- What should schools teach now?
- What do universities owe students on this?
- My company encourages AI and my child’s school restricts it. Who is right?
- Does the EU AI Act cover AI in schools?
- Is official guidance on AI in education based on evidence?
- Do US states regulate AI in schools?
Governments, regulators and international bodies have published a great deal of official guidance telling schools what to do about AI. This page reads it at source and asks one question of each document: did it measure anything, or does it assert a position and recommend a practice? Of the 14 documents read here, 3 present any original data at all. The other 11 are guidance, frameworks or law.
Which part of education this covers#
Mostly schools. Of the 14 documents: 11 are about compulsory schooling, roughly ages 5 to 18 and what the United States calls K-12; 2 are written to apply at every level; and 1 is about higher education.
The gap that leaves is worth naming, because it is not an accident of what was collected here. No government in this corpus has issued guidance specific to universities. States and ministries write for schools, where they are the regulator and the children are compulsorily present. The only higher-education document is a university writing its own policy for itself, which is a different kind of object and is graded as one.
Nothing here covers workplace training, apprenticeships or professional education. For the transition out of education and into work, see what happens at entry level.
The guidance stops one year before it matters most#
Put the two halves of this page together and a shape appears that no individual document shows. Governments regulate AI in education most heavily where children are youngest, and the obligation thins out as the stakes rise.
At the bottom of the age range the instruction is now specific and compulsory. China sets a tiered curriculum from primary upward. The UAE puts AI in every public-school timetable from kindergarten. Singapore makes ten hours compulsory from Primary 4 while forbidding pupils below that to use the tools at all. These are five-year-olds and eight-year-olds, and their education is being specified in detail.
At the top of the range there is nothing. Not one government in this corpus has issued guidance for universities. The single higher-education document here is MIT writing a policy for MIT, and its first recommendation is against a uniform rule even inside one institution.
That is the wrong way round, and the reason it is wrong is the year it happens in. A ten-year-old who leans on a chatbot has a decade of supervised practice ahead of them in which the habit can be corrected. A finalist has months, and then a first job in which nobody checks their working and there is no curriculum at all. The scaffolding is thickest where there is most time to recover, and absent at the last point before the consequences become somebody's career. If capability is built by doing hard things unaided, the years in which that stops being enforced are exactly the years in which it stops being observed.
This is the same gap as the one in the missing rungs and synthetic seniority, arriving one stage earlier. The apprenticeship that used to turn a graduate into a practitioner is thinning at the same moment the education that precedes it stops instructing them. Neither side is watching the handover, because neither side owns it.
What education was worried about, and who solved it#
Read the corpus for what it is anxious about and the answer is cheating. 7 of the 14 documents here address assessment integrity, malpractice or academic honesty. Three touch capability or skill. Two of the fourteen, from Ofqual and JCQ, are about almost nothing else. That was the reflex: a new tool arrived, and the question education asked first was whether it could tell who had used it.
Detection was never going to work, and the institutions closest to it now say so. MIT recommends against AI detectors outright, on the grounds that it invites an arms race. Ofqual's advice note is not about catching students either; it asks awarding bodies to assess which assessments are structurally vulnerable, which is a quieter admission that the detector was the wrong instrument.
Then the problem was solved, by somebody else, for other reasons. From 2 August 2026, Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act requires providers of systems generating synthetic text, audio, image or video to mark their outputs so that they can be detected.
Providers of AI systems, including general-purpose AI systems, generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 50(2), in application from 2 August 2026
Notice where that obligation sits. It is on the model provider, not on a school, an awarding body or a university, and the Article does not mention education anywhere. Provenance is arriving as product regulation, as a side effect of a law written about deepfakes and disclosure. The thing education spent three years trying to build for itself is being delivered by a market-surveillance regime that has no interest in it.
It is also worth being clear about what marking does and does not settle. It can establish that a passage was generated. It cannot establish that the person submitting it understood a word of it, and Article 50(2) exempts systems performing an assistive function for standard editing, which is where most student use actually sits. So the question education asked is being answered by regulation it did not write, and the question it did not ask is the one still open. That question is whether a graduate can do the work unaided, and it is unregulated, unmeasured, and nobody's responsibility at precisely the point they walk into a job.
