“I’ve realised how damaging the whole thing’s been because, you know, you can’t trust people,” Jen Smith says from her home in Bristol.

Smith is one of a number of parents of children with special education needs and disabilities (Send) who allege Bristol city council spied on them because of their online criticism of the local authority.

More than three years have passed since a leak of council correspondence containing personal details – including wedding photos – of parents of Send children, and the council has finally agreed to commission an independent investigation into the claims.

Smith and others – some of whom wish to remain unnamed – have called on the former Bristol mayor Marvin Rees – now Baron Rees of Easton – to give evidence to the investigation as they search for answers as to why they were monitored.

They want to know if the “social media spying scandal” as it is known in the city was linked the cutting of funding to the Bristol Parent Carers charity days after the allegations first surfaced.

Smith, who has a son and daughter who are autistic and has been battling for improved Send provision for years, became a member of Bristol Parent Carers in 2018 and assisted in running coffee mornings and support groups in the south of the city.

She would frequently post her frustrations with the Send system in the city on social media. “It wasn’t done in any capacity as being part of the forum,” she says.

“It was just that Send was so bad in Bristol we had to challenge it, because it was, it was just a mess.”

Her view was backed up by official reviews and reports at the time. A review into alternative learning provision commissioned by the council found a catalogue of failings, and a report by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission found “significant areas of weakness in the local area’s practice”. “Parents and carers are overwhelmingly condemning of the Send system in Bristol because of the experiences they have had,” the regulators said.

A July 2022 article in the Bristolian, a self-proclaimed “scandal sheet”, published a leaked cache of emails and a spreadsheet of “combative” social media posts that showed officials in the council’s department for children, families and education department had collated examples of social media criticism by Smith and other parent carers.

One official says they are “working hard to uncover some concrete evidence” and lists a number of examples of social media posts, as well as revealing they had been trawling personal photos of some of the members of the parent carer forum.

In one line of the email, the official says: “External comms deduced this is [redacted] as image is the same as wedding photos on [redacted]’s personal Facebook site.”

In another email, an official refers to Smith’s “duplicity”.

She says: “It was personal, critical stuff … They were just so full of themselves. It’s almost like they had this little bubble where they thought they were really important.”

The council conducted an internal “fact finding” mission in August 2022, which found there had been no “systematic monitoring” of social media – an exercise that Smith and others called whitewash.

After a vote by its children and young people policy committee, however, the council announced last month that it would commission an independent investigation into the “historic monitoring of the social media accounts of parents and carers of Send children”.

Smith is critical of Rees, who was Labour mayor from 2016 to 2024 before the people of Bristol voted to abolish the mayoral system in favour of a committee system.

She found him “vitriolic toward Send parents”, alleging he had “a real issue with anybody speaking out whatsoever”. Rees has been contacted for comment.

Kerry Bailes, who has been a Labour councillor in Bristol since 2021, believes she was among the parents monitored when one of her tweets appeared in a subject access request – a process for individuals to ask an organisation for a copy of their personal data.

Bailes, whose son has autism and campaigned for improved Send provision before the allegations of monitoring surfaced, said she had been shocked and baffled when she learned her tweet had appeared in some of the correspondence.

“It feels like a big betrayal,” she says. “It’s like being in an abusive relationship, that you’re reliant, you’re co-dependent on that service, or that person or that group of people, and it just feels like a huge betrayal, but you can’t leave them. Because what’s going to happen to the support for your child?”

Bailes said she took part in protests outside Bristol city hall to raise the profile of the crisis in Send provision in the city.

“We took snippets of that and we put it on social media,” she says. “Our aim was to help the council help themselves. At at the time, there were 250 children without a school placement, so we put bunting up with with one triangle for each child that was missing a school placement outside city hall.

“Prior to 2022 the parent carer forum wasn’t what it should have been. The council weren’t really working with them. We were trying to advocate for our children, advocate as an alliance. It just seemed to rub the council up the wrong way.”

Bailes dismissed the council’s subsequent internal investigation as “patting themselves on the back, saying everything’s legal and above board”.

A spokesperson for Bristol city council said: “The children and young people policy committee is committed to inclusion and transparency and has voted to conduct an independent review into historical social media use.

“The council is also progressing with its Send and inclusion strategy, which includes investment in educational psychology services, the development of an inclusion and outreach service, and is spending over £40m to create new specialist places for children over the coming five years.”

No timetable has been set for the independent investigation.

AI can help build individual learning paths for Ukraine’s 3.5 million students, but its use must remain ethical, First Deputy Minister of Education and Science Yevhen Kudriavets has said.

Speaking to UNN, Kudriavets stressed that AI can analyse large volumes of information and help students acquire the knowledge they need more efficiently. He said AI could construct individual learning trajectories faster than teachers working manually.

He warned, however, that AI should not replace the educational process and that safeguards must be found to prevent misuse.

Kudriavets also said students in Ukraine should understand the reasons behind using AI, adding that it should be used to achieve knowledge rather than to obtain grades.

The deputy minister emphasised that technology itself is neutral, and how people choose to apply it determines whether it benefits education.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech, and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told a US podcast that if he was graduating today, “I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history.”

Altman, whose company developed and released ChatGPT in November 2022, believes the transformative power of AI offers unprecedented opportunities for young people.

Yes, there will be job displacement, but “this always happens,” says Altman, “and young people are the best at adapting to this.” New, more exciting jobs will emerge, full of greater possibilities.

For UK sixth-formers and their families looking at universities, trying to make the best possible choices about what to study – and where – in the age of generative AI, Altman’s words may offer some comfort. But in a fast-changing environment, experts say there are steps students can take to ensure they are well placed both to make the most of their university experience and to emerge from their studies qualified for the jobs of the future.

Dr Andrew Rogoyski, of the Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey, says that in many cases students will already be well versed in AI and ahead of the game. “What’s striking is the pace of change and adoption vastly outstrips the pace of academic institutions to respond. As a general truth, academic institutions are quite slow and considered and thoughtful about things. But actually this has gone from the launch of ChatGPT to ‘Should we ban it?’, to ‘OK, here are some concerns about exams’, to actually recognising it’s going to be a life skill that we have to teach in every course and that we want all our students to have equitable access to.

“So it’s gone from zero to 100 in a very short space of time, and of course, the world of work is changing accordingly as well.”

His advice to prospective students? “Be demanding. Ask the questions. I think there are some careers that are going to be very different … make sure that universities are adapting to that.”

Students who are less familiar with AI should take time to learn about it and use it, whatever their chosen subject. Rogoyski says being able to use AI tools is now equivalent to being able to read and write, and it’s important “to be resourceful, adaptable, to spend time understanding what AI is capable of and what it can and can’t do”.

He says: “It’s something you need to be able to understand no matter what course you do, and think about how it might impact your career. So read around, look at some of the speculation surrounding that.

“Then I’d start thinking about what the university’s responses are and what support there is for integration of AI. Is my course, and is the university as a whole, on the front foot with regards to the use of AI?”

There will be a lot of information online but Rogoyski recommends visiting universities to ask the academics who will be delivering your degree: “What is your strategy? What is your attitude? Am I going to get a degree that’s worth having, that will stand the test of time?”

Dan Hawes, co-founder of specialist recruitment consultancy the Graduate Recruitment Bureau, is optimistic about the future for UK graduates and says the current slowdown in the jobs market is more to do with the economy than AI. “It’s still very hard to predict what jobs there will be in three to four years, but we think it’s going to put a premium on graduates,” he says. “They are the generation growing up with AI and employers are probably very interested in getting this new breed of talent into their organisations.

“So for parents and sixth-formers deciding where to study, the first thing always to take note of is the employability of the graduates that are produced by certain universities.”

For example, maths has consistently been the top degree his clients are looking for, and he thinks this is unlikely to change. “AI is not going to devalue the skills and knowledge you get from doing a maths degree,” he says.

He agrees that AI is a concern for parents and those considering going to university, “but in the long term I think it’s going to be a good thing. It’s going to make people’s jobs more interesting, redesign their roles, create new jobs.”

Elena Simperl, professor of computer science at King’s College London, where she co-directs the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, advises students to look at the AI content right across a university, in all departments. “It is changing how we do things. It’s not just changing how we write emails and how we read documents and how we look for information,” she says.

Students might wish to consider how they can set themselves up for a job working in AI. “DeepMind is proposing AI co-scientists, so entire automatic AI labs, to do research. So a university should train their students so that they can make the most out of these technologies,” she says. “It doesn’t really matter what they want to study at the university. They don’t have to study AI themselves, but they should go to a university where there is a broad expertise in AI, not just in a computer science department.”

Prof Simperl says that the evidence so far suggests it is unlikely that entire jobs will completely disappear. “So we need to stop thinking about what jobs will be killed by AI and think about what tasks can AI help with. People who are able to use AI more will be at an advantage.”

In the brave new world of AI, will it still be worth doing a degree like English literature or history? “Yes, if they’re well taught,” says Rogoyski. “They should be teaching you things that will last throughout your lifetime. The appreciation of literature, learning how to write well, learning how to think and how to communicate are enduring skills.

“The way that you might use that degree in the future will undoubtedly change, but if it’s taught well, the lessons learned will see you through. If nothing else you’ll enjoy your downtime as our AI overlords take over all the work and we’ll have more time to read books while we’re all on universal basic income.”