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1.5 Current State of AI in Education

Take Home message

  • The EU AI Act is the legal basis. The EU’s rulebook for AI is in force since August 2024 and phasing in through 2027. It applies not just tech companies, but also to schools.
  • AI literacy is a duty, not a course to tick off. Schools must support staff in building AI literacy.
  • Several AI uses are banned outright. Among them: inferring students’ emotions from facial or vocal data, AI that exploits children’s vulnerabilities to distort their behaviour, and building facial-recognition databases or inferring traits like race or religion from biometric data.
  • Risk depends on the decision, not the product. Ordinary writing, research, translation and lesson-planning tools are not high-risk simply because they are used at school. They become high-risk once they influence admission, learning pathways, exam outcomes or employment decisions.
  • Not everything AI-generated needs a label. The disclosure duty mainly sits with the provider; teacher-reviewed material with human editorial control is exempt.
  • High-risk AI needs a human who can overrule it. AI output is never the final decision. You must understand its limits and be able to disregard or override it.
  • The AI Act sits on top of other law, it doesn’t replace it. National data protection, education, employment, child protection and copyright law continue to apply alongside it.

If you remember only one sentence from this page: Use AI to support your professional judgement, not replace it—stricter rules apply as soon as AI helps make decisions about grades, educational pathways or people.

IdentifiedCurrent Needs

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is advancing at an extremely rapid pace, and its use is increasingly permeating our society, entering aspects of everyday life such as education. This pervasiveness brings with it multiple and often interconnected implications, spanning ethical, social, economic, legal, and cultural dimensions, touching on issues such as data protection, fairness and non-discrimination, algorithmic transparency, technical safety, and accountability. Precisely because of the speed of this diffusion and the scale of its consequences, there is a growing need for shared guidelines, regulatory frameworks, and governance tools capable of steering technological development in a responsible and sustainable direction.

The current way of usageUses of AI in schools.

Educational Contexts

Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded in everyday educational practice, well beyond pilot projects. Common applications include adaptive learning platforms, intelligent tutoring systems, automated grading, and AI-assisted lesson planning for teachers (OECD, 2026). The most visible shift, however, is the direct use of general-purpose tools by students and teachers alike. According to OECD's TALIS survey, 37% of lower secondary teachers reported using AI in their work in 2024, and 57% said it helps them improve lesson plans — though 72% also expressed concern about students passing off AI-generated work as their own (OECD, 2026). The OECD cautions that better task performance does not always mean genuine learning, warning of a risk of "metacognitive laziness" when cognitive work is offloaded to AI without pedagogical guidance.

Current State of Teaching With AI

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Current State of Teaching About AI

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AI Usage Across Educational Levels

 

Identified Needs

Alongside institutional frameworks and adoption data, it is important to understand how these dynamics play out in practice. A series of workshops was conducted with education stakeholders — including teachers and school leaders — to gather first-hand perspectives on the current use of AI in teaching. These workshops surfaced a set of concrete needs and concerns expressed by educators, covering practical, pedagogical, and training-related aspects. The following sections outline these needs in detail.

In both directions: teaching WITH and teaching ABOUT.

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