That is not a complaint. Guidance is supposed to be guidance, and a regulator writing an assessment rule is doing its job whether or not it ran a trial. It matters because the volume of official documents is routinely mistaken for a weight of evidence, and the issuing bodies are more candid about this than the people citing them. The UK Department for Education says so on the face of its own policy.
We have limited evidence on the impact of AI use in education on learners’ development, the relationship of AI use and educational outcomes, and the safety implications of children and young people using this technology in the classroom.
UK Department for Education, generative AI in education, updated 12 August 2025
The three that measured something#
These carry original data, and the data is thinner than the documents around it suggest.
- UNESCO, Guidance for generative AI in education and research. A UNESCO survey of more than 450 schools and universities found fewer than 10 per cent had any formal institutional guidance on generative AI as of mid-2023. That single figure is the measured part; the rest is prescription. Read at source.
- UNESCO, AI competency framework for teachers. A count rather than a study: as of 2022, seven countries had an AI competency framework or professional-development programme for teachers. Read at source.
- UNICEF Innocenti, Guidance on AI and children: recommendations for AI policies and systems that uphold child rights, Version 3.0. Grounded in an original UNICEF study across twelve countries with children and caregivers, which makes this evidence-informed guidance rather than assertion. The document itself remains a set of recommendations. Read at source.
What each document actually says#
Grouped by who issued it. Every entry was fetched and read on the issuing body’s own domain, and carries a verbatim line so the reading can be checked. The label states what the document is: guidance carries no binding force, a framework is a structure for others to adopt, and binding means it has legal or regulatory effect.
International bodies#
Guidance for generative AI in education and research · UNESCO · 7 September 2023
Guidance
Seven steps for governments: national data-protection and privacy standards, human-rights-based approval processes before a tool reaches a classroom, and mandatory teacher training. Sets an age floor of 13 for classroom use of AI tools without parental consent, and asks institutions to validate tools before approving them.
Generative AI can be a tremendous opportunity for human development, but it can also cause harm and prejudice. It cannot be integrated into education without public engagement, and the necessary safeguards and regulations from governments.
Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director-General
AI competency framework for students · UNESCO · 2024
Framework No original data.
Twelve competencies across four dimensions, at three progression levels, for insertion into national curricula so that students become users and co-creators of AI rather than consumers of it.
Integrating AI learning objectives into official school curricula is crucial for students globally to engage safely and meaningfully with AI.
AI competency framework for teachers · UNESCO · 2024
Framework
Fifteen competencies across five dimensions, at three levels, as the reference for national teacher-training and assessment programmes.
As of 2022, however, only seven countries had developed an AI competency framework or professional development programme for teachers.
Guidance on AI and children: recommendations for AI policies and systems that uphold child rights, Version 3.0 · UNICEF Innocenti · December 2025
Guidance
Ten requirements and 48 recommendations. Requirement nine covers education: update AI-literacy curricula, train and equip teachers so that AI is placed around them rather than in place of them, and adopt AI in education only where it is appropriate and evidence-based. Version 3.0 adds AI companions, AI-generated child sexual abuse material, and child labour in the AI supply chain.
AI has transformed the traditional teacher-student relationship into a teacher-AI-student dynamic.
United Kingdom#
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education · UK Department for Education · Published 26 October 2023, last updated 12 August 2025
Guidance No original data.
Leaves adoption to schools and colleges while requiring compliance with data protection, safeguarding and copyright law. Advises that personal data is not entered into generative tools, notes that schools report clearer benefits from teacher-facing use than pupil-facing use, and defers to Ofqual and JCQ on assessment integrity.
We have limited evidence on the impact of AI use in education on learners' development, the relationship of AI use and educational outcomes, and the safety implications of children and young people using this technology in the classroom.
Artificial intelligence malpractice and assessment: advice note · Ofqual · 27 April 2026
Guidance No original data.
Awarding organisations should assess each assessment's vulnerability to AI malpractice by its features: task specificity, output type, supervision level and stakes. It warns that the obvious mitigations, such as removing internet access, can damage the validity of the assessment they protect.
In some cases, AOs may conclude that there are no effective or proportionate measures available to adequately address the risk of AI-related malpractice for a particular assessment.
