"Teachers at Euan Blair firm report 'horrendous stress' after AI used to rate their work,"

Teachers at Euan Blair’s £1.6bn tech training company, Multiverse, have blown the whistle about “horrendous stress” and feeling constantly watched after bosses started using AI models to surveil and rate their teaching...

The AI is trained to flag problems in their performance ranging from not fixing a disruption to the online connection quickly enough – within about a minute – to using too many “filler” phrases, such as “sort of” and “kind of”.

Teachers called the newly introduced system “remorseless” and “unnerving”, and said some staff were on edge, losing sleep and seeking therapy...

Its new AI teacher monitoring system tags each instructor by their “risk status”, calculates a “percentage confidence score” and produces written comments about teachers’ work for managers to see at a glance...

“Since all of this has come in, the stress level has been absolutely horrendous,” said one of several Multiverse teachers who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It has affected sleep, and not just for me. I’ve gone through a lot of things in my life, and I haven’t ever been in a position where I’m waking up in the middle of the night.”...

“This is inducing stress because you consistently have to be cautious,” one teacher said. “Your attention is no longer delivering [the lesson] and listening to the learner [but] ‘am I saying the right thing so the AI doesn’t mark me down for something stupid that I’ve mistakenly said’.”

Another teacher called it “very uncomfortable”.

Multiverse says the AI does not replace human judgment but “directs human time to where it’s needed most” by highlighting problems. A spokesperson said it was “using AI to improve the experience of learners and customers”, and that only human managers wrote teachers’ performance reviews.

They did not directly address complaints the system caused stress and anxiety and felt “remorseless”, but said its introduction was communicated in advance and teachers will have access to the data the AI collects...