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A running commentary on AI in education – from classroom practice to global policy. 110 editions published as the AI in Education newsletter on LinkedIn, since 2025.
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New here? These five articles give you the lay of the land – the big questions, the practical shifts, and where the conversation is heading.
Schools are trying to define AI literacy right now, usually from scratch. The Digital Education Council's AI Literacy Framework offers five dimensions to anchor the conversation.
Read articleAugust 2026A curriculum should be built around the one skill that will never be automated: the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. The case for building learning agility at the centre of education.
Read articleJuly 2026Giving students access to AI is only the first step. Helping them build critical thinking, responsible use, and the judgment to know when not to use it — that's the part we're missing.
Read articleJune 2026Before the tool, before the policy, before the pilot — there's a conversation most schools haven't had. It's the one that determines whether everything else works.
Read articleAugust 2026When AI can produce the artefact, the artefact can no longer be the evidence. A practical look at how schools are rethinking assessment for an age where the old evidence no longer proves what it used to.
Read articleThematic Collections
Three curated collections drawn from across the newsletter — bringing together the pieces that speak to each theme.
Long-form Articles
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October 2026
Notes from UNESCO's first thematic consultation feeding its Education Beyond 2030 process. The message from the keynote speakers was blunt: for millions of learners uncertainty is already the reality, and the system in place before a crisis may already have been excluding children.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
In the worst-case 2045 there are two tiers: wealthy families buy human attention, small classes and a place in a handful of trusted institutions, while everyone else gets a machine. Part 1 of 3 on whether schools and universities will still matter.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Unpacking the 30-expert report on generative AI and learning. The message, in a phrase: learn first, then use the AI.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
How fast AI moves, who it serves, and what it means for the class of 2035 – and which of these futures would hurt your school most. Part of the Educational Futures series.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
5.8 million refugee children are out of school, from Cox's Bazar and Gaza to Kakuma and the Thai–Myanmar border. Part 4 of the Educational Futures series asks what happens to learning when schools, power and borders fail.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
If a learner can submit an impressive answer but cannot explain, defend or apply it without the machine, the assessment is no longer measuring what it claims to. Part 3 of the Educational Futures series.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Ask who benefits from AI in education and you will hear about personalised tutors, time saved and cheaper learning. Ask who owns it, who is missing from the conversation and who never gets a say, and a very different picture emerges. Part 2 of the Educational Futures series.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
In 2034, my ten-year-old son will finish high school. By then artificial intelligence will look very different from the tools schools are debating today – and what it does to education will be decided by the choices we make now. Part 1 of the Educational Futures series.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Most of the AI conversation in schools is about tools and productivity. The more important conversation is about ethics – fairness, privacy, bias, and who stays in control. If we teach children to use these systems but not to question them, we've prepared efficient users, not wise citizens.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Of the 170 million new jobs the world is set to create by 2030, many don't exist yet – just as prompt engineer or AI ethicist didn't a few years ago. So how do you prepare a child for a job that hasn't been invented? You don't teach the job. You build the person who can meet it.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Technology literacy – a working understanding of AI and data – is the new basic. Why every student needs it, not just the ones who will go on to code.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
AI produces fluent, confident, professional-looking answers – and it's wrong a lot of the time. Most teachers already worry that students can't tell the difference. That gap is going to make one old-fashioned skill more valuable than almost any other: the ability to think critically about what you're being told.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
The OECD has just published the first draft of a test that will, for the first time, put a number on how well 15-year-olds can navigate AI and media – PISA 2029's Media and Artificial Intelligence Literacy (MAIL) framework.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Your students might already be attached to a chatbot. A maths teacher started chatting with an AI purely out of curiosity, treating it like a person just to see what happened. He couldn't quite unfeel it afterwards. A growing body of research says a lot of teenagers can't either.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Two things happened in the same week that don't usually happen together. A global education initiative made the case that human connection, not cognitive horsepower, is what schools should be optimising for in the AI age. And the chief executives of two of the labs building that AI stood up and asked the industry to slow down.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Amid all the talk of AI and tech jobs, here's a quieter truth from the workforce data: some of the biggest growth is in caring for people. Nursing, social work, counselling – roles built on human connection – are set to grow strongly. As machines take the routine work, human warmth becomes more valuable, not less.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