AI Use in Assessments: your role in protecting the integrity of qualifications · Joint Council for Qualifications · Published 26 April 2023, revision two 30 April 2025
Binding No original data.
Teachers may accept only work that is the student's own. Misuse of AI such that submitted work is not the student's own is malpractice and carries severe sanctions. Students must identify any AI-generated passage reproduced directly.
Students who misuse AI to the extent that the work they submit for assessment is not their own will have committed malpractice in accordance with JCQ regulations and could attract severe sanctions.
European Union#
Artificial Intelligence Act, Annex III paragraph 3: education and vocational training · European Union · Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, dated 13 June 2024; high-risk obligations apply from 2 August 2026
Binding No original data.
Classifies as high-risk any AI system used to determine admission to educational institutions at any level, to evaluate learning outcomes, to assess the level of education a person should receive, or to monitor and detect prohibited behaviour during tests. High-risk classification triggers the full Chapter III obligations: risk management, data governance, technical documentation, human oversight and conformity assessment.
AI systems intended to be used to evaluate learning outcomes, including when those outcomes are used to steer the learning process of natural persons in educational and vocational training institutions at all levels.
United States, federal#
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: insights and recommendations · US Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology · May 2023
Guidance No original data.
Seven recommendations, including keeping humans in the loop, aligning models to a shared vision for education, and requiring teacher-facing AI to be inspectable, explainable and overridable. Frames itself around open questions rather than settled answers.
Always Center Educators in Instructional Loops.
United States, states#
Guidance for the Safe and Effective Use of Artificial Intelligence in California Public Schools · California Department of Education · Updating the 2023 Learning With AI, Learning About AI guidance
Guidance No original data.
Human-centred AI use, AI literacy, equitable access, academic integrity and data privacy. States on its own face that compliance is not mandatory, under Education Code section 33308.5.
compliance with this guidance is not mandatory
Guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in schools · North Carolina Department of Public Instruction · 16 January 2024
Guidance No original data.
Promotes the EVERY framework for classroom use: evaluate, verify, edit, revise, and you are responsible. Presses for AI literacy across all grades and subjects. North Carolina was the fourth US state to publish such guidance.
Evaluate, Verify, Edit, Revise, You're responsible
AI Model Policy for Ohio Districts and Schools · Ohio Department of Education and Workforce · Published by 31 December 2025, districts must adopt by 1 July 2026
Binding No original data.
Issued under House Bill 96 and Ohio Revised Code section 3301.24, which requires the department to publish a model policy and requires every district, community and STEM school to adopt a local AI policy by 1 July 2026. The only US state entry in this corpus with statutory force rather than advisory status.
AI Model Policy for Ohio Districts and Schools
United States, individual institutions#
Report of MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training · Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training · Committee charged January 2026 by the Chancellor, Provost and Faculty Chair; final report published 13 August 2026
Guidance No original data.
Recommends AGAINST a single Institute-wide rule, on the grounds that it would be too permissive for some courses and too restrictive for others, while requiring every subject to publish its own policy with a rationale tied to that course's learning goals. Advises against AI detectors and against current lockdown browsers. Urges assessment less vulnerable to AI and more valuable for learning: oral exams, semester portfolios, out-of-class work paired with in-class conversation. Every thesis must state how AI was used, and AI is never a co-author.
Read this one carefully. Reads as though it measured something and did not. Its own account of method is five months of meetings, listening sessions and outreach, with no count of sessions, no participants, no dates, and one reference to survey results with no instrument or sample attached. The two most quotable claims about campus life are labelled anecdotal by the committee itself, and its recommendation 3.3.6 asks MIT to start tracking metrics, which is measurement proposed as future work. Authoritative on what a leading university has decided. Not evidence that any of it happened.
But if students give in to that tempting option, they cheat themselves of the cognitive friction and productive struggle necessary for actual learning.
Eric Klopfer and Sam Madden, co-chairs
Australia#
Australian Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence in Schools · Australian Government Department of Education · Approved 5 October 2023, in force from Term 1 2024, review endorsed June 2025
Framework No original data.
Tools used in schools must uphold privacy and data rights, comply with Australian law, avoid unnecessary collection of student data, limit retention, prevent onward distribution and prohibit its sale. Reviewed at least annually.
schools should not use generative AI products that sell student data.
