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One day Sarah Al Amiri, minister of education for the United Arab Emirates, was walking past her daughter’s bedroom when she realised quite how commonplace AI has already become in young people’s lives.

“She was using Alexa to practice a speech that she was giving in school. I said: ‘Do you want me to help you?’ And she said, ‘No, I’m all good.’ And that’s when it hit me: they’re using AI already - and they’re quite savvy at using it.”

The UAE is particularly ahead in this, too, with the recent Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) 2025 report noting that 64.3 per cent of students in the country report using AI at least weekly to help them learn - far ahead of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 45.5 per cent.

It’s because of this, she says, that it is now clear that “teaching [young people] how to use AI appropriately” has “become more important” than ever.

Teaching pupils AI literacy

This realisation has also come about, in part, due to the contrast with how slowly nations worldwide reacted to the surge of social media into young people’s lives, which is only now being addressed, with bans, including .

“We completely ignored social media and its implications on the social fabric of children while they’re growing up. Are we going to repeat the same mistake with AI? Our decision as a government was no, we’re going to give them access to AI literacy,” says Al Amiri.

As such, in the 2025-26 school year, the UAE government ran a pilot for in all state schools from Kindergarten to Year 12 (equivalent to Year 13 in England).

“The driver is we know young people, especially older students, are using AI tools. Not only are they able to access knowledge, but they’re able to access some form of dissemination and analysis of that knowledge,” says Al Amiri.

However, she says the key is to ensure young people truly understand what they are using and how it works.

“We want pupils to understand how AI tools are developed and where biases are introduced, so high school students will get a better understanding of ‘how do I use AI to support me in my learning’ rather than [how do I] use AI to think on my behalf?”

To achieve this, the framework is based on three key goals:

• Foundational AI literacy for all: Ensuring all pupils understand foundational knowledge, concepts and principles of AI, while developing their awareness of AI ethics, societal impacts and the requirements for safe and responsible use.
• From understanding to application: Helping pupils connect technical concepts of AI with real-world applications by using and evaluating smart solutions and developing innovative AI-based ideas and projects.
• Ready for what comes next: Prepare pupils for AI-integrated higher education, careers and real-world AI challenges.

These goals are then covered in the curriculum via six key principles: human governance of AI; ethical, safe and inclusive AI; progressive learning for lifelong relevance; critical engagement with AI systems; societal impact and responsible participation; and cultural and contextual relevance.

And within this, the curriculum is divided into three age-specific cycles: Cycle 1: Years K-4; Cycle 2: Years 5-8; and Cycle 3: Years 9-12.

It is this framework that was officially rolled out this September as a distinct and mandatory part of the curriculum for all state schools to use, and for international schools to adapt as they wish.

“It can now be adapted to anyone’s curriculum to be deployed across schools. You can choose to embed it within your current core curriculum, or have it separately once a week or once every two weeks,” Al Amiri says.

The UAE Cabinet also approved for the entire curriculum to be published online, so that any other nation can adapt and use it as required.

To help with this, the government has aligned its development with other key education frameworks, chiefly the , and the in the US.

Reducing screen use

The rollout of such a curriculum just as Pisa results came in was certainly timely - with AI cited as one reason why scores across most nations dropped.

“The results on the use of AI in education from Pisa are a bit sobering - the highest performing students tend to be those who do not use AI,” said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD and head of the Pisa programme.

It should be noted, though, the UAE was one of a handful of countries to see scores in each area increase compared with 2022: science 458 (up 26), reading 433 (up 15) and mathematics 453 (up 21).

Given this, could the UAE be about to undo its good work by bringing more AI into children’s lives - especially those in the younger years?

Al Amiri, though, is keen to stress that the literacy aspect of the framework is key: “We approached it as an AI literacy programme and not as an AI for education programme”.

She explains, for example, that “more than 25 per cent [of the framework] focuses purely on ethical use of AI,” and that in Years 4 to 7 when pupils encounter the framework it will be entirely without screens.

“We introduce AI to them as something that adults use in particular circumstances, and that is happening around them,” she adds.

In fact, Al Amiri notes that, as part of a separate but related initiative, the UAE has now banned screens from the teaching of maths, science, English and Arabic from this September up to Year 6 (England Year 7), after a pilot project last year with nine schools.

“In the classrooms where there were no digital devices, pupils improved at double the rate from those that were in our normal classes, and that for us was an astonishing number,” she says.

