Over the last three years (2022-2025), we have been working with partners at the Scottish AI Alliance and The Alan Turing Institute to learn about the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (A.I) on children and their rights. Exploring Children’s Rights and A.I is an internationally groundbreaking piece of work and in this blog, Sandra Rabbow (Project Officer, Children’s Parliament) explains how this work has led us to the launch of a new set of learning resources for educators and children.
A.I will be in all our lives, so we need to know what it means and how it works before we grow up.
Member of Children’s Parliament, age 9, Shetland
Working with more than 140 children from 6 schools across Scotland (from Glasgow to Shetland!), we explored how the children interact with A.I, what they think the possibilities and risks are for the use of A.I in Scotland, and how they can become meaningfully involved in A.I development and policy.
We are excited to now share a comprehensive resource pack to support children in primary school to learn about A.I through a children’s human rights approach. These resources provide educators with a practical, ethical and age-appropriate way to bring A.I learning into the classroom, an approach that puts children and their human rights at the centre of the conversation. It has been an exciting journey; so much has happened in the world of A.I since the project began. Back in 2022, many children and educators hadn’t heard of A.I, and it wasn’t part of their learning at school. Generative A.I tools weren’t yet widespread, for example, ChatGPT and other such tools had yet to be released. Exploring children’s experiences, feelings and thoughts around A.I was more of a challenge than first anticipated; we had to spend a lot of time developing age-appropriate activities to make complex and abstract technologies accessible for children (more in our teaching pack). These were necessary, because who can really tell if the washing machine at home or the ATM around the corner uses A.I or not? And how and why, or why not?
We found that A.I is already shaping children’s lives – from the apps they use, to how they learn and connect. However, most A.I systems have not been developed with children in mind and, as such, are not yet safe for children to use, there is a risk of children’s human rights being infringed in various ways. So, to find out how these risks might be mitigated, we went straight to the experts in childhood: children themselves. We asked Members of Children’s Parliament to think about what needs to happen for A.I to play a role in keeping all children healthy, happy and safe, using children’s human rights as a framework. The children came up with 12 “Calls to Action” around different issues they consider most important.
Many of the Calls to Action address the importance for children (and adults) to learn about A.I; its impact on (children’s) human rights as well as the things the children want adults to consider when using A.I in education. Meanwhile, we know that there is a considerable gap in support for school staff: 79% of teachers surveyed in 2024 said they’d had no guidance on teaching A.I, while only 13% of children participating in our 2023 survey said they had learned about A.I in school.
The new teacher resource pack aims to fill this gap. The activities in the resource pack explore the most relevant themes and have been designed, tested and edited with the support of both children and teachers. It is a direct outcome of one of the children’s key calls to action, that A.I should be in the curriculum.
Our survey results show that many teachers do not feel knowledgeable about A.I or confident in the teaching of it. This resource pack aims to address this; it includes six easy-to-use lesson plans with clear learning objectives for teachers and relevant background notes. So, every educator should be able to make use of the resource without the need for A.I expertise.
The resource pack’s focus is on understanding and exploring A.I in relation to children’s lived experiences and their human rights. To do that, we used many real-life scenarios to explore themes like fairness, bias, safety and security. The children wanted the teaching pack to be fun to use and include a lot of creative tools. We are especially proud of the four animated videos explaining key A.I and children’s rights concepts, created by children for children with the support of Katy Beveridge and JHP Visuals.
More children should know about AI so they can understand what’s happening when they use it. This will help to make sure children’s rights are respected. The more we learn about AI, the more we’ll know how to keep ourselves safe.
Members of Children’s Parliament’s Call to Action
Children value the relationships that they have with their teachers. Children see the potential for A.I to support teachers with their workload and hope that future A.I systems might help teachers, making learning fun and freeing up more time for teachers to spend with the class. Children want teachers to get to know them better and to build positive relationships. Children don’t want A.I systems to replace teachers.
Children feel strongly about the ways A.I might be used in education and how that might affect their human rights, their learning and their development. They want A.I systems deployed in education to be fair, inclusive, and safe for all children to use.
The activities in the pack are designed to be easy-to-use, engaging, and creative. Providing a fun learning experience for both children and educators while not requiring access to A.I technologies themselves. A children’s rights approach provides a critical framework for children and teachers to engage with complex ethical questions about A.I’s development and use; questions that are more pressing than ever.
To learn more about the children’s work exploring A.I, visit childrensparliament.org.uk/exploring-childrens-rights-and-ai/