Hi SW*AID-ers

Hope you are all well. It was lovely to see some of you over the past few weeks at BTF+ events, and our causal coffee last week.

We are cooking up a breakfast learning event for end of Nov (details to come soon), but had a request from our friends at Cyber First to share.

CyberFirst is a GCHQ/ NCSC-led project working with schools to encourage students into careers in cybersecurity. Due to the success of the project since its inception, next year CyberFirst becomes TechFirst, with control of the project moving to DSIT and with a significantly increased remit. 

Schools apply to be a CyberFirst-accredited school, both in recognition of the standard of their current offer around computer science and careers, but also to work with the CyberFirst team to improve their curriculum, their careers offer, their industry links or their teacher training provision. 

The Christmas Lecture gives schools a chance to introduce their students to the world of AI safely, formally and backed by professionals. The students will come away from the event with a clear understanding of how they can immediately begin to incorporate AI into their day-to-day lives to prepare themselves for the world of work powered by AI. 

The teachers present will be paired with an industry specialist to improve and develop their own practice. They will compose an action plan, and be paired with an industry ambassador accordingly. They will choose from up to two of the following action plan points: 

• Development of AI teaching within computer science

• Incorporation of AI teaching in the wider curriculum

• Support for governors- policy writing, monitoring

• Integration of AI in daily practice- lesson planning, assessment, behaviour management, report writing etc

• AI safety for students/ staff/ parents

These action plans will be worked on between January-July 2026. 

The role of the ambassadors will be to act as a knowledge base, sounding board and critical friend. The ambassadors will be there as an AI specialist, and no pedagogical knowledge is expected or required. Ideally, interactions will include at least 6 meetings (online or face to face) through the year- one to introduce, 4x termly meetings, 1 wrap-up, plus any additional commitment decided by the ambassador. 

The ambassadors would all be invited to the Christmas Lecture at Bristol Cathedral, on the morning of Tuesday 9th December. 

It would be useful to know any particular skill sets of the ambassadors, or any aspect of AI adoption they are particularly interested in developing.  

If anyone is interested please email [email protected]

Taught by Humans is excited to be helping with this and hope we can get a few more SW*AID ladies involved.

We’ll be in touch soon with November event details.

Laura