6 October 2026
James Laycock is teaching Scots pupils AI.
Jamie Laycock is a former Principal Teacher of Biology who was appointed to the newly created role of Principal Teacher of AI Literacy at Mearns Castle High School in East Renfrewshire, Scotland.
Overview of the Role & Curriculum
Core Focus: The curriculum is explicitly designed to foster healthy skepticism rather than blindly promoting AI tools.
Pupils are taught to doubt, check, and question AI output, recognize hallucinations or bias, and understand both the capabilities and limitations of generative models. Pupil Reach:
S1 and S2: Every younger secondary pupil receives dedicated AI literacy lessons.
S3–S4: Older year groups engage with the topic via personal education and citizenship classes.
S5–S6: Senior pupils can take an elective class on AI.
Practical Lessons: Topics covered include detecting deepfakes/AI-generated images, identifying machine "sycophancy" (the tendency for chatbots to flatter the user), and preventing users from treating language models as trusted friends.
Broader Reach: Beyond teaching students, Laycock is tasked with upskilling teaching staff and creating AI literacy resources that can be shared with other schools across Scotland and the UK.
What do the pupils think?
Pupils at Mearns Castle High School have shown a mix of surprise, curiosity, and career-focused anxiety around AI:
Difficulty Spotting Synthetic Media: In early practical exercises—such as sorting genuine photographs from AI-generated deepfakes—pupils quickly discovered that distinguishing reality from synthetic media was far harder than they initially expected.
Career Concerns: A major driver for student engagement with the new AI literacy curriculum stems from anxiety over their future career paths.
Many pupils (and their parents) have expressed worry about how automation, generative models, and rapid technological shifts will impact the job market and traditional trades by the time they leave school. Over-Trusting the Machine: Many pupils initially fall into the trap of treating conversational AI as a reliable authority or an objective friend. Laycock's lessons actively counter this by demonstrating how AI model outputs are sycophantic (flattering the user's ideas) and prone to hallucinations.
Building Critical Skepticism: The primary takeaway for pupils has been learning to treat AI as an unreliable assistant rather than a primary search engine or truth-teller—emphasizing that without their own foundational knowledge, they cannot spot when a model is making things up.
What do their teachers think?
Teachers at Mearns Castle High School—and across the wider region—view the initiative with a mix of relief, initial apprehension, and growing enthusiasm:
Relief Over Practical Guidance: Before the appointment of a dedicated AI lead, many teachers felt overwhelmed trying to keep up with generative AI tools, manage plagiarism concerns, or determine how to safely incorporate AI into lesson planning. Having a dedicated specialist inside the school provides clear boundaries, ethical frameworks, and practical strategies.
Shift in Plagiarism Mindset: Staff are shifting away from treating AI purely as a cheating mechanism to be policed or banned. Instead, the focus has moved toward helping pupils understand when AI use is constructive and why relying on it for core tasks bypasses genuine learning and skill development.
Initial Anxiety About Relevancy: Like many professionals, some teachers initially voiced concern over how generative AI might alter their traditional roles or render certain teaching methods obsolete. The school's training emphasizes that AI is a supporting tool, reinforcing the irreplaceable value of human mentoring and subject-matter expertise.
Saving Time on Admin: Teachers who embrace the school's AI training actively use generative tools to streamline administrative tasks—such as generating initial lesson plan drafts, creating differentiated reading materials for various reading levels, and preparing quiz ideas—allowing them to focus more time on direct pupil interaction.
Cross-Curricular Collaboration: Rather than keeping AI contained strictly within IT or Computer Science departments, teachers across humanities, arts, and sciences are actively integrating AI critical thinking into their respective subjects, using Jamie Laycock's resources as a shared blueprint.
The head teacher's opinion?
Stuart Clark, the head teacher of Mearns Castle High School, views the dedicated role as a necessary, proactive measure to protect and prepare pupils rather than an endorsement of the technology.
His perspective centers on three key principles:
Action vs. Advocacy: Clark explicitly emphasizes that creating a dedicated AI post is about responsibility, not promotion.
As he stated: "We're really clear that acting on AI is not the same thing as advocating for it or promoting it."
Avoiding Past Mistakes with Social Media: Clark compares the rapid rise of AI to the early days of social media.
His goal is to avoid repeating the mistake of allowing young people to adopt powerful new technologies en masse without first understanding the psychological, ethical, and societal implications. Economic and Societal Impact: He acknowledges that artificial intelligence will significantly reshape both society and the job market.
Therefore, the school’s duty is to give pupils the critical tools to navigate both the genuine opportunities and the inherent risks of AI safely.
What extra costs to the school are there?
The creation of the Principal Teacher of AI Literacy role at Mearns Castle High School incurs minimal direct extra cost to the school:
Internal Staff Reallocation: Jamie Laycock was already an existing member of teaching staff (a Principal Teacher of Biology).
The post was created by restructuring and reallocating internal responsibilities rather than hiring an additional full-time teacher, avoiding a net increase in payroll headcount. No Major Software Procurement: The curriculum focuses on critical thinking, media literacy, identifying hallucinations, and evaluating outputs.
Because the focus is on evaluating AI rather than building proprietary platforms, the school relies on existing infrastructure and free or standard educational tiers of AI tools rather than expensive enterprise software contracts. Absorbed Curriculum Costs: Teaching materials and resources are generated in-house by Laycock as part of his post's remit, with the intention of sharing them open-access across East Renfrewshire and Scottish schools.
The primary cost to the school is an opportunity cost: allocating a proportion of an experienced Principal Teacher's time and timetable away from traditional science instruction to focus on AI literacy and cross-departmental staff training.
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