A new JRC study explores how early adopters in five EU Member States approached generative AI in secondary education shortly after this technology entered the consumer market. The study highlights opportunities for personalised learning, new teaching practices and pressing AI literacy needs, alongside concerns about ethics, bias and academic integrity.
GenAI rapidly enters classrooms, but guidance lags behind
Generative AI tools have quickly found their way into European classrooms, long before policies, training and infrastructure were ready to support them. A new study published by the Joint Research Centre presents data from Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain, drawing on interviews and focus groups with policymakers, teacher educators, school leaders, teachers and students. The analysis shows that early adopters were already experimenting with GenAI for lesson planning, personalised materials and student feedback. However, they also highlighted challenges including academic integrity, bias, and the need for clear ethical frameworks.
How early adopters engage with GenAI
Teachers involved in the study report using GenAI to speed up administrative work, create tailored learning resources and design differentiated tasks. Students, often more intensive users than teachers, rely on GenAI to simplify complex topics, practise skills, brainstorm ideas, and prepare for exams.
Participants emphasised the technology’s potential to enhance student engagement. In Ireland, for example, teachers used GenAI-powered tools to motivate hard-to-reach learners or support foreign-language oral practice. In Luxembourg and Finland, teachers used GenAI for personalised feedback and adaptive support.
Despite these benefits, both teachers and students recognise risks: overreliance on AI for task completion, reduced independent thinking, and uneven digital readiness across schools.
Emerging AI literacy needs for students and teachers
The mainstreaming of GenAI is transforming what it means to be digitally competent. The report underlines the importance of AI literacy for all students, to ensure they are ready to engage effectively and responsibly with this technology — understanding how GenAI works, evaluating its outputs, recognising its limitations, etc..
However, students cannot acquire these skills without trained teachers. Across all five countries, educators stressed that pre-service and in-service training on AI needs to be updated to incorporate these competences.
Teacher competences identified as essential include:
understanding how GenAI works and its limitations
evaluating AI-generated content critically
designing assessments resistant to misuse
integrating GenAI into subject-specific pedagogies responsibly
supporting students’ ethical, creative and critical engagement with AI
GenAI is forcing a rethinking of assessment
Academic integrity is a pervasive concern. Teachers and school leaders across the five Member States reported increased difficulty distinguishing students’ own work from AI-generated content.
This is prompting schools to explore more authentic, process-based assessment approaches, such as project work, in-class activities and oral examinations that focus on critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving, rather than product-oriented tasks susceptible to AI automation.
A call for coherent policies, clearer guidance and sustained investment
Across the countries analysed, participants expressed a strong need for national strategies, ethical guidelines, and infrastructure to support safe and effective GenAI integration. Most reported that policies were either absent or still under development in the early days of GenAI adoption, when fieldwork for the study took place.
The report concludes that policymakers should prioritise:
ensuring guidance and capacity building for all stakeholders involved in the delivery of secondary education
Coordinating efforts across EU Member States with regard to research on the implications of GenAI for secondary education
strengthening the presence of AI literacy within the curriculum
Investing in suitable infrastructures and systems to ensure an ethical and equitable uptake
Promoting further research to better understand how AI is being use in the classroom across the EU
Background
The findings complement major EU initiatives such as the AI Act, the AI Continent Action Plan, the Apply AI Strategy, the Digital Education Action Plan 2021–2027, and the AI Literacy Framework developed with the OECD.