UAE Teachers Lead the World in Classroom AI (75% Use It) — So Why Are Parents Still in the Dark?

Three in four UAE teachers now use AI in their classrooms — the highest rate in the world, per the OECD’s TALIS 2024 survey of 280,000 teachers across 55 education systems. Across the OECD, the figure is two in five. Education International’s analysis of the data puts it plainly: around 41% of teachers across the OECD use AI in their teaching, “ranging from 75% in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore to 14% in France.”

That is not a marginal lead. It means a typical UAE classroom is roughly twice as likely as the OECD average to involve AI — and five times more likely than a French one. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) describes UAE teachers as the most “prolific users of AI” among all participating systems, reporting use at close to 80 per cent.

So the UAE has built a world-first AI classroom reality. What it has not yet built — and what almost no system has built — is the layer that explains that reality to families. That gap is now the most underpriced trust opportunity in Gulf education.

What UAE teachers are actually doing with AI

The TALIS data is specific about how lower secondary teachers use AI. According to Education International, among lower secondary teachers, the most common uses are to “efficiently learn about and summarize a topic (68%) and generate lesson plans or activities (64%).” The least common uses are the ones parents would worry about most: “assessing or marking student work (26%), and reviewing data on student participation or performance (25%).”

In other words, most classroom AI use today is preparation work — not grading children by algorithm. That is a reassuring story. But it is only reassuring if someone tells it to parents.

The UAE has also moved at the policy level. Gulf News reports that starting in the 2025–2026 academic year, AI is officially taught in UAE public schools as a core subject from kindergarten through Grade 12 — making the UAE among the first countries worldwide to introduce AI as a standalone school subject, with around 1,000 teachers delivering the curriculum. Notably, the curriculum’s seven areas include “ethical awareness” and “policy and community engagement” — a strand that schools delivering the curriculum may wish to interpret as an invitation to engage families in how AI is used.

The tension inside the data: confident adoption, anxious adopters

Here is what makes the TALIS picture more interesting than a simple success story. The same teachers leading the world in adoption are deeply uneasy about its risks.

Per Education International’s TALIS 2024 summary:

Around 72% of teachers believe AI enables students to misrepresent their work — the plagiarism worry, held by 7 in 10 teachers.
66% believe AI “makes inappropriate or incorrect recommendations.”
Among teachers who do not use AI, the top reason — cited by 75% — is “not having enough knowledge and skills in how to use it.”
The least common reason for non-use? School bans, at just 12%.

That last pair of numbers deserves attention. Non-use is almost never a policy decision; it is a capability gap. As Dr Tim Friedman, ACER Senior Research Fellow, put it in the ACER briefing: “Teachers are excited about the use of AI but are also being very mindful of how they are using it… They want to use it, but they don’t always feel they have the skills or knowledge yet.” Teachers in the survey also “expressed a desire for clear guidance and safeguards, particularly around ethical use and potential risks.”

So inside the school: world-leading use, real anxiety about integrity, and a hunger for clear rules. Now look outside the school gate.

The missing layer: what families are (not) being told

There is no Gulf-specific survey of parent awareness of school AI practice — that data simply does not exist yet, so the best available evidence comes from the United States, and the UAE picture must be read as an inference, not a measured statistic. But the US evidence is stark, consistent, and worth taking seriously precisely because US classroom AI adoption is lower than the UAE’s.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) surveyed over 1,800 US households in 2024 and found that nearly three quarters of parents said their children’s teachers or school “had not sent home information about policies related to student use of GenAI,” and half did not know whether teachers were prohibiting or encouraging it. Only 14% of parents had discussed appropriate AI use with their children. One parent in the study asked a teacher, “What is your policy on AI so that we can be consistent at home?” The teacher’s candid answer: “I don’t know! I go back and forth!”

A year later, CRPE’s follow-up found almost no movement: 96% of families with an elementary-aged child either knew of no school-communicated AI policy or said their school had communicated nothing; for secondary families the figure was 83%. Meanwhile the gap in AI use between teens from high-income and low-income families doubled in one year, from 12 to 24 percentage points.

If communication lags this badly where one in three classrooms uses AI, consider what the same silence means where three in four do. UAE families are living with the world’s highest classroom AI exposure, and there is no evidence anywhere in the international data that the communication layer has scaled with it.

The contrast case is instructive. Singapore — the UAE’s co-leader at 75% adoption — pairs its classroom AI use with the world’s highest AI training rate (76% of teachers trained, vs an OECD average of 38%) and an established national school-home portal, Parents Gateway, developed by the Ministry of Education and GovTech to strengthen the school-home partnership. Singapore has also “laid out clearer guidelines to establish boundaries on after-hours communications between teachers and parents.” The world’s other AI-adoption leader, in short, already operates structured family-communication infrastructure alongside its classroom technology.

Why the gap is not a UAE failure — and why it still matters

Honesty requires widening the lens before narrowing it back to action. First, the parent-communication vacuum is universal, not Emirati: CRPE’s data shows US schools failing at it too, at far lower adoption levels — so this is a lag that afflicts every system, and the UAE simply has more at stake. Second, capacity pressures are real: AGBI reports that the UAE may need as many as 30,000 additional teachers in the next six years, per Oliver Wyman, while Dubai’s enrolment alone passed 387,000 — schools juggling recruitment and a new national curriculum have limited bandwidth for new communication workstreams. Third, the evidence linking professional development to AI use is correlational: Education International describes “a strong relationship” between AI training and AI use, not a proven causal effect, and the same discipline applies to communication and trust. None of this dissolves the argument; it sharpens it. The communication gap matters and is under-operationalized — and it is one of the few levers a school can pull this term without hiring anyone.

