Baguio City Mayor Magalong urges responsible use of AI in schools
By Saghir Hussain ·
A Philippine mayor’s warning on AI in classrooms should ring alarm bells in Whitehall.
Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong has urged education leaders to ensure artificial intelligence “supports learning, not replaces critical thinking” — a message that lands just as UK ministers scramble to draft guidance for generative AI in schools. The intervention, reported by the Philippine Daily Inquirer on 9 November, cuts through the hype: technology must serve pupils, not the bottom line of Silicon Valley giants.
The Philippine warning
Magalong, a former police chief turned mayor, told local education officials that AI tools should be “ethical, responsible, and inclusive.” He stressed that students must not become passive consumers of algorithmic output. His office cited risks of plagiarism, data privacy breaches, and the erosion of analytical skills — concerns echoed by teachers’ unions from Manila to Manchester.
The Philippines has no national AI-in-education framework. Baguio’s move is local, pragmatic, and grounded in the reality of under-resourced public schools. That matters. When a city with limited broadband and aging computer labs demands guardrails, it exposes the gap between glossy tech promises and classroom reality.
What it means for UK classrooms and small firms
The Department for Education published its Generative AI in Education call for evidence in October. Responses close this month. But teachers in Birmingham, Glasgow, and Cardiff are already navigating ChatGPT-written essays, AI-generated lesson plans, and edtech sales pitches that overpromise and underdeliver.
Small British edtech firms — many founded by former teachers — say they are being squeezed out by US giants offering “free” AI tiers that lock schools into proprietary ecosystems. A Leeds-based startup founder, who asked not to be named, told Crawlio: “We build tools aligned to the national curriculum. The big players build for scale. Guess who wins procurement?”
Meanwhile, the digital divide sharpens. Pupils in leafy Surrey academies get AI-assisted tutoring; peers in coastal towns like Great Yarmouth or post-industrial valleys in South Wales share one laptop per household. The Mayor of Baguio spotted this dynamic. So has the National Education Union, which warns that uncritical AI adoption “risks entrenching inequality.”
The regulatory gap
UK ministers talk up the AI Safety Institute and the Online Safety Act. Neither addresses classroom deployment. Ofsted has no inspection criteria for AI use. The Information Commissioner’s Office has issued general guidance on children’s data — but nothing specific to large language models in schools.
Contrast that with the EU’s AI Act, which classifies educational AI as “high-risk” and mandates transparency, human oversight, and bias testing. The UK has chosen voluntary codes. History suggests voluntary codes suit incumbents, not innovators — and certainly not pupils.
Magalong’s message is simple: put the learner first. In the UK, that means binding standards, not warm words. It means funding for teacher training, not just licences for Big Tech. And it means listening to the small British firms building for the curriculum, not the balance sheet.
If a Philippine mayor can see the stakes, why can’t Westminster?