Quiet Disruption: A Reintroduction
There’s a version of the AI in education story that gets told a lot. It usually involves a teacher discovering ChatGPT, a worried headteacher, a policy document that arrives six months too late, and a lot of breathless commentary from people who have never stood in front of a class.
This isn’t that story.
I’ve been working in Further Education for several years, currently as Area Vocational Lead for IT and Digital at a college in the Northeast of England. I lead Level 3 Digital courses, manage a budget, have been a staff governor and sat on the Finance Committee. I also spend a significant amount of my own time building AI systems — not as a hobby, but because I became convinced early on that the gap between what these tools can do and what most organisations are actually doing with them is one of the more interesting problems of the moment.
That conviction led me to design and build a prompt engineering framework — integrating GPT-4o and Microsoft Copilot Studio — that enables staff who have never written a line of code to generate structured AI outputs tailored to their specific professional needs. It’s currently live across curriculum, quality and senior leadership functions at my college, and the experience of building and deploying it shapes everything I write here.
What The Quiet Disruption is about
This publication started as something looser — a place to think out loud about AI and education. That was useful for me, but I’m not sure it was useful enough for anyone else.
So I’m refocusing.
The Quiet Disruption is now specifically about what AI adoption actually looks like from inside an institution that is genuinely trying to do it — not performatively, not for an Ofsted bullet point, but as a real and considered change to how people work. That means writing about the systems and frameworks behind making AI work at scale. It means being honest about what hasn’t worked as well as what has. It means taking the organisational and human dimensions of this seriously, not just the technical ones.
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It also means paying attention to the bigger picture. The Northeast of England has just been designated the UK’s first AI Growth Zone, with up to £30 billion in investment and thousands of jobs expected to follow. That’s not an abstract policy announcement it has direct implications for FE colleges, skills providers, and the communities we serve. I intend to write about that, regularly and specifically, as someone who is here and watching it unfold.
Who this is for?
Honestly? Several kinds of people, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
FE and HE leaders who are trying to figure out what responsible, practical AI adoption looks like in their institutions — and who are tired of being sold solutions by people who have never worked in one.
AI and EdTech professionals who want a ground-level view of what happens when you actually deploy these tools with real staff in real settings, rather than in a controlled pilot or a conference demo.
Business leaders and organisations in the Northeast and beyond who are navigating their own AI adoption journeys and recognise that the challenges — staff confidence, governance, meaningful implementation — are not so different from ours.
And anyone, frankly, who thinks the conversation about AI deserves more rigour, more honesty, and less noise than it currently gets.
What comes next?
Fortnightly, I’ll be publishing here. Some pieces will be practical — frameworks, approaches, lessons from implementation. Some will be analytical — looking at policy, sector trends, and what the evidence actually says. Some will be more personal — honest accounts of what it’s like to be building this in real time, in a real institution, with real constraints.
If that sounds like something worth reading, I’d be glad to have you along.
The Quiet Disruption is published fortnightly. If you found this useful, consider sharing it with a colleague who is navigating the same questions.
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