The Ministerial Statement, presented at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 8 September during Digital Learning Week 2026, sets out shared priorities for ensuring that the terms on which AI is integrated into education are shaped through deliberative governance, public accountability and respect for the rights of learners and teachers.
Under the theme “Education in the age of AI: Facts | Frictions | Frontiers”, Digital Learning Week 2026 is bringing together over 1,500 participants in Paris and thousands more online, including ministers of education, high-level experts, representatives of the technology industry, educators and students.
The Ministerial Statement acknowledges the profound shifts AI is creating, including changes in how learners think, how teachers exercise professional judgement, and how learning is assessed. It notes that while AI holds the potential to extend access and support learners, these benefits are conditional on deliberative governance, human support and adequate preparation. Crucially, the statement affirms that learning is not served when AI substitutes for human relationships and human judgement.
The Ministerial Statement is a clarion call for sustaining the public interest, critical understanding, teacher agency, and solidarity. How we integrate AI in education is a matter of public decision and public accountability.
Qun ChenUNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education
Eight priorities for action
The Ministerial Statement outlines eight priorities for action, committing to:
- Restore public-interest conditions to ensure AI systems are auditable, data portable, and subject to public oversight, even when they reach learners through free tiers, donations, and vendor agreements.
- Protect the development of critical understanding by developing and using AI that prompts learners to reason and perform cognitive work, and by investing in AI competencies for teachers and students drawing on UNESCO’s twin AI Competency Frameworks.
- Cultivate teacher agency through investment in teacher preparation and professional development, and by ensuring that teachers take part in decisions about which systems enter their classrooms. The statement emphasizes that AI must support and not replace their professional contribution and judgement.
- Promote age and developmentally appropriate AI and safeguard learners, with approaches grounded in children and young people’s rights, evolving capacities and educational needs, and with the ability to pause or discontinue the use of AI where warranted.
- Govern data in education in the public interest, recognizing learners and teachers, and children in particular, as rights-holders over their own data, and involving them in decisions about systems that collect and act on their data.
- Integrate equity and inclusion by design, including through inclusive and multilingual design and the capacity to evaluate AI systems across the languages, abilities and contexts of the learners who will use them.
- Count the total costs of ownership before adopting AI, favouring interoperability, portability, and open-source systems to ensure that education systems can change course, if needed.
- Build and pool AI governance capacity both nationally and regionally, to ensure that no education system faces the concentrated supply of AI systems alone.
A call to action
The Statement urges providers of AI systems to provide evidence of educational benefit before deployment, make their systems explainable and auditable, and accept accountability for harm. It also calls upon the international community to support education systems where capacity is least developed, and invites UNESCO to continue to convene global dialogues, monitor how AI is reshaping education’s public purposes, and report on progress and inform policy.
Ministerial Statement: Sustaining education as a common good in the age of AI
UNESCO
2026
