Mearns Castle High School in East Renfrewshire has appointed Jamie Laycock to a dedicated AI literacy post, with lessons for pupils and training for colleagues. The approach is less “AI is the future” than “check what it tells you”, which is a more useful starting point for a classroom.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Resultsense reports that Laycock, previously a principal teacher of biology, will teach AI literacy to every S1 and S2 pupil. Older pupils will encounter the subject in citizenship and personal education classes, with an elective available to senior pupils. Resultsense says the BBC described the post as the first of its kind in the UK.
Laycock will also train colleagues and produce materials that other schools can use. The teaching is deliberately sceptical: one early exercise asked pupils to distinguish real photographs from AI-generated ones, while other lessons address chatbots inventing facts, bias in training data and their tendency to flatter users.
Why it matters
AI literacy is often left to a teacher to squeeze into an already full timetable. Mearns Castle is testing a different model: give the subject a dedicated post, teach pupils how to question AI, and share materials beyond the school. That makes this a practical experiment in both curriculum and staffing, not just another school saying AI matters.
The concrete relevance for WittyWires readers is the school’s plan to teach every S1 and S2 pupil to scrutinise AI outputs, while producing resources other schools can use. The account does not establish whether the model improves pupils’ judgement, but it gives other schools something specific to assess.
Our read
Teaching pupils to spot a confident mistake may be more valuable than teaching them to admire a clever demonstration. The interesting test is whether a specialist post makes that literacy more consistent, and whether the shared materials help schools that cannot create one.
What to watch
- Whether Mearns Castle publishes the teaching materials for other schools.
- How the lessons reach pupils beyond S1 and S2.
- Whether other schools adopt a dedicated AI literacy role or fold the subject into existing classes.
Discussion spark: Should AI literacy have a dedicated teacher and curriculum in every school, or is it better taught across existing subjects?
Sources and evidence
- Mearns Castle High creates UK's first AI literacy post – Resultsense (6 October 2026, 07:25 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.