Jason Clare, Minister for Education
Which countries teach AI in primary school#
The documents above are what ministries tell schools. This is what countries have actually required children to be taught, which is a different question and a harder one to check. Five mandates reach primary-age children and were read at a government source. Everything usually reported alongside them and not found at source is named as missing rather than repeated.
China · Primary upward, across all of basic education · Policy documents unveiled 12 May 2025
Mandated and running.
A tiered AI curriculum across primary, junior high and senior high school. At primary level the Ministry of Education sets the goal as AI literacy through exposure to basic technologies such as voice recognition and image classification, rising to machine-learning logic at junior high and building algorithm models at senior high.
China will establish a tiered AI education system spanning primary, junior high, and senior high schools to guide students from foundational cognitive awareness to practical technological innovation.
State Council Information Office, carrying Xinhua
What does not survive checking. The same policy prohibits pupils from submitting AI-generated content as academic work or examination responses. Widely repeated figures for minimum annual teaching hours are not on this government page and are not used here.
United Arab Emirates · Kindergarten to Grade 12 · From the 2025-2026 academic year, announced 4 May 2025
Mandated and running.
Artificial intelligence as an official subject in public schools from kindergarten to Grade 12, spanning seven areas: foundational concepts, data and algorithms, software use, ethical awareness, real-world applications, innovation and project design, and policies and community engagement. It is taught inside the existing Computing, Creative Design and Innovation subject and adds no teaching hours.
The Ministry of Education (MoE) has announced the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) as an official subject in the public-school curriculum for kindergarten to Grade 12, starting from the 2025-2026 academic year.
Emirates News Agency (WAM), the UAE state news agency
What does not survive checking. Three widely repeated details do not hold at source. It was announced by the Ministry of Education, not approved by the Cabinet, and nothing on the Cabinet's own site carries it. WAM says the UAE is "among the first countries", not the first. And no official source calls the subject mandatory: the words used are "official subject" and "formal subject", while the same WAM article does use "mandatory" of Arabic and Islamic Education in private kindergartens, so the agency reaches for that word when it means it. The Ministry's own 2025-26 student assessment policy lists no standalone AI subject; AI sits inside CCDI.
Singapore · From Primary 4 · Running; to be updated and made available to all schools in 2027
Mandated and running.
Code for Fun, a compulsory ten-hour programme covering coding, computational thinking and an introduction to AI. Two further five-hour AI for Fun modules, on generative AI and computer vision, are optional and schools apply for them.
From primary 4, students undergo the mandatory 10 hours 'Code for Fun' (CFF) programme; it is coding for fun, but it is mandatory programme which includes coding, computational thinking and introduction to AI.
Ministry of Education, parliamentary reply
What does not survive checking. The interesting half is the exclusion. From Primary 1 to 3 the Ministry prioritises physical hands-on learning and states that schools will not set work requiring pupils to use AI directly. A widely repeated claim that Singapore has integrated AI into a primary computer science course is wrong in its own terms: there is no computer science subject at primary level. So is a claim that Singapore has committed to AI training for all teachers by 2026, which appears nowhere on any Singaporean government domain.
India · Classes 3 to 8, so roughly ages 8 upward · From the 2026-27 academic session
Mandated, with the primary years still being phased in.
A Computational Thinking and Artificial Intelligence curriculum for Classes 3 to 8, integrated into mathematics rather than taught as a separate subject at the primary stage, with a suggested fifty hours across Classes 3 to 5.
CBSE introduces the Computational Thinking (CT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Curriculum for Classes III-VIII from the academic session 2026-27.
Central Board of Secondary Education, Circular Acad-15/2026, and the Ministry of Education via the Press Information Bureau
What does not survive checking. Two corrections to how this is usually reported. First, the primary years are not AI: the curriculum states that AI is introduced later, once computational thinking is built, and the Classes 3 to 5 learning outcomes contain no AI content at all. The Class 3 teacher handbook is titled Computational Thinking; the Class 6 one adds Artificial Intelligence. Second, the binding instrument is CBSE's, which reaches CBSE-affiliated schools rather than all Indian schools, and state boards teach the large majority of children.
