Teachers are in an uncomfortable spot right now. They’re navigating AI in their classrooms largely without clear policy guidance, while parents have expectations on one side and students have access to powerful tools on the other. It’s worth understanding what that position actually looks like — because the things teachers most want parents to grasp aren’t the things parents tend to ask about.
Here’s what comes up most often when teachers talk about AI in education.
”We don’t have clear guidance either.”
The most common situation in schools right now isn’t a well-thought-out AI policy — it’s contradictory messaging. A school sends an email banning AI tools in assessed work, then another email from a different administrator encouraging teachers to “integrate AI into their teaching practice.” Nobody at the policy level seems to notice the contradiction. The classroom teacher is the one left to deal with it in practice.
What does this mean for parents? Don’t assume your child’s teacher has clarity they don’t have. If there’s a rule in place, it may be poorly thought through. If there’s no rule, the teacher is making individual calls in real time. Judgment calls made under genuine ambiguity are easier to understand when you know the ambiguity exists.
”The ‘just ban it’ approach isn’t working.”
Detection tools don’t work reliably. Turnitin’s AI detection has a well-documented false positive problem — it disproportionately flags writing by students for whom English is a second language. In several widely reported cases, teachers who used detection scores to fail students were later shown to have flagged human-written work.
More fundamentally: a policy of “don’t use AI” in 2024 is like a policy of “don’t use calculators” in 1990. Students who honour the rule are disadvantaged relative to students who don’t, while the students who don’t are learning a skill that matters.
The teachers who feel best about their situation aren’t the ones with the strictest bans. They’re the ones who have redesigned assignments so that AI-dependent submissions are obviously missing what the assignment was actually assessing — asking students to bring a printed draft to class and then write an in-class reflection on their own choices, for instance. Suddenly it’s not about whether they used AI for the draft. It’s about whether they can think and explain their decisions.
What does this mean for parents? Ask less “does your school have an AI policy?” and more “does your school have a thoughtful approach to what learning looks like with AI?"
"We’re not trying to stop them from learning about AI — we’re trying to protect learning.”
The concern that comes up consistently among teachers isn’t with AI as a technology. It’s with students outsourcing the cognitive work that builds their brain. When a student uses an app to solve every maths problem without understanding why, they’re not learning maths. When they use AI to write every essay without developing their own argument, they’re not learning to write. The concern isn’t the tool — it’s whether any learning is happening.
There’s a useful analogy here. Using GPS to navigate is completely fine for an adult who already has a spatial model of their city. Using GPS constantly as a child never develops that spatial model — which may or may not matter for the specific child, but is a real developmental question. The same logic applies to cognitive tools: using AI to help with tasks you already know how to do is a productivity tool; using it to skip the development of the underlying skill is something different.
What does this mean for parents? Reinforce this at home. The message isn’t “don’t use AI.” It’s “use AI in ways that make you better, not in ways that mean you don’t have to learn."
"A little support at home would help enormously.”
Teachers are trying to have nuanced conversations with students about AI — about when to use it, how to disclose it, what “original work” means in a world where AI exists — but those conversations are happening in a vacuum if they’re not happening at home too.
The students who navigate AI best in classrooms are the ones who have clearly talked about this with their parents — who have a sense of the ethical dimensions, who understand what they’re trying to learn and why, who can articulate why “I used AI to help outline my ideas and then wrote the essay myself” is different from “I asked AI to write my essay.”
What does this mean for parents? You don’t need to know AI policy at your child’s school. You need to have a conversation about what it means to actually learn something versus what it means to appear to know something. What’s the difference? Why does it matter? That’s a conversation that transfers to every classroom and every tool.
”We need to figure this out together.”
The teachers who seem least stressed about this aren’t the ones who have solved the AI problem. They’re the ones who have decided to treat it as something to explore with their students rather than a threat to manage.
The approach looks something like this: at the start of the year, acknowledge openly that the rules aren’t fully settled yet. Some things are clear — submitting AI work as your own without disclosure is dishonest, and that matters regardless of the tool. Beyond that, the honest framing is: what does it mean to do your own thinking in a world where AI can help? That’s worth thinking about together.
That approach requires trust, and it requires the same conversation being continued at home. If parents and teachers are aligned in wanting children to actually learn — not just appear to learn — and in being honest about the genuine uncertainty around how to do that with AI in the picture, the children benefit.
That alignment doesn’t happen on its own. It requires a conversation. Maybe between you and your child’s teacher. Definitely between you and your child.
Exploring AI literacy at home? Browse our activity library for hands-on ways to build AI understanding alongside your children.