AI Literacy Course for Teachers

AI literacy for teachers is the working knowledge to use AI tools effectively, judge their output, and guide pupils' AI use. It covers how chat AI works, what it gets right and wrong, and how to apply it to teaching tasks like planning and feedback. This course builds it across 17 short lessons in two levels: Understand AI, then Put AI to Work.

Because pupils got there first. 51% of UK 8–17-year-olds who use AI say they use it for schoolwork or homework (Ofcom, 2026), while 41% of UK teachers have not had any AI training at work yet (Bett/YouGov, June 2026). AI literacy lets teachers save real time, set fair classroom rules, and guide pupils instead of reacting to them.

Learning a tool teaches you where the buttons are; AI literacy teaches you judgement. It covers how AI generates answers, when its output is unreliable, what happens to your data, and how AI affects pupils' thinking. Tools change every term; literacy transfers. This course teaches both, with hands-on practice inside the lessons rather than tool walkthroughs.

The lessons follow the same structure, but the UK edition is written for UK schools. Data protection is covered through UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and ICO guidance. Policy and safety are covered through DfE guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, Ofsted and JCQ. The statistics come from UK sources such as Ofcom, DfE, Bett/YouGov and Teacher Tapp, and the examples use UK terms: pupils, Key Stages, GCSEs and A levels.

Teachers in UK primary and secondary schools are the main audience. The lesson on teaching AI literacy has a tab for each stage, from KS1 to KS4–5. Teaching assistants, SENCOs, librarians and school leaders are welcome too. It works at any experience level, from never having opened a chatbot to already using AI every week.

No. The course starts from zero, in plain language, with no coding and no jargon. Early lessons show that you already use AI daily (your spam filter, your maps app) and build from there in small steps. If you can use email and a browser, you can complete every lesson.

About two hours in total: 17 lessons, each six to ten minutes long. Level 1, Understand AI, is 9 lessons totalling 64 to 72 minutes; Level 2, Put AI to Work, is 8 lessons totalling 62 or 63 minutes, depending on how much AI experience you say you have at the start. Most teachers spread it over a week or two, one lesson at a time.

Fully self-paced. There are no live sessions to book; you take lessons whenever you have a free stretch, and the course saves your place so you can pick up where you left off. One short lesson fits into a free period.

You receive a certificate when you finish each level, which you can add to your CPD record. Whether it counts towards your school's CPD time is up to your school, so check with your CPD lead. The whole course takes about two hours, which is the figure to record.

Yes. Finish a level and a shareable certificate lands in your inbox. Add it to your LinkedIn profile, share it with your senior leadership team, or file it with your CPD records. The certificate is free, like the rest of the course.

Yes. Schools and multi-academy trusts can roll the course out as staff CPD, and Flint works with school and trust leaders on wider AI literacy training and rollout support. Book a demo to talk through running it across your school or trust, or email alex@flintk12.com.

Yes, a free Flint account on Flint's UK service, uk.flintk12.com, so Flint can save your progress and email your certificate. The UK service stores data in the UK, and no school setup is needed. The course is about AI, not about any one product, and everything works with whatever tools your school uses.

Teachers in England who use AI most often use it to create lesson resources and to plan (DfE School and College Voice survey, December 2025). In a June 2026 Bett/YouGov survey of 1,033 UK teachers, regular AI users said they save a little under two hours a week. Level 2 opens with a playbook lesson on these workflows, practised on your own tasks.

Start by modelling it: show pupils when you use AI, when you do not, and why. The course's final lessons cover teaching AI literacy to pupils, with what pupils need to understand at each Key Stage, how to teach it, and what to say when AI comes up. They also cover designing assignments that work with AI rather than pretending it does not exist.

A classroom AI policy should state when AI use is allowed, required or off-limits; how pupils acknowledge it; how it affects marking; and what happens to pupil data. In England, DfE guidance does not require a separate AI policy, but your school's safeguarding and data protection duties still apply. For GCSEs, A levels and other qualifications that JCQ covers, follow JCQ's rules and your exam centre's. The course walks you through drafting your own policy in Level 2.

You usually cannot know for certain: AI detectors are unreliable and produce false accusations, so the course does not recommend relying on them. More dependable signals come from the process: drafts, in-class writing and conversations about the work. For qualification work that JCQ covers, follow your exam centre's procedures. The course covers ways to reduce misuse in the first place, like AI-aware assignment design.

General consumer chatbots like ChatGPT require users to be 13 or older, so they are not appropriate for most primary pupils. For younger pupils, use an AI platform built for schools, supervised by teachers, with pupil guardrails. DfE's generative AI product safety standards set out what to expect from one; see how Flint meets them. The course covers what to check before adopting any tool for pupils.

Not into consumer tools: never enter pupil names, grades or identifying information into general chatbots, which may store and train on what you type. For schools in England, DfE guidance says to check with your data protection officer or IT lead before entering pupil data into any AI tool, and that the data must be protected and not used to train the AI. The lesson on bias, data, and where your words go covers how to work safely.

Yes. The course covers data protection in practical terms: how UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply when schools and providers handle personal data, how the ICO's Children's Code applies to edtech, and what the ICO's 2026 audits of edtech providers found. It is written for teachers, not lawyers, with concrete do-and-do-not examples.

Yes. It covers DfE's guidance on generative AI in education, DfE's product safety standards for AI tools, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, and how Ofsted looks at AI during inspection. DfE guidance applies to schools in England; teachers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should also check their own government's guidance.

Directly, with practice. Level 1 includes a three-rule safety kit for judging AI output, a lesson on bias, data, and where your words go, and a lesson on deepfakes and fake media. You practise catching confident-but-wrong answers yourself, so you can teach pupils to do the same.

Those programmes mainly teach their own products, like Gemini or Copilot. This course is classroom-first: it starts from teaching problems such as planning time, academic integrity and parent questions, and treats tools as interchangeable. It is also about two hours, free and self-paced, and you leave with a classroom AI policy you drafted in the course.

No. Flint wrote the course, and DfE has not endorsed it. The course draws on DfE's published guidance and links to it, so you can read the original. DfE also publishes its own free training materials for staff in England, which work well alongside this course.

The course is free. Every lesson, check-in and certificate costs nothing, and there is no paid tier or card details required. You need a free Flint account to take it, but no school setup.