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Over 25 countries call for AI certification before reaching classrooms
Gathered for UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week, education Ministers demand that tech companies demonstrate AI systems’ safety and educational benefit before impacting children.
© UNESCO/Sacha HERON
Across the world, AI is rapidly becoming a permanent fixture in children’s education, promising to democratise learning, respond to individual children’s needs, and reduce teachers’ burdens. Yet, untested, unregulated, and unaccountable systems are too often designed and deployed to prioritise commercial objectives over children’s rights and best interests.
And children are already bearing the cost. A recent Digital Futures for Children centre evidence review of over 2,100 studies across the world found that understanding of the impacts of educational technology on children has failed to keep pace with its rapid deployment in classrooms. Meanwhile, an audit of major GenAI tools used in UK classrooms found that all were in breach of the country’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, exposing children to porn site trackers, giving dangerous misinformation about self-harm, and teaching false facts.
Against this backdrop, over 25 education Ministers across continents urged tech companies to provide evidence of safety and educational benefit before deploying AI in classrooms. The Ministers also committed to holding tech companies accountable and strengthening protections for data harvested and inferred from children, echoing guidance from UN agencies and international organisations and calls from civil society led by 5Rights.
Providing a keynote at UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week, 5Rights Founder and Honorary President, Baroness Beeban Kidron said:
“The digital world today entraps children in unsafe environments, exploits them for commercial value, and deprives them of essential conditions for a flourishing childhood. The capabilities we should seek to maximise are not those of machines but of children.”
Five years after the adoption of UNCRC General comment No. 25, tech companies continue to optimise for commercial gain by embedding risks at children’s expense. Regulators must now robustly enforce the requirement to demonstrate that systems affecting children respect their rights and are safe before they are deployed.