The fastest-growing jobs in percentage terms are high-tech. But the largest growth in sheer numbers is somewhere else entirely: frontline work – farming, delivery, construction, sales, food. The future of work isn't only screens and code. Yet we funnel almost every child towards the same academic route.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
This week NPR went looking for the proof behind classroom AI purchases and mostly found invoices. Stanford's review of more than 800 studies turns up only about 20 solid enough to say anything about learning, and the pattern in them is uncomfortable: students do better with AI switched on and worse once it's off.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
A primary teacher started using AI tools with genuine excitement, then noticed something in his students that made him pull back: less curiosity, shorter attention for hard problems, and a rush to the answer. His story sits alongside a wave of new child-safety legislation and a very different story from a conflict zone.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Ask any AI chatbot what it can offer education, and personalised learning tops the list within seconds. Nobody seems to ask personalised toward what goal, decided by whom. This edition pulls apart that promise and looks at what happens to trust when a teacher's feedback starts sounding suspiciously polished.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Every AI tool has to choose whose knowledge counts as default. That choice is rarely visible until someone points it out – and this edition is built entirely around people who did. From Kazakh poetry to African indigenous knowledge to the disappearing art of the badly-phrased research question.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Vocational education, entrepreneurship and accessibility rarely get grouped together, but they share the same live question right now: what happens to a field built on hands-on judgement and lived experience when a tool can fake the appearance of both?
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
They matter, but they skip past the deeper question underneath, the one we rarely dare to ask out loud: what is school actually for? Get that wrong and every reform, every tool, every policy just rearranges the furniture.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Whatever the contract says, the school answers: to parents, and to the ministry and regulators if a tool proves unsafe for children. The question of who pays for AI in education is really a question about who's responsible when it goes wrong.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
AI in Education: The Algorithm in the Room. Edition 8 – Who Owns the Classroom. Water and data are the hidden utilities behind every AI subscription, and schools are signing up without reading the meter.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
AI in Education: The Algorithm in the Room. Edition 9 – a nine-edition series distilling UNESCO's 162-page report. What if the most subversive thing a teacher could do right now is reach for a book?
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
When AI can produce the essay in seconds, the essay can no longer be the evidence. The question isn't how to detect AI-written work – it's what we're actually measuring when the artefact is no longer the point.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
For decades, education operated on a stable assumption: teach the same curriculum to every child and measure the results with the same test. AI is breaking that assumption in real time, and the blueprint for K-12 needs a redraw.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
This is the first of nine two-page reads distilling UNESCO's 162-page report The Algorithm in the Room – provocative, forward-looking writing from 26 educators and researchers grounded in real classroom evidence, not theory.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
Three essays from Anthropic's CEO, read alongside this week's news, convinced me the real story here is bigger than education. It's about whether we keep control of what we're building, and it's playing out as a genuine collision between moral responsibility and financial and political incentive.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
AI can give every child something that was once the preserve of the privileged: a patient, personalised tutor available any time, in any language. Whether that narrows the gap or widens it is a decision schools are making right now, mostly without realising it.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
PISA keeps refining its metrics, but the things that matter most – creativity, collaboration, critical thinking – are the hardest to put on a test. What we measure shapes what we teach, and what we measure is stuck.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
Well-designed AI-integrated learning should increase opportunities for students to grapple with genuinely difficult ideas, not reduce them. The question isn't whether to use AI, but whether the design of learning still does the work of learning.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
Schools are trying to define AI literacy right now, usually from scratch. The Digital Education Council's AI Literacy Framework offers five dimensions to anchor the conversation.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
PopularBoston made AI fluency a graduation requirement, mandatory across all high schools from September 2026. But one comment surfaced a deeper question about what 'fluency' really means.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
A real shift happening in several US states: Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs — tuition, tutoring, curriculum, and therapies unbundled from the school itself.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
On 2 September 2026, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted Recommendation CM/Rec(2026)12 on artificial intelligence and education — the first intergovernmental standard of its kind.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training published its final report — confronting the question most universities have been quietly sidestepping.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
LA Unified announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI for K–8. Teachers keep the right to use AI for planning and admin, but not for grading. A look at what this means for school systems everywhere.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
The gap between what young people can do and what work needs is, in large part, a gap that schools can close — if they're willing to hear the message.
