Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently become a central focus of public and media attention. UNESCO has been monitoring the disruptive implications of AI for education as part of its foresight function over the past several years and providing guidance for both policy and practice. The 2019 Beijing Consensus on Artificial Intelligence and Education, in particular, emphasises that while teachers cannot be displaced by machines, it has become critical to "take institutional actions to enhance AI literacy across all layers of society" and "prepare teachers to work effectively in AI-rich education settings". UNESCO developed AI competency frameworks for teachers and school students, which were released during Digital Learning Week 2024.

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The content of this article is based on the original report.

Objectives

The AI competency frameworks for teachers and school students define the knowledge, skills and attitudes that teachers and students should possess to understand the roles of AI in education and utilize AI in their teaching and learning practices in an ethical, effective and meaningful manner. Both frameworks are guided by human rights principles and the need to protect human dignity and privacy and strengthen human agency.

AI competency framework for teachers

AI processes vast information, generates new content, and helps decision-making through predictive analyses. In education, AI has transformed the traditional teacher–student relationship into a teacher–AI–student dynamic.

This shift requires a re-examination of teachers' roles and the competencies they need in the AI era. Yet, few countries have defined these competencies or developed national programmes to train teachers in AI, leaving many educators without proper guidance.

By 2022, only seven countries had developed AI frameworks or programmes for teachers. The AI competency framework for teachers addresses this gap by defining the knowledge, skills, and values teachers must master in the age of AI. Developed with principles of protecting teachers' rights, enhancing human agency, and promoting sustainability, the publication outlines 15 competencies across five dimensions: Human-centred mindset, Ethics of AI, AI foundations and applications, AI pedagogy, and AI for professional learning. These competencies are categorized into three progression levels: Acquire, Deepen, and Create.

As a global reference, this tool guides the development of national AI competency frameworks, informs teacher training programmes, and helps in designing assessment parameters. It also provides strategies for teachers to build AI knowledge, apply ethical principles, and support their professional growth.

The AI competency framework high-level structure: aspects and progression levels

Purpose and target audience

The AI CFT targets teachers who need to apply AI to facilitate learning in core subject areas. It is not designed for teachers who are specialized and tasked to teach advanced AI knowledge and skills. The AI CFT is designed to guide the proactive, continuing professional development and learning of teachers for a human-centred approach to the adoption of AI in education.

The specific objectives of the AI CFT are to offer a reference framework that helps shape national, state-level or institutional AI competency frameworks or training programmes for teachers; to provide an operational framework to teacher educators for the design and planning of training courses on AI; and to establish a benchmarking matrix for the assessment of teachers' AI competencies and professional learning regarding the use of AI. As such, the framework is designed for policy-makers, teacher education providers, teachers' unions, school leaders, teachers and educational experts.

Image: Freepik

Key Principles

AI competency framework for teachers has six principles: ensuring inclusive digital futures, a human-centred approach to AI, protecting teachers' rights and iteratively (re)defining teachers' roles, promoting trustworthy and environmentally sustainable AI for education, ensuring applicability for all teachers and reflecting digital evolution, and lifelong professional learning for teachers.

The fundamental principle of the framework is ensuring inclusive digital futures, which is grounded in a solid human and social foundation. Teachers are the primary users of AI in education and the key mediators in ensuring adequate redefinition and balance in the evolving relationship between humans and technology. The AI CFT therefore aims to help teachers decipher the multi-layer and multi-perspective foundational values and attitudes towards human–AI interaction.

Key Principles of the AI CFT Image: UNESCO

Three Progression levels

1、Acquire

The overall curricular goal in the 'Acquire' level is to support all teachers to reach a basic level of AI competency or literacy required by the teaching profession across varied contexts.

2、Deepen

The overall curricular goal in the 'Deepen' level is to support teachers to become fully competent teachers or master teachers in using AI. They should demonstrate human-centred perspectives in their analyses and decisions, ethically sound behaviours, deepened conceptual understanding of AI and capacity to apply AI to support pedagogical activities and professional learning.

3、Create

The curricular goal at the 'Create' level is to empower teachers who have sound AI knowledge and competency to become expert teachers and agents of change. They should be able to innovatively use AI for education and engage with communities to explore how it might drive the desired transformation of teaching and learning practices.

Five dimensions

1、Human-centred mindset

The Human-centred mindset aspect defines the values and attitudinal orientation towards human–AI interactions that teachers need to nurture.

2、Ethics of AI

The Ethics of AI aspect delineates essential ethical principles, regulations, institutional laws and practical ethical rules that teachers need to understand, apply and help adapt.

3、AI foundations and applications

The AI foundations and applications aspect specifies conceptual knowledge and transferable skills teachers need to understand and apply in selecting, applying and creatively customizing AI tools to serve student-centred, AI-assisted teaching and learning environments.

4、AI pedagogy aspect

The AI pedagogy aspect proposes a set of competencies required for purposeful and effective AI– pedagogy integration. This covers the ability to validate and select proper AI tools and to integrate them into pedagogical strategies to support course preparation, teaching, learning, socialization, social caring and learning assessment.

5、AI for professional development

The AI for professional development aspect outlines competencies teachers need to develop in order to use AI properly in driving their lifelong professional learning, supporting collaborative professional development and exploring professional transformation.