“What we’ve realised is removing that distraction of the screen in front of you removes a big barrier in creating social interactions between pupils themselves, and then building the right connection between the teacher and the pupil.”

She says, too, that anecdotal feedback from parents and leaders was that behaviour improved when this ban was introduced, and so the government is now going to track this nationwide move to help further consider the use of screens in classrooms.

Non-screen approach to AI

As an example of this non-screen approach to its AI curriculum, Al Amiri says pupils at a younger age would be taught how AI works by way of an example where an AI is shown 10 pictures of red apples, and then when shown a green apple it will say, “That is not an apple”.

She continues: “You can teach pupils the basics of machine learning so they understand the context of how the machine is trained and can think critically about the results, so they understand how to put in the correct prompts and analyse the results.”

This approach is one that Schleicher at the OECD said is likely to be key to ensure pupils learn to use AI properly and thereby offset its negative impacts.

“Where pupils are intentionally taught how to interpret evidence from AI, you can see the use of AI seems to be more positively related to learning outcomes,” .

“Preparing young people with the right levels of AI literacy may become an antidote to the more negative effects.”

Clarity on when AI can be used

For older students, meanwhile, Al Amiri hopes that as well as building AI literacy that helps students use the technology responsibly within their learning, they can also start “exploring how they can function later on in life in the age of AI”.

She continues: “[Students] told us that [the AI framework] has informed them better on how to choose their careers and how AI will play a role in their future and the future of their careers as well.

“It’s allowed them to rethink what field they want to study in and what areas they want to focus on, and if they want to specialise in something that has to do with the utilisation of AI or the development of AI.”

Teachers, too, she says, have welcomed the AI literacy framework to frame “conversations with pupils on what is the mechanism to use this tool” so there is clarity around how and when it can be used.

Of course, though, creating an entire AI literacy framework that has to be delivered means teachers will have to be AI literate themselves.

To this end, Al Amiri notes that while the aim is for existing computer design teachers to deliver the majority of the AI curriculum, and so should therefore have many of the skills required, they have been provided training on the curriculum itself.

Notably, she says that as well as this, the curriculum design team from the ministry will host sessions on Friday via Microsoft Teams where teachers can attend and ask questions about the curriculum and its deployment.

Teacher training on AI

Meanwhile, as part of a wider requirement for all federal employees to understand how to use AI within their jobs, she says that by the end of the year some 22,000 teachers will have received training on things such as “the tools that are available, what can they use and what can’t they use”.

She continues: “We know teachers are using AI. We know this is going to be helpful for them to do their jobs, and it’s going to cut out a lot of the time that it takes them to prepare for their classroom.

“Why not provide them with the right tools and how to use those tools to be able to deliver a better education experience for pupils?”

This is also why, although the curriculum is not being mandated across all schools in the country, she believes most schools, including international schools, will adopt it.

“We’re not looking at mandating it today, but there is a general drive nationwide on the importance of AI literacy, where I don’t think we would need to mandate because…there’s already buy-in to deploy it.”

International growth

Speaking more broadly to ����Vlog about the nation’s education system, Al Amiri says the government remains committed to maintaining a welcoming environment for international schools.

“We have a very diverse population in the UAE, so offering diverse curricula across different fields and international schools is very important, and growth of that sector is also very important for us,” she adds.

She noted, too, that even with the Iran war that began in February, growth in the market had not diminished.

“We haven’t had an issue in terms of registrations of pupils or opening up schools, so private schools that were set to open up went through and opened up, which means that there’s real demand for seats and for enrolment for young people,” she says.

Certainly the opening of the likes of Queen Elizabeth’s and , as well as Epsom College planning to open two schools in the region, shows interest remains high.

She also feels that the nation “bounced back” well from the initial impact of the war, not least in how schools evolved their remote learning approaches.

“A lot of people think that online learning for us was just giving the same class, but through a video conferencing system, but that was not the case,” says Al Amiri.

Instead, she explains, schools adapted to the situation by ensuring that, for example, attention span on screens was considered and lessons adapted accordingly.

“The instruction evolved into an actual online learning approach, rather than an approach of ‘do the same thing that you would do in a normal classroom, but in front of a screen’.”

For Al-Almiri, it’s this adaptability that is key in the AI age and why the AI literacy curriculum is not about forcing technology into schools but placing it within a wider education that prepares pupils for the future - whatever that may be.

“We are a country that is for technology, and pupils need to learn how to use it - but also when to use it at the appropriate time, not a replacement for thinking, not a replacement for foundational knowledge that is required,” she says.