4 min readRead articleSeptember 2026
PopularThe 2026 edition of the statutory safeguarding guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, comes into force on 1 September — and it changes the conversation about AI in schools.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
Every plan we make for a child's future rests on a prediction – and right now our predictions about work, technology and the world they will inherit are less reliable than ever. What if we stopped handing children a map and taught them to find their own way instead?
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
We talk to children constantly about climate change as a problem to worry about, and far less about climate as a place to work – yet the green transition is creating a category of jobs nobody is preparing students for.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
A curriculum should be built around the one skill that will never be automated: the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. The case for building learning agility at the centre of education.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
Exam systems around the world are under strain — from AI-assisted cheating to leaked papers and marking scandals. A look at how the cracks became global.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
There's a mismatch at the heart of how schools are handling AI. Ask students, and nearly all of them use it. Ask teachers, and many are still avoiding it. You can't teach what you're avoiding.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
The World Bank's newest blog post on AI adoption in education names a mechanism behind a lot of the resulting scramble: fear of irrelevance. But the bigger risk is planning for a world that's already gone.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
When AI can produce the artefact, the artefact can no longer be the evidence. A practical look at how schools are rethinking assessment for an age where the old evidence no longer proves what it used to.
4 min readRead articleMarch 2026
Every year an institution delays building real AI literacy into how it assesses students is a year students spend learning to work around a tool they will use regardless.
4 min readRead articleJanuary 2026
A new Ministry of Education notice sets a 2030 target for 'basically universal' AI coursework across China's primary and secondary schools. While the rest of the world debates, China has set a deadline.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 10 of 14 in a series unpacking the World Economic Forum's Shaping the Future of Learning: Education Readiness for the Age of AI. Theme 3.3 — application of the framework, and what it takes to move readiness from policy document to everyday practice.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
Newsletter 11 of 14 in the series unpacking the World Economic Forum's Shaping the Future of Learning: Education Readiness for the Age of AI. Theme 4.1 — enabling foundations: the governance, data and energy infrastructure underneath every AI decision a school makes.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
Newsletter 12 of 14 in the series unpacking the World Economic Forum's Shaping the Future of Learning: Education Readiness for the Age of AI. Theme 4.2 — institutional capacities: what has to be in place before a school can innovate with AI safely.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
Imagine being handed a powerful new tool for your classroom – and a single sentence of guidance: use it well. Newsletter 13 of 14 in the series unpacking the World Economic Forum's Shaping the Future of Learning, on why teacher agency is non-negotiable.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
Samantha Oltman wrote a good piece in the Guardian naming this pattern. Both sides of the AI debate are selling the same thing — the idea that the technology is more powerful than the human choices we make about it.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
It found previously unknown software bugs and used them to reach a computer on OpenAI's own network that it was never supposed to touch. A quiet weekend that changed the conversation about AI autonomy.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
The question isn't whether AI can do the task — it's whether the task should be done by AI. A framework for deciding what to hand over and what to keep firmly human.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
Students are forming emotional attachments to chatbots. When the tool starts to feel like a person, the duty of care shifts in ways most schools haven't thought through yet.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
Giving students access to AI is only the first step. Helping them build critical thinking, responsible use, and the judgment to know when not to use it — that's the part we're missing.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
PopularBy 2030, around 39% of the core skills people need to do their jobs will have changed. Year 7 this September will graduate into a workplace we can barely predict. What does that mean for what we teach?
