Page 6 - Winter 2026

Industry News
ESPORTS DEAL
WITH ENGLISH
FOOTBALL LEAGUE
British Esports has secured funding for a pilot
campaign with the English Football League. The
‘Safe to Play’ campaign will operate across ten
Football Club communities and will use esports
to help around 400 young people to build digital
skills and will empower trained facilitators to
deliver guidance informed by the British Esports
Federation’s Duty of Care in Esports framework.
The Safe to Play project will use esports as a means
of achieving digital inclusion in its existing Football
Club charities youth programmes, with each club
delivering a 6 to 8 week programme of weekly
workshops and esports sessions.
EFL in the Community will oversee national
coordination with Sheffield United’s Community
Foundation acting as the accountable body and
Sheffield Hallam University providing external
advisory input. British Esports will deliver e-learning
and one-day in-person training to 60 facilitators from
the ten Football Club charities.
Debbie Cook, Director of Community for the English
Football League, states:
“ The Safe to Play campaign is an existing and
innovative way to support young people in our
EFL club communities. Using esports as a vehicle
for digital inclusion, online safety and wellbeing,
we’re equipping disadvantaged young people with
essential skills for the modern world”.
6 7
Chester King, President of British Esports, adds:
“ We’re incredibly grateful to receive the
Government’s support for this new Safe to Play
campaign with the EFL. This backing will allow us
to work alongside Sheffield United’s Community
Foundation and other partners to deliver vital
digital skills and online safety training to young
people through esports”.
The British Esports Federation
The British Esports Federation is a not-for-profit
organisation established in 2016 to promote esports
in the UK. It is currently partnering with SLOCOACH in
the development of a dedicated global platform for
online learning and professional development for
esports.
The National Esports Performance Campus
Located in Sunderland, the National Esports
Performance Campus provides a dynamic hub for
entrepreneurs, innovators and esports enthusiasts.
The Arena esports and entertainment complex
offers 5G connectivity and a dedicated esports
stage with retractable seating for 250 spectators,
and hosts the British Esports Student Champs
LAN Finals, International Defence Esports Games
2026, professional esports team bootcamps and
international show matches. Nearby three Grade II
listed 1840s townhouses have been converted into
luxury gaming spaces equipped with the latest
gaming and esports technology.
Reference: ‘Government backs EFL and British Esports
Workshops to help disadvantaged Young People’,
Education Today, January 2026, p.4.
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THE RISE OF AI-GENERATED
PARENTAL COMPLAINTS
This is an issue that has risen very much to the fore
over the last few years and now in The Voice ( journal
of the Institute of School Business Leadership ), Issue
40, Autumn 2025, p.22-23, Partner and Barrister
at VWV, and education law specialist Miriam
Carrion Benitez, explains what is driving this ‘new
phenomenon’ and provides advice on how schools
might address it.
The problem concerns ‘ lengthy, jargon-filled, and
meticulously structured parental complaints -
sometimes ten pages long - about issues that, not
long ago, might have been addressed with a quick
chat at the school gate ‘. The root cause is identified
as artificial intelligence, or AI: ‘AI tools such as ChatGPT,
Claude and other generative text platforms have
made it possible for parents to draft highly formal
complaints in a matter of minutes‘.
Such misuse is ‘creating a new and growing challenge
for schools’ with AI allowing parents to create
‘multi-page documents filled with policy citations,
legislative references, and procedural demands at
unprecedented speed‘.
Complaints are noted to have increased in:
• Volume (parents generating multiple complex
complaints in the time taken previously to write
just one).
• Complexity (AI introduces detailed legal,
bureaucratic language, sometimes relevant,
sometimes not, that schools have to verify).
• Persistence (parents generating instant follow-up
letters).
As a result headteachers and administrators have
to spend considerable time ‘unpicking AI-generated
letters’ instead of managing the school.
The author highlights the reasons why AI is able to
‘supercharge’ complaints:
• Low effort (feed AI a few bullet points and generate
a professionally written multi-section letter in
minutes).
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Industry News
• Perceived authority (AI mimics legal and policy
language providing a degree of credibility and
urgency).
• Information inflation (AI able to utilise sections of
education policy and add them to the argument
regardless of whether they are relevant).
• Emotional distance (removal of the cooling-off
period so as to increase escalation).
All of this leads to resource drain, procedural
overload, wellbeing strain and mission distraction.
Misuse is characterised by:
• excessive length for a minor matter
• repeated submissions with minimal new evidence
• cut-and-paste legal references that do not fit the
context
• unrealistic or multi-faceted things that extend way
beyond the school’s remit
The author highlights the point that many school
complaints policies were written long before the
rise of AI and therefore often cannot account for the
speed and volume of AI-generated correspondence
nor the merging of repetitive submissions. Education
authorities are only just beginning to recognise the
scale of the problem.
In order to address the problem the author calls for
complaint policies to be updated with particular
attention being given to defining and addressing of
“vexatious” or “frivolous” complaints. She also calls
for correspondence to be kept on-file to help identify
patterns and, where possible, for AI to be removed
from the communication loop to help de-escalation
e.g. by inviting parents to a meeting.
The author concludes:
“ The capabilities of AI are only going to expand.
Parents could soon use AI to analyse school
budgets, generate data-driven criticisms, or
coordinate group complaints that overwhelm
administrative systems. If schools and education
authorities don’t act now, the risk is that a minority
of parents could monopolise staff time to the
detriment of the wider student body “.