Short answer: no — it replaces tasks, not teachers. AI is genuinely good at drafting, structuring, summarising and generating variations. Teaching is relationships, in-the-moment judgement, behaviour, safeguarding, and knowing what this child needs today. Nothing in the current technology touches that core, and nothing on the horizon changes it.
What actually changes
The realistic shift is in where a teacher's hours go: less time producing documents from blank pages, more time on the work only humans can do. A teacher who saves three hours a week on planning drafts and letters hasn't been partially replaced — they've been partially un-buried. That's also why the DfE's framing centres workload reduction rather than automation of teaching itself.
The version of this worth actually worrying about
The genuine risk isn't replacement — it's over-reliance: staff accepting AI output uncritically until their own judgement muscles atrophy, or schools letting AI make calls that belong to professionals. That's a governance problem with a governance solution: human review as a hard rule, and clear lines about what AI never decides. Our staff guidance sets those lines out.