Marking and planning are about to get much cheaper. Knowing which student needs which conversation is not — and that's where the job actually lives.
“The teacher who reads the room will always beat the model that only reads the text.”
About this report
This report is general guidance, not professional advice. Recommendations reflect patterns the model has seen, not your specific circumstances. Evaluate them against your own situation, professional obligations, and your organisation's policies (including any AI-use, procurement, data, or compliance rules) before acting. For significant career, financial, or wellbeing decisions, we recommend speaking with a qualified career counsellor, financial adviser, or other appropriate professional. See our Terms of Service for the full version.
Start here
Your next 90 days.
The whole report in one view. Each step links to the reasoning behind it further down the page.
1
Pick your next set of report comments and draft three of them in ChatGPT before writing the rest yourself
Report-writing is your single biggest time sink; three drafts is enough to know exactly how much of the work AI can genuinely take off you.
2
Start a simple document called 'Prompts that worked' and add to it every time AI gives you something usable
The compounding value of AI comes from reusing what works — starting from scratch each week is the mistake most teachers make.
3
Have a 20-minute conversation with a colleague already using AI in their teaching
One honest chat with someone two steps ahead will save you months of trial and error and tell you what your department is actually doing about it.
I teach senior secondary English at a public high school. My week is lesson planning, teaching five classes, marking essays and drafts, writing report comments, parent-teacher communication, and running a debating club. I'm strong at getting reluctant readers engaged and at giving feedback that students actually act on. AI-wise I use ChatGPT most weeks to help brainstorm lesson ideas and rewrite worksheets, but I don't trust it anywhere near marking and I've never paid for a subscription.
The reasoning
Where you stand today.
Day to day, you're doing something that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades and won't: standing in front of a class of teenagers and pulling them into a text, a debate, an idea. Around that core sit the tasks that eat your evenings — lesson planning, drafting worksheets, writing report comments, marking essays, chasing parent emails, prepping debating rounds.
Over the next five years, most of that surrounding work gets lighter. AI will draft your worksheets, propose differentiated versions for your mixed-ability classes, summarise reading passages at different levels, and write solid first-pass report comments you refine. Marking is the interesting middle ground: AI will happily generate feedback, but the profession is rightly cautious, and you'll likely use it as a second reader rather than a marker in its own right — flagging patterns across a class, checking your comments are consistent, catching things you missed at 10pm on a Sunday.
What stays firmly yours: knowing which student needs pushing and which needs praise this week, the moment a class finally 'gets' a poem, the trust that makes a reluctant reader try again, and the professional judgement that decides what a B+ actually means. That's the job. The rest is admin — and admin is exactly what this technology is best at lifting.
Where AI fits in your role
Three categories. Same job.
Most roles split into three buckets over the next 5 years. The middle one — where AI helps you, not replaces you — is usually the largest by year three.
35%
45%
20%
Distinctly human · 35%
This stays distinctly yours.
Augmented by AI · 45%
AI helps you do this faster or better.
Lifted by AI · 20%
AI takes this off your plate.
A closer look · common tasks
Teaching classes and running discussions
Distinctly human
AI takes ~5%
Being in the room with teenagers, reading their energy, and steering a live discussion is exactly the kind of work AI cannot do.
Giving feedback students actually act on
Distinctly human
AI takes ~15%
AI can generate feedback, but knowing which student needs which words this week comes from your relationship with them.
Running the debating club
Distinctly human
AI takes ~10%
Coaching argument, poise, and confidence in real time is deeply human work — though AI can help you prep motions and research.
Lesson planning and unit design
Augmented by AI
AI takes ~45%
AI is excellent at generating options, differentiated versions, and starter activities — you stay the judge of what actually fits your class.
Writing and rewriting worksheets
Augmented by AI
AI takes ~60%
You're already doing this. In five years it'll be near-instant, with reading-level variants generated on demand.
Marking essays and drafts
Augmented by AI
AI takes ~40%
AI will draft feedback and flag patterns across a class, but the professional call on standards and grades stays with you.
Writing report comments
Lifted by AI
AI takes ~75%
First-draft report comments are a natural fit for AI — you'll edit and personalise rather than write from scratch.
Parent-teacher communication
Augmented by AI
AI takes ~40%
AI can draft the tricky email you've been putting off; you decide tone and what to actually say.
Curating texts and resources
Augmented by AI
AI takes ~35%
AI can summarise, compare, and suggest — but your taste in what will actually land with your students is the value.
Admin and email triage
Lifted by AI
AI takes ~70%
Scheduling, replies, summaries of long emails — this is the boring bit AI takes off your plate first.
What only you bring
Your moat.
Getting reluctant readers to engage
Choosing the right text, the right moment, and the right challenge for a specific student is craft built over years — no model has that context.
Giving feedback students act on
You already know this is your edge. Knowing what a student can hear this week versus next is relational, not analytical.
Professional judgement on standards
Deciding what a piece of writing is really worth against a rubric, a cohort, and a curriculum is a judgement call parents and systems trust a human to make.
Live classroom presence
Managing thirty teenagers, reading the room, and shifting a lesson on the fly is the part of teaching that gets more valuable as everything around it gets automated.
Debate coaching and argument craft
Teaching students to think on their feet, hold a position under pressure, and disagree well is exactly the skill AI makes more important, not less.
Trust with parents and students
The relationship that lets a parent hear hard news well, or a student try again after failure, is built face to face over terms — not in a prompt.
