I ask the same question at the start of every AI teachier training session: “How many of you are using AI regularly in your teaching practice?” The response is nearly always the same: teachers looking around the room, waiting for someone else to raise their hand first. Maybe two or three hands creep up, to the surprise of the vast majority.
What follows reveals the true scale of our crisis. I demonstrate what AI can do in proficient hands, watching their expressions transform from polite scepticism to genuine shock as they witness AI generating differentiated lesson plans, creating PowerPoints and resources that would take them hours to develop. The looks on their faces are unmistakable: How did I not know about this?
But I don’t stop there as the demonstration takes a further turn as I show how easily AI produces authoritative-sounding responses filled with dangerous misinformation, and creates student work that’s nearly impossible to detect. At this point, the natural progression would be to discuss implementing the school’s AI policy.
However, that conversation cannot happen. That policy doesn’t exist. How can it without detailed and full guideline on AI from the Dept. of Education.
Students Aren’t Waiting
Eighteen months after the Department of Education promised official guidelines, schools remain in limbo. Without national direction, individual schools cannot create meaningful policies. The fact is clear: school policy must be grounded in government policy. Yet whilst we wait, something crucial is happening: students aren’t waiting with us.
Our students are using AI. Not proficiently, but they’re using it nonetheless. Why wouldn’t they? This powerful technology sits in every student’s pocket, integrated into the social media platforms they use constantly. Snapchat’s AI assistant, Meta AI across WhatsApp and Instagram, ChatGPT just a browser tap away. These aren’t specialist tools requiring technical knowledge; they’re companions embedded in the apps students already spend hours using daily.
This is not a future threat we can prepare for at leisure. It’s happening in every classroom right now. Students are generating essays in English, solving maths problems, researching History projects, all whilst their teachers lack the expertise to guide them safely or the policy framework to assess their work fairly.
The implications for assessment are profound, but for some teachers, the pressure is even more immediate.
Science Teachers on the Front Line
Science teachers find themselves in an especially acute crisis. The new Leaving Certificate reforms have already been rolled out across Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Project work now carries a weighting of 40% of students’ final grades through additional assessment components like the Biology, Chemistry and Chemistry in Practice Investigations.
These aren’t abstract concerns about future possibilities. Science teachers face immediate realities affecting assessment fairness right now. They watch students with premium AI subscriptions gaining advantages over those without. They recognise legitimate concerns about not being equipped to guide students on ethical AI use. They see the fundamental unfairness unfolding before them, yet they lack any official framework to address it.
The NCCA guidelines for these investigations acknowledge AI exists and require students to reference it if used, but they don’t tell teachers how to guide students in using it appropriately, how to spot misuse, or how to ensure fair assessment when some students have access to far more sophisticated tools than others.
This immediate crisis has prompted action.
Leadership in a Vacuum
Into this policy void has stepped the Irish Science Teachers’ Association. In the absence of official guidance, ISTA has taken the initiative and produced comprehensive AI guidance for educators. You can read the 12-page document HERE.
ISTA hasn’t waited for policy to catch up with reality. Instead, their working group has collaborated to create a practical resource that addresses the questions teachers face daily:
- How do we use AI responsibly?
- How should students reference it?
- When is AI use appropriate, and when isn’t it?
The document provides concrete strategies, from differentiated lesson creation and Bloom’s taxonomy question generation to supporting EAL students through Google Translate. It includes a traffic light system for classroom use, student reflection prompts, and clear academic integrity expectations. The guidance draws on sources from the NCCA, the UK Department for Education, and international research. It even addresses the crucial distinction between teacher use and student use, something many discussions conflate.
Perhaps most valuably, the document doesn’t shy away from complexity.
It acknowledges both the benefits and challenges of AI, from administrative efficiency to the risks of diminished personal engagement. It provides frameworks for good practice, appropriate practice, and safe practice. It gives teachers the vocabulary and structure they need to navigate this technology with their students.
Written by Irish science teachers facing the immediate realities of AI in assessment-heavy coursework, this is guidance that educators across all subject areas should read. As a History and English teacher, I can attest that whilst created for science teachers, the frameworks around ethical use, referencing, and academic integrity apply across every subject. The traffic light system for determining when AI can be used works as effectively in History or English as it does in Chemistry.
The working group who created this document deserve our gratitude. They’ve provided clarity where there was confusion, structure where there was chaos, and practical strategies where there was paralysis.
The Problem With Excellence
Yet here’s the uncomfortable truth: ISTA should never have needed to create this document.
The existence of this guidance, excellent though it is, highlights a fundamental gap in our educational leadership. A professional teachers’ association has been forced to step into a void that should have been filled by the Department of Education months ago. Teachers are doing the work that policymakers have delayed.
Moreover, this remains unofficial guidance. Schools seeking to develop AI policies now have a valuable resource, but it carries no official weight. Principals and boards of management still lack the governmental backing they need to implement comprehensive AI strategies with confidence. The document itself acknowledges this limitation, describing itself as “an unofficial resource intended to support science teachers in exploring the use of generative artificial intelligence in their professional practice, in the absence of an official guidance document.”
This places teachers in an impossible position. They can read this guidance, recognise its quality, and still find themselves unable to act decisively because it lacks official sanction.
- What happens when a parent challenges a teacher’s decision about AI use in assessment?
- What protection do teachers have when that decision is based on guidance created by fellow educators rather than mandated by the Department?
What Needs to Happen Now
Every teacher in Ireland should read this ISTA document. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real. It addresses the actual questions teachers face, provides practical strategies they can use tomorrow, and acknowledges the complexity of the challenges ahead. It’s grounded in classroom reality rather than abstract policy speak.
The Department of Education now has a clear example of what comprehensive guidance looks like. ISTA has shown them what’s possible, what’s necessary, and what teachers actually need. The question is whether the Department will recognise the urgency that prompted science teachers to act, and whether they’ll finally deliver the national guidelines that schools have been waiting for since 2023.
Ireland’s science teachers have provided a roadmap. Now it’s time for the Department of Education to provide the official framework that teachers desperately need to do their jobs fairly and effectively.
Patrick Hickey is the Head of History with the Tuition Centre. He is one of Ireland Ireland’s leading providers of Teacher AI CPD in Ireland. Patrick has been featured on Irish media outlets such as RTÉ Six-One News, TV3’s “Tonight Show,” “The Irish Times” and Newstalk Radio on the area of AI in Education.
Contact Patrick at aiteachinggur@gmail.com for any requests for training, webinars, workshops or keynote speaking