By crossing these three levels with the five aspects of competency, the AI CFT defines fifteen competency blocks. These competency blocks are designed to support all teachers – from those with no knowledge at all about AI, to those with a higher degree of competency and experience in AI.

AI competency framework for students

Artificial intelligence is increasingly integral to our lives, necessitating proactive education systems to prepare students to be responsible users and co-creators of AI. However, only 15 countries had included AI learning objectives in their national curricula by 2022. Integrating AI learning objectives into official school curricula is crucial for students globally to engage safely and meaningfully with AI.

The UNESCO AI competency framework for students aims to help educators in this integration, outlining 12 competencies across four dimensions: Human-centred mindset, Ethics of AI, AI techniques and applications, and AI system design. These competencies span three progression levels: Understand, Apply, and Create. The framework details curricular goals and domain-specific pedagogical methodologies.

Grounded in a vision of students as AI co-creators and responsible citizens, the framework emphasizes critical judgement of AI solutions, awareness of citizenship responsibilities in the era of AI, foundational AI knowledge for lifelong learning, and inclusive, sustainable AI design.

AI competency framework for students

Purpose and Target Audience

The AI CFS aims to serve as a guide for public education systems to build the competencies required of all students and citizens for the effective implementation of national AI strategies and the building of inclusive, just and sustainable futures in this new technological era. The AI CFS is aimed principally at policy-makers, curriculum developers, providers of education programmes on AI for students, school leaders, teachers and educational experts.

More specifically, the AI CFS: (1) provides a global reference framework on the core set of AI competencies for students to inform the design of national or institutional AI competency frameworks; (2) specifies typical attitudinal and behavioural performance relating to the key aspects of AI competencies at different levels of mastery to help design AI-related curricular content for school students; and (3) recommends an open-ended roadmap to help plan the learning sequence of AI curricula across grade levels.

Image: Freepik

Three Progression levels

1、Understand

This first level is designed for all students. At this level, students are expected to foster an understanding of what AI is and construct age-appropriate interpretations of the values, ethical issues, concepts, processes and technical methods underlying AI tools and their uses. They should be able to explain or exemplify their knowledge with connections to real-life or social practices and assimilate novel knowledge by integrating them into their own knowledge schemas.

2、Apply

Students are expected to enhance, transfer and adapt their learned values, knowledge and skills to new learning processes. They do so by addressing theoretical questions and/or practical tasks in more complex contexts, and by critically examining advanced technical methods behind AI tools. Upon achieving this level, students will have constructed a sound and transferable foundation of conceptual knowledge and associated AI skill-sets.

3、Create

Students are expected to reinforce their interest in AI innovation and develop new AI tools based on open-source and/or customizable datasets, programming tools or AI models. Throughout the iterative process of customizing and testing AI technologies, students are expected to reinforce the sense of being an AI co-creator and belonging within a broader community, helping to lead the human-centred design and use of AI.

Four Dimensions

1、Human-centred mindset

The ‘Human-centred mindset’ aspect focuses on students’ values, beliefs and critical thinking skills, applied to the examination of whether AI is fit for purpose, whether its use is justified, how humans should interact with it, and what responsibilities individuals and institutions should take on to contribute to the building of safe, inclusive and just AI societies. A human-centred mindset lays the foundation for further engagement with all aspects of AI.

2、Ethics of AI

The ‘Ethics of AI’ aspect represents the ethical value judgements, embodied reflections, and social and emotional skills students require to navigate, understand, practise and contribute to the adaptation of a growing set of principles and regulatory rules relative to the entire life cycle of AI systems.

3、AI techniques and applications

The ‘AI techniques and applications’ aspect represents the intrinsically linked conceptual knowledge on AI and associated operational skills, in connection with concrete AI tools or authentic tasks. This aspect serves as the most important and transferable technical foundation for a concrete understanding and application of a human-centred mindset and its associated ethical principles.

4、AI system design

The aspect of ‘AI system design’ focuses on the systemic design thinking and comprehensive engineering skills required for problem scoping, design, architecture building, training, testing and optimization of AI systems. This aspect aims to challenge the explainability of AI systems and to enable exploratory learning for students who will pursue further programmes of study in the field.

Implementation Strategies

1、Place AI CFS as competency cornerstones of AI strategies

2、Build interdisciplinary core and cluster AI curricula

3、Frame future-proofing and locally feasible AI domains as carriers of curriculum

4、Tailor spiral Curricular sequence

5、Build enabling learning environment

6、Promote professionalization of AI teachers

7、Guide cohort-based pedagogical activities

8、Build competency-based assessments

AI and sub-domains Image: UNESCO

Policy Recommendations for AI in education

UNESCO recommends that AI competency frameworks for students and teachers be integrated into a comprehensive strategy for AI capacity building across all educational levels. This includes ensuring universal access to the internet, enforcing ethical design principles for AI tools, and promoting environmentally-friendly AI practices.

UNESCO also warns against over-reliance on AI in addressing systemic issues in education, such as teacher shortages and infrastructure inadequacies, which require sustained policy attention and investment.

As AI continues to shape our future, UNESCO's new frameworks provide critical guidance for preparing students and teachers to navigate this landscape. These frameworks represent a call to action for countries to develop national AI strategies that are ethical, inclusive, and aligned with human-centered values.

Image: Freepik