What's coming · next 5 years
Expect AI tools to become standard-issue in schools within three years, much like interactive whiteboards did a generation ago. Marking assistants that suggest feedback on drafts will be common, and most departments will have shared prompt libraries and lesson-planning tools by 2027. Long-context models will happily read an entire novel plus your unit plan plus a student's prior essays and give you something usable, which changes what 'personalised feedback' looks like at scale. Governance will tighten around student data and AI-generated assessment, so the teachers who understand both the craft and the guardrails will be the ones trusted to lead. Parent communication and reporting will be substantially AI-assisted by default. The core act of teaching — presence, relationship, judgement in the room — becomes more valuable, not less, because everything around it gets cheaper.
How to get ahead
Skills worth building.
Quick wins first
Quick win
A few hours or a weekend.
Prompting for lesson design
Learning to ask AI for lesson ideas by specifying year level, ability range, text, and time available — instead of generic 'give me a lesson on Macbeth'.
WhyYou already use ChatGPT for this; a few better habits will double what you get from the same 15 minutes.
Drafting report comments with AI
Feeding a rubric and a few notes on a student, then editing the AI's draft into your voice.
WhyReport-writing season is the single biggest evening-and-weekend cost of the job, and this reclaims hours immediately.
Few weeks
A few hours a week for a month or two.
Using AI as a second reader on drafts
Not marking with AI — using it to spot patterns across a class set, check consistency of your comments, and catch what you missed late at night.
WhyKeeps you firmly in charge of grades while quietly making your marking sharper and faster.
Building a personal prompt library
A simple document of the prompts that work for you — worksheet rewrites, differentiated versions, parent emails, debate prep — reused every week.
WhyThe teachers who compound their AI use save real hours; the ones who start fresh every time save minutes.
Reading-level differentiation with AI
Taking a text or task and generating variants for different reading abilities in your class.
WhyGenuine differentiation used to cost hours per unit. It's now the fastest single win for a senior English teacher's practice.
Few months
A real course or sustained practice.
Understanding AI, assessment, and academic integrity
Getting properly informed on how students use AI, how to design tasks that still measure their thinking, and what your jurisdiction's policy actually says.
WhyThis is becoming a defining professional skill for English teachers specifically — English is the subject most affected by student AI use.
Your learning path
Four levels of fluency, calibrated to your role.
Four levels
Where most people in your role should start — and what each level would unlock. Build these skills through courses, self-study, or your employer's training.
1
Level 1
Basics
A few hours
Recommended for you
Get properly confident with the free version of ChatGPT or Claude for lesson prep, worksheet rewrites, and first-draft report comments — the same tasks you already touch, done better.
Start this week
Take a worksheet you're rewriting this week and paste the original into ChatGPT with the prompt: 'Rewrite this for a Year 11 English class of mixed reading abilities. Give me a version for confident readers and a version for reluctant readers. Keep the same learning objective.' Compare both against what you'd have written yourself.
2
Level 2
Power User
A few weekends
Master prompting, tool choice, and reliable habits so lesson planning, differentiation, and report comments become a genuine partnership rather than occasional help.
Start this week
Pick one student's recent essay and one rubric. Prompt Claude with both and ask: 'Draft feedback in the voice of an experienced English teacher. Point out three specific strengths and two things to work on next.' Compare against your own marking — note where it was useful and where your judgement clearly beat it.
3
Level 3
Builder
A few weeks
Design repeatable workflows for the highest-cost parts of your year — report-writing season, marking a class set of drafts, generating differentiated resources for a whole unit.
Start this week
Map out your report-writing process into 5-6 steps (gather data, sort by student, draft comment, personalise, proof, submit). Design a prompt template that takes rubric scores plus 3 short notes on a student and produces a draft comment in your voice.
4
Level 4
Certifiable
A few months
Pursue formal AI-in-education credentials that position you as the teacher your department turns to on AI policy, assessment design, and academic integrity.
Start this week
Spend 30 minutes researching two options — the Common Sense Education AI Foundations for Educators certification and the ISTE Generative AI courses — and bookmark the one that fits your jurisdiction and workload best.
Each level builds on the last.
Your human moat
You already know your edge: getting reluctant readers to engage and giving feedback students actually act on. Those are exactly the skills the next five years will reward most, because they cannot be prompted into existence. The paperwork gets lighter; your craft gets more valuable.
1–5 year horizon
Moves that compound.
1
Become the person in your department who understands AI, assessment, and academic integrity
WhyEnglish is the subject most affected by student AI use; the teacher who understands both the craft and the policy will shape how their school responds and is trusted to lead.
2
Build a personal library of AI-assisted workflows for the parts of your year that hurt most — reporting, marking drafts, differentiation
WhyIn five years, teachers with these workflows will be finishing their admin at school; those without will still be doing it on Sundays.
3
Invest in your face-to-face craft — debate coaching, feedback conversations, reluctant-reader work — as your public identity as a teacher
WhyAs everything around teaching gets automated, the human core gets more valuable and more visible; the teachers known for it will be the ones schools protect and promote.
These are bigger than quarterly moves. They're investments in skills, relationships, role positioning, or infrastructure that pay off across years — tied to the structural shifts in the outlook above.
Worth reading
Where this comes from.
5 sources
Future of Jobs Report
World Economic Forum · 2023-2025
Global data on which parts of professional roles change first — teaching is consistently identified as high-relationship and durable.
We give you the title and publication so you can find the latest version — reports like these are updated regularly.
Your turn
What would yours say?
Describe your role in a paragraph. Creating an account takes about thirty seconds and comes with enough credits to run your first check-up and ask a few follow-up questions.