South Korea · Elementary grades 3 and 4, from March 2025 · Announced February 2023, launched March 2025, downgraded in law 14 August 2025
Mandated, launched, and then withdrawn or downgraded in law.
AI digital textbooks in English and mathematics for elementary grades 3 and 4, with grades 5 and 6 due in 2026. Seventy-six titles were approved. Because they were legally textbooks, they fell inside free and compulsory education.
Learning-support software under Article 29-2(1)(2) may not be authorised, approved or compiled as a textbook.
National Law Information Center, Elementary and Secondary Education Act as amended by Act No. 21013
What does not survive checking. The only reversal in this set, and the most instructive entry on this page. A national mandate reached primary classrooms and was then removed by statute within five months, demoting the textbooks to optional "educational material" chosen school by school. The Ministry now refers to them itself as "AI and digital educational materials (formerly AI digital textbooks)". Widely quoted spending figures are NOT used here: the circulating US$850 million is a news outlet's own dollar conversion of a single year's budget allocation reported before the textbooks reached a classroom, and a second press figure for the same year is less than half of it. No government source states a programme total.
One of the five has already been reversed. South Korea legislated AI textbooks into primary classrooms and then removed them by statute five months after launch, demoting them to optional material chosen school by school. It is the only entry here with a full cycle from mandate to withdrawal, which makes it the only one that tells you what happens after the announcement.
What could not be confirmed#
Nothing is currently outstanding. One entry was published here as unverified and has since been resolved, and the record of that is below rather than deleted.
Correction, UAE Ministry of Education, AI as an official subject, kindergarten to Grade 12. Published here as unverified on 30 August 2026. No document on moe.gov.ae, the UAE Cabinet site or WAM could be retrieved carrying the announcement, while two genuine Ministry pages on other AI programmes read fine. The conclusion drawn was that the domain was reachable and the announcement text was not.
Verified on 1 September 2026 at the Emirates News Agency, the UAE state news agency, and now in the primary-education mandates below.
The conclusion was wrong and the reason is worth more than the entry. wam.ae is a client-side-rendered application. A plain fetch returns the site's generic meta tags and an empty body, which is indistinguishable from a page that does not exist, and it was read as exactly that. The article had been there since 4 May 2025 and is retrievable in any browser that runs JavaScript. "Could not be retrieved" is a fact about the retrieval, not about the document, and this corpus had turned one into the other. Anything else marked unverified on the strength of an empty body needs re-checking the same way.
It stays out of the corpus until a document can be read. The reason for saying so rather than leaving a gap is that this is exactly how an unverified claim enters a reference: several reputable outlets carry it, the agreement between them reads as corroboration, and the common source underneath is never checked.
How to use this corpus#
Cite guidance for what it is. A UNESCO framework establishes what an international body recommends, and it establishes nothing about whether the recommendation works. If you need to know whether AI helps or harms learning, the measured findings are in the graded evidence base, where Bastani’s school trial and the learning-science work on retrieval practice and productive struggle sit with their limits stated.
The gap between the two is the useful finding. There is a large and growing body of official instruction about classroom AI, and a small body of measurement underneath it, and the documents themselves are clearer about that than their readers usually are.
Related SuperSkills research#
On what the evidence does show: how humans learn with AI, retrieval practice, productive struggle and desirable difficulty. On assessment: assessing students when AI can do the assignment and does AI detection work. On what accumulates when practice stops: capability debt. For families: should children use AI and how much should teenagers use AI. The wider reading list is at the AI reports worth reading.
About this research#
Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), keynote speaker on AI and human capability, and founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. He has worked in and around education technology for a decade, and was writing weekly on AI and education from 2017, including Reinventing Education (5 November 2017), AI in Education (14 October 2018), AI Grading (16 August 2020) and AI Tutors (13 September 2020). Those pieces were curating and flagging the question rather than advancing a thesis, which is the honest description of them. Every document on this page was read at the issuing body’s own site on 30 August 2026, and anything that could not be is listed above rather than summarised.
Cite this
Hirji, R. (2026). The official guidance on AI in education. The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. Last reviewed 30 August 2026. thesuperskills.com/research/official-guidance-on-ai-in-education