How to explain your AI practice to families

The practical bar is lower than most leadership teams assume. Parents in the CRPE research were not hostile to AI — 58% considered unapproved AI use cheating, but only 25% wanted AI banned outright. Families want to know the rules, not to relitigate the technology.

Three moves cover most of the ground.

1. A term-start AI disclosure note

One page, sent through your school’s main communication channel in the three days before term starts, in the same languages your admissions forms are offered in — for most UAE schools, that means Arabic and English at minimum, and often Tagalog, Hindi, or Urdu for a significant share of families. Content: which AI tools the school sanctions, what teachers use AI for (lesson preparation and summarising — the TALIS-typical uses among lower secondary teachers) and what they do not (marking, per most of the data), and the homework rule in one sentence. In practice, this looks like: “Our teachers use approved AI tools to prepare lessons and materials. Student work is assessed by teachers, not AI. Students in Grades 7–12 may use AI for research only when the assignment says so, and must say when they have.”

2. Per-assignment AI rules where it counts

A three-line note attached to major take-home assignments in Grades 7–12, triggered whenever an assessment counts toward a grade: allowed uses, banned uses, disclosure requirement. For UAE public-curriculum schools, the national AI curriculum’s “ethical awareness” strand is the natural peg — a per-assignment note is how that strand becomes real practice rather than a syllabus heading. This is also the single move that addresses the 72% plagiarism worry head-on — and gives parents the consistency-at-home answer that the CRPE parent asked for and never got.

3. A termly AI bulletin

Once per term: five bullets, 200 words maximum, pushed as a notification and in-app post to the parent news feed on the Tuesday morning of the first week of each term. Content: what changed in the school’s AI practice, one reminder of the integrity policy, one suggested home conversation (“Ask your child to show you how they used AI on a recent project”). Send it via your school’s communication platform with read-receipt tracking — so you know the open rate before the parent-teacher meeting, not after. For UAE public-curriculum schools, this aligns naturally with the national AI curriculum’s “policy and community engagement” strand.

The tone to aim for already exists in the region’s own market leadership. Sunny Varkey, chairman of GEMS Education — the UAE’s largest private school operator, which recently launched a Global Education AI Hub to examine how AI can support rather than replace classroom teaching — frames it this way: “No machine is programmed to give our children the values and mindset to succeed and be a good person. No line of code can replace warmth and encouragement.” Every school can say its own version of this. The question is whether it has a channel that reliably reaches every family, in their language.

Schools that explain their AI practice first will own the trust advantage

The sequence of events is no longer hypothetical. Classroom AI use in the UAE is at world-leading levels now. The national curriculum mandate is in force now. The parent-side evidence, everywhere it has been measured, shows families uninformed and increasingly split along income lines. The question facing a Gulf school leadership team is not whether families will eventually demand to know how the school uses AI — it is whether they hear it first from the school, or first from a headline, a WhatsApp rumour, or a contested grade. The schools that publish their AI practice to families this coming term will set the reference point that every later explanation gets measured against.

That channel has to exist first. Purpose-built school communication platforms provide exactly this: structured channels, multilingual delivery, and read confirmation built for families, not inboxes. BeeNet is one implementation path — structured channels, Arabic-French-English support, and delivery tracking designed for schools in the Gulf and Europe. If your AI practice is ahead of your parent communication, a short demo is a low-cost way to see what closing that gap would take.

References

Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). “TALIS 2024: Using data to support a vibrant and future-focused teaching profession.” 2026 (reporting TALIS 2024 data). https://www.acer.org/ae/news/article/talis-2024-using-data-to-support-a-vibrant-and-future-focused-teaching-profession
Li, Ruochen. “Using Artificial Intelligence: Takeaways from TALIS 2024.” Education International, Worlds of Education, 5 December 2025. https://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/31815:using-artificial-intelligence-takeaways-from-talis-2024
Ministry of Education, Singapore. “Singapore Teachers Embrace Digital Technologies and Benefit from Strong Professional Development: OECD TALIS 2024 Study.” Press release, 7 October 2025. https://www.moe.gov.sg/news/press-releases/20251007-singapore-teachers-embrace-digital-technologies-and-benefit-from-strong-professional-development-oecd-talis-2024-study
Polikoff, M., Rapaport, A., & Fast, N. “What Do Parents Know about Generative AI in Schools?” Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), January 2025. https://crpe.org/what-do-parents-know-about-generative-ai-in-schools/
Rapaport, A., Saavedra, A., Silver, D., Fast, N., & Polikoff, M. “AI Is Moving Fast—But School Responses and Parent Opinions Are Not.” CRPE, November 2025. https://crpe.org/ai-is-moving-fast-but-school-responses-and-parent-opinions-are-not/
Rasheed, Abdulla. “New UAE school year brings AI curriculum, unified holidays, and updated exams.” Gulf News, August 2025. https://gulfnews.com/uae/education/new-uae-school-year-brings-ai-curriculum-unified-holidays-and-updated-exams-1.500243448
Gibbon, Gavin. “UAE schools roll out AI curriculum amid teacher shortage.” Arabian Gulf Business Insight (AGBI), 26 August 2025. https://www.agbi.com/analysis/education/2025/08/uae-schools-roll-out-ai-curriculum-amid-teacher-shortage/