The role of artificial intelligence in the classroom was brought sharply into focus after tech giant Anthropic unveiled its Claude for Teachers programme.
This is a specialised version of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant and large language model (LLM) rival to ChatGPT.
One of its key functions is to generate lesson plans for teachers, aligned with the relevant curriculum.
It is available only in the US for now but is likely to be introduced across the world at a later date. Already, with or without Claude for Teachers, the use of AI by educators has become a reality.
In the US, the private education operator Alpha has launched schools that are based around an AI tutor that “gives students 1:1 personalised education”, with coursework tailored to their pace and level. Some UAE educators are already embracing AI.
A recent study found that almost half of teachers in the Emirates use ChatGPT at least once a week, with the technology deployed to design lessons and create instructional materials.
A 2024 survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found 75 per cent of teachers in the UAE use AI in their work, the highest figure in the OECD alongside Singapore.
Why would teachers use AI?
According to Bobby Johal, head of primary digital learning and teaching at Nord Anglia International School Dubai, AI is cutting administrative tasks by helping with lesson plans, creating resources and assessment analysis (understanding performance). This, he said, allows teachers to focus on teaching and supporting pupils.
“AI saves teachers’ time, supports high-quality planning and personalisation, and gives students quicker feedback and more tailored learning,” he said.
“The time can be reinvested in high-quality teaching, one-to-one support, pupil well-being, professional development and building stronger relationships with students.”
This view is echoed by Vikas Pota, founder of T4 Education (an online platform that links teachers and schools) and the Global EdTech Prize, the winners of which were announced at the World Schools Summit in Abu Dhabi last November.
He said “time-consuming tasks” AI now carried out had over time “built and built and taken teachers away from actually teaching”.
A reduced workload for teachers might improve staff recruitment and retention, although this could be cancelled out if schools impose additional duties.
“[AI] can also help them achieve, much more efficiently, a key goal in closing learning gaps in the classroom – personalised learning tailored to each student,” Mr Pota said.
“One of the hardest things for even the best teacher to do when faced with a class of maybe 20 children who have very different needs is to differentiate the work they’re doing,” said Dan Clark, principal of Queen Elizabeth’s School Dubai, which opens next month.
“Let’s say you’re putting together a worksheet or something of that sort. If you’ve got children with different needs in your class, it’s very difficult to make six different versions of a particular learning resource.
“If you have an AI platform that understands children’s needs and understand how to meet them, you could feed it a master resource which could then be, by AI, made personal to each of the children who has particular needs.”
What are the downsides?
Although benefits may result from the use of AI in schools, such as cost savings from freeing up time, there are potential pitfalls.
For example, could institutions become dependent on technology that, even if initial adoption costs are low, may not be cheap in the long term?
Yigit Saf, a Dubai-based education specialist with the consultancy Arthur D Little, said education accounted for between 4 per cent and 6 per cent of global GDP, so technology companies such as Anthropic hope for significant revenue.
“At the moment Claude for Teachers or any other platform that would replace our typical AI support for teachers comes with a profit mindset. Even if it’s not in the short term, it’s going to happen in the long term,” he said.
“At the moment it’s more of a land grab, where you get these tools somehow adopted within the education sector.”
However, Mr Saf said AI was likely to save schools significant sums of money by reducing costs for functions such as marketing.
A separate concern might be that teachers will use AI to carry out work that some might feel they should be doing themselves.
Such issues have been raised about pupils. In 2023, Curtin University Dubai announced plans to bring back handwritten exams because of cheating using ChatGPT. In one class, a third of pupils had used the LLM to produce essays.
Mr Clark said he would have misgivings if, for example, technology was being used by teachers to write reports on pupils.
“That feels to me totally inimical to what we are trying to do in my school, because we want children to feel well known and we want teachers to know them well, and I don’t think outsourcing things like reporting to AI is going to further that aim,” he said.
“I wouldn’t call it cheating. I think there are some very, very advantageous uses of AI that are going to help the best teachers become even better, because it’s going to short-circuit very long and detailed production times for certain types of educational resource.
“On the other hand, you have to be careful, especially at the premium end of the schooling market, that you don’t accidentally destroy the thing your school is about, which is that sense of connection and that sense of attention that your child is getting from a professional.”
Ensuring that individual pupil data, such as their educational performance or even their health, remains confidential is another issue, given that AI may be fed personal information so that it can, for example, come up with individualised learning options.
“Schools need clear policies on privacy, data protection, accuracy, responsible use and equity,” Mr Johal said.
Regulating AI in the classroom
Many schools are formulating policies that cover these issues. For example, in its 2025–26 AI policy, the Herefordshire Marches Federation of Academies, which runs a number of state schools in England, said teachers using AI must safeguard pupil data.
The policy also requires teachers to “clearly indicate where and when AI is being used”.
So, how widely is AI likely to be used in schools in the future? At the moment, Mr Clark said most teachers were probably using AI in some way, although they may be pushing ahead because they like the technology, rather than as part of a co-ordinated programme within their school.
Mr Saf said some institutions might be more willing than others to embrace the technology.
“There are different grades of it along the spectrum and we’ll have to observe which schools will fall under which [level] as we move forward in this new reality,” he added.
“In the Gulf in general, people do have a very open mindset. Especially in centres like Dubai, you have a significant expat population who are very, very cognisant of their kids’ educational requirements. Along with that, the private-sector education is adaptive to those requirements, so there’s an open mindset.”
