Robots in the Back Office: A Critical Review of Robotic Process Automation and Service Robots in Educational Administration and Management
Abstract
Educational robotics is among the best-reviewed fields in educational technology, yet almost the entire corpus concerns robots as objects of learning or agents of instruction. The parallel question of what happens when robots and robotic automation are deployed to run the institution rather than to teach in it has no consolidated literature. This critical review addresses that omission. Drawing on 60 sources spanning robotic process automation (RPA) in higher education and public administration, service and social robots in institutional non-teaching roles, and AI-enabled governance in educational leadership, it argues that a coherent research object exists, administrative robotisation in education, but that it is currently split across three literatures that do not cite one another. The review finds that the efficiency case rests on an evidentiary base that is structurally vendor-shaped; that gross hours released are reported while cost, fragility and failure are not; that the discretionary educational processes where automation matters most remain wholly unstudied; and that the administrative staff whose work is being automated are almost never the informants. It proposes a task-discretion-accountability framework for classifying which administrative processes should and should not be robotised, advances nine falsifiable propositions, and identifies K-12 district administration, cost-side accounting and longitudinal post-deployment evidence as the field's three most urgent priorities.
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