School children are using free online artificial intelligence (AI) software to write essays and poetry for them, as well as university applications and even art projects, a teacher told Parliament. Lord Hampton, who is a working teacher in a north London state school, said an A-level product design student of his even generated degree-level designs in minutes using AI. He warned peers in the House of Lords that conversations around AI dominated by issues of plagiarism and intellectual property miss the fact that the curriculum needs to catch up with a changing world. The independent crossbench peer said: "There is a lot of anecdotal evidence, at the moment, that suggests that students are using AI for everything from essays and poetry to university applications and, rather more surprisingly, in the visual arts subjects. Just before Christmas, one of my product design A-level students came up to me and showed me some designs he'd done. "He'd taken a cardboard model, photographed it, put it into a free piece of software, put in three different parameters and had received, within minutes, 20 high-resolution designs, all original, that were degree level - they weren't A-level, they were degree level.

GCSEs should be scrapped and A-levels should be replaced by a mix of academic and vocational subjects, says Robert Halfon, chairman of the Education Select Committee. His radical rewriting of England's exam system is designed to give young people a much broader range of skills for their working lives. The former Tory minister says GCSEs for 16-year-olds have become "pointless". The Department for Education defended GCSEs as "gold standard" exams. But head teachers' leader Geoff Barton said the ideas had a "lot of merit".

Some progress has been made in encouraging girls to study physics at A-level, according to a report by the Institute of Physics (IoP). In 2016, 1.9% of girls chose A-level physics, up from 1.6% in 2011. But that compared with 6.5% for boys in 2016 and 44% of schools in England still send no girls at all to study the subject. The IoP said physics-based skills were essential for many future careers, from artificial intelligence to aerospace. However, the gender balance at physics A-level in England's schools has changed little in decades, with only 20% being female.

Glance at last year's big releases and you might think video games have cracked the issue of diversity. Two of 2016's most acclaimed action adventures Mafia III and Watchdogs 2 both had black male leads, while Mirror's Edge 2, Uncharted 4 and indie game, Virginia, all featured women of colour. This year, we have flagship PlayStation4 title Horizon Zero Dawn as well as Gravity Rush 2, Nier Automata and Tacoma, all showcasing female protagonists. But look beyond the games and into the companies that make them, and you get a very different picture. Representation is still very much a problem.