The irony is almost too perfect to bear. Just as artificial intelligence threatens to automate vast swaths of human expertise, the teaching profession—already hemorrhaging talent due to poverty-level wages—is quietly embracing AI as a lifeline. Not because educators are early adopters or tech evangelists, but because when you're working 53 hours a week for $46,526 and still can't afford rent, any tool that promises to reduce your workload starts looking less like disruption and more like salvation.
England's Department for Education has just released the most comprehensive AI guidance for teachers we've seen in Europe, explicitly permitting educators to use artificial intelligence for marking and writing letters to parents. The training materials, distributed to schools across England, represent a pragmatic acknowledgment of reality: Teachers can use the technology to "help automate routine tasks" and focus instead on "quality face-to-face time."
It's a cautious embrace born of necessity rather than enthusiasm, and it might be the most honest policy response to AI in education we've witnessed anywhere.
Europe's Measured Approach: Caution with a Dose of Reality
The guidance emerging across the UK nations reflects a remarkably unified approach to AI in education, even as each jurisdiction maintains its autonomy. The Scottish and Welsh governments have both said AI can support with tasks such as marking, as long as it is used professionally and responsibly. In Northern Ireland, education minister Paul Givan announced that a study by Oxford Brookes University would evaluate how AI could improve education outcomes for some pupils.
This coordinated response stands in stark contrast to the patchwork of policies emerging elsewhere. The Department for Education (DfE) says AI should only be used for "low-stakes" marking such as quizzes or homework, and teachers must check its results. They also give teachers permission to use AI to write "routine" letters to parents—including the rather prosaic example of generating a letter about a head lice outbreak.
The practical specificity of these guidelines reveals something important: these aren't policies written by technologists excited about AI's potential, but by educators who understand that teachers need concrete guidance about what they can and cannot do with these tools.
Emma Darcy, a secondary school leader who works as a consultant to support other schools with AI and digital strategy, said teachers had "almost a moral responsibility" to learn how to use it because pupils were already doing so "in great depth". But she warned that the opportunities were accompanied by risks such as "potential data breaches" and marking errors.
While Europe moves toward coordinated guidance, the United States presents a stark contrast in both policy and necessity. Only 13 states have provided official AI guidance for their schools, according to recent analysis by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The remaining 37 states essentially defer to districts or provide no guidance at all.
This policy vacuum exists alongside a teacher compensation crisis that makes the European context look positively generous. The national average beginning teacher salary was $46,526 in 2023-24, according to the National Education Association. Despite a 4.4% increase—the largest in 15 years—starting salaries are still $3,728 below 2008-2009 levels when adjusted for inflation.
More tellingly, teachers reported working 53 hours per week on average during the school year, though nearly all said they were contracted to work 40 hours per week at most. Some 87% of teachers expressed concern over low pay, and 40% work extra jobs. The median teacher makes around $5,000 less than the median government human resource worker and almost $3,000 less than the median police officer.
This is the context in which American teachers are encountering AI: not as a fascinating technological frontier, but as a potential reprieve from the crushing workload that accompanies poverty-level compensation.
The policy differences become even more stark when examining professional development. More than 7 in 10 K-12 teachers have never received professional learning on AI, according to a 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey. Yet last year, just half of middle and high school teachers said they'd used AI at school or personally. This year, that number shot up to more than 8 out of 10, according to a June report from the Center for Democracy & Technology.
The mismatch reveals a profession learning AI tools out of desperation rather than design. Teachers are self-training on ChatGPT and other platforms not because their districts provided thoughtful professional development, but because they're drowning in administrative tasks and see AI as a way to reclaim some semblance of work-life balance.
Meanwhile, 93 percent of those teachers say their students are using it too, creating a situation where educators are simultaneously trying to master AI tools themselves while figuring out how to teach students to use them responsibly.
The guidance emerging from England acknowledges what many educators already know: the ethical questions around AI in education aren't abstract philosophical problems—they're daily practical dilemmas. The DfE guidance says schools should have clear policies on AI, including when teachers and pupils can and cannot use it, and that manual checks are the best way to spot whether students are using it to cheat.
But these policies are being written for a profession where 77% of U.S. school districts still pay a starting salary below $50,000, and where chronic understaffing means individual teachers are managing class sizes and administrative loads that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
In this context, asking teachers to develop sophisticated ethical frameworks around AI usage while simultaneously expecting them to work for wages that qualify for food stamps in many states creates a cruel paradox. We're demanding moral leadership from a profession we've systematically undervalued and overworked.
The challenge isn't whether AI tools can be useful in education—the evidence suggests they can significantly reduce administrative burden and free up time for actual teaching. The challenge is whether we're using these tools to address educational needs or to paper over systemic failures in how we fund and support public education.
When teachers turn to AI to automate parent communications or speed up assignment feedback, are we witnessing pedagogical innovation or educational triage? When starting teachers making $40,000 a year use ChatGPT to lesson plan because they can't afford the time to create materials from scratch, are we seeing technology adoption or educational desperation?
The answer, uncomfortably, might be both.
What makes the European approach more compelling isn't just the coordinated policy framework—it's that these policies exist within educational systems that generally provide better compensation and working conditions for teachers. While teacher pay remains a concern across Europe, the crisis doesn't approach the severity seen in American public education.
This creates space for more thoughtful AI integration. When teachers aren't working second jobs to afford rent, they have cognitive bandwidth to consider the pedagogical implications of AI tools. When class sizes are manageable and administrative support exists, AI becomes a tool for enhancement rather than survival.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI in education is arriving not as a carefully planned innovation, but as a response to systemic neglect of the teaching profession. Teachers are embracing these tools not because they've been convinced of their pedagogical value, but because they're exhausted, underpaid, and overwhelmed.
This doesn't make AI adoption wrong—many of these tools genuinely can improve educational outcomes and teacher satisfaction. But it does make it ethically complicated. We're asking teachers to navigate the complex implications of artificial intelligence while denying them the professional compensation and support that would allow them to do so thoughtfully.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the guidance aimed to "cut workloads" and put "cutting-edge AI tools into the hands of our brilliant teachers to enhance how our children learn and develop – freeing teachers from paperwork so they can focus on what parents and pupils need most: inspiring teaching and personalised support".
But until we address the fundamental crisis in teacher compensation and working conditions, AI in education will remain less about innovation and more about desperation—brilliant teachers using brilliant tools because their profession has been systematically stripped of resources and respect.
The question isn't whether AI belongs in classrooms. The question is whether we're going to use it to build better educational systems or simply to manage the decline of the ones we have.