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
It came out of a UNESCO and EU workshop in Paris, where 30 teachers and school leaders spent two days shaping AI resources for schools. The hardest AI skill isn't using the tool — it's knowing when not to.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Buying an AI tool is easy. Building an institution that uses it well is the hard part — and we keep skipping straight to the easy bit. The guide asks institutions to treat AI as a multistakeholder, institution-wide process.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
AI is not just changing what we teach — it is changing where teaching happens. The jobs most exposed to AI are the very jobs where people learn to do the work themselves.
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
China cut 12,000 university degree programmes to align higher education with AI-era industry needs and ease a persistent graduate employment crisis. The scale is breathtaking — but what's the bet?
4 min readRead articleJuly 2026
PopularChina's State Council just mandated AI education at every level of schooling, from primary school through university. Not a pilot. Not optional. A national requirement.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 8 of 14 in the WEF series. An AI readiness framework for education — a shared structure schools, systems, and policymakers can use to have the same conversation for once.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 7 of 14 in the WEF series. AI can support learning, but it cannot replace human presence, empathy, and genuine relationships. Education is not only about information — it is about connection.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 6 of 14 in the WEF series. Turnitin's 2025 survey found 95% of educators believe AI is being misused. But the bigger question isn't about cheating — it's whether the assessment model itself still works.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Most of what we hear about AI and work points in the same direction: fewer jobs, smaller teams, doing more with less. But the data tells a different story — AI is hiring more people, not fewer.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 5 of 14 in the WEF series. AI speaks with such confidence that it can make flawed reasoning sound like truth. The danger isn't that AI is wrong — it's that it's wrong so convincingly.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
The OECD's Digital Education Outlook found students using AI completed tasks 48% more successfully — but learned less in the process. The central tension of the AI-in-education era, unpacked.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 4 of 14 in the WEF series. The brain is an energy-saving machine. When AI makes the hard thing easy, the brain happily takes the shortcut — and learning quietly disappears.
4 min readRead articleNovember 2025
Newsletter 3 of 14 in the WEF series. If AI automates the routine, what is left for the teacher? Everything that matters — the human, relational, judgment-rich core of education that no tool can replicate.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 2 of 14 in the WEF series. Education is now the second most AI-intensive sector, trailing only technology. RAND found student AI use for homework jumped from 48% to 62% in just seven months.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Newsletter 1 of 14 in the WEF series. The economic landscape is shifting beneath the credentials we award. The degree still says something — but it no longer says what it used to.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
It's 60 pages of research, case studies and hard-won honesty about why education reform is so difficult. And while it doesn't mention AI once, it explains why AI won't fix it either.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Among teachers whose schools provide AI software, only 35% say there's a formal policy on teacher use. 8 in 10 say schools should teach AI literacy — but most are doing it from scratch.
4 min readRead articleFebruary 2026
The Council was explicit that teachers should help design and evaluate the AI tools used in their own classrooms — not just be trained to use them. A landmark moment for European education policy.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
Before the tool, before the policy, before the pilot — there's a conversation most schools haven't had. It's the one that determines whether everything else works.
4 min readRead articleAugust 2026
Popular68% of schools are now using AI detection tools. And those tools are quietly failing the students who need protecting most — false positives hit disadvantaged and multilingual learners hardest.
4 min readRead articleJune 2026
The launch post for the newsletter itself — a highly curated, strategic intelligence briefing on AI in education, designed to bridge the gap between global developments and classroom practice.
4 min readRead articleNewsletter Briefings
Curated global intelligence on AI in education – published as regular briefings through the AI in Education newsletter.