19 pandemic, it has now become an important part of teaching and learning in our schools more generally. This academic year alone, our pupils have answered over five million questions on our platform.

When CENTURY’s International Director Charles talked me through the platform in June 2018, I remember thinking that the use of AI to help teachers make purposeful interventions and to bring learning to life for students almost seemed a bit too good to be true. In July 2019, we ran a pilot at North Bridge House and saw great potential in the platform: we saw how it could support our students and bridge learning from the traditional classroom to extended study at home.

Fast forward to 2021 and we have launched AI-powered learning tools in 45 of our schools, across Spain, Switzerland and the UK. One of the biggest challenges for us was figuring out how to take our people on this digital journey. Not only were we navigating remote learning for the students in our care during a global pandemic, this was all new for our teachers in terms of professional development as well. There was no one-size-fits-all solution. We had to be flexible and look at the needs of each of our individual schools to determine the training and support they would need to turbo-charge remote professional development.

We identified a year group or a department that could spearhead the implementation, because cascading early experience was highly effective. Our Digital Education Advisors work closely with colleagues in schools to identify pioneers and champions within the classroom, which has really enabled us to build momentum, rally the teams and move schools on at a pace that suits them, all while delivering that high-quality online learning experience.

Our main areas of focus over the next two to three years are going to be around some specific areas. Obviously, EdTech is to be one of them, as we’ve already seen its huge potential. We’ll also be looking at how we can further develop our digital professional development offering to help teachers use the data provided to them through EdTech to make purposeful interventions and bridge the learning gap after a very disruptive 18 months. AI will play a clear role in that because the way the platform provides data is second to none. You can look at group level, then at a school level, and then teachers can also look at it down to the class and individual student level.

From a teacher’s perspective, having immediate access to the depth and breadth of data the AI platform provides reduces time spent collating it through other means. Access to high-quality resources, the auto-marked question banks and the ability to automatically personalise learning can all play a role in minimising teacher workload. It all supports our final focus: to use technology not only to boost academic outcomes, but also to improve student and teacher wellbeing.

We’re in a really great position now to be able to take what has been such an amazing tool during the pandemic, and to look at how it’s going to drive learning within our organisation going forward.