What the UNESCO AI Competency Framework means for your teachers

In 2024, UNESCO published the AI Competency Framework for Teachers. It starts from a simple observation: AI has turned the traditional teacher–student relationship into a teacher–AI–student dynamic. That shift changes what teachers need to know and be able to do.

Yet as of 2022, only seven countries had developed an AI competency framework or training programme for teachers. Most educators have been left to work it out on their own.

Fifteen competencies, five dimensions

The framework sets out 15 competencies grouped into five dimensions:

1. Human-centred mindset: keeping human agency and accountability at the centre of any use of AI.
2. Ethics of AI: understanding and applying ethical principles, and promoting safe and responsible use.
3. AI foundations and applications: knowing how AI systems work, and using them appropriately.
4. AI pedagogy: designing teaching and learning that integrates AI thoughtfully.
5. AI for professional learning: using AI to support teachers’ own ongoing growth.

Three levels of progression

Each competency develops across three levels: Acquire, Deepen and Create. A teacher might start by acquiring a basic understanding of how AI produces an answer, deepen it by designing AI-supported lessons, and eventually create new practices that others in the school can adopt.

What this means for a school

Frameworks can define the capability. Schools still have to build it.

UNESCO is clear that teachers are the primary users of AI in education, expected both to design learning with it and to guard safe practice around it. For a school, that raises practical questions:

• Where do our teachers stand today against these competencies?
• Which departments need support first?
• How do we make sure the capability stays in the building, rather than leaving with one training session?

This is the thinking behind our three-stage journey. Align establishes where your faculty stands. Practice turns that into classroom-ready work. Embed leaves the capability inside the school.

See how the AI for Educators programmes work →

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Source: UNESCO (2024), AI competency framework for teachers. https://doi.org/10.54675/ZJTE2084