Survey highlights:

• 62% of teachers using AI for work purposes
• Frequent users (61%) think AI will make a positive contribution to children’s education
• 69% yet to receive any training or substantial guidance from their school
• Only 20% of teachers agree AI is sufficiently regulated  

Twinkl, the leading educational publisher and solution provider, has surveyed over 3,500 U.S. teachers to explore their attitudes towards artificial intelligence - revealing a majority of educators (62%) are already making use of AI at school, substantially more than private life usage (52%). Over a quarter are using it daily for work purposes.

A recent RAND report suggested only 25% of U.S. teachers leveraged AI tools in the 2023-24 school year. With 62% of teachers in the Twinkl survey currently making use of AI for work purposes, uptake appears to have risen greatly in the past 12 months. Most educators are harnessing the technology either weekly (41%) or daily (28%). These frequent users are saving significant amounts of time each week - with 25% claiming to save up to an hour,  63% between 1-5 hours, and 9% over 5 hours.

 “The research shows American teachers are increasingly embracing AI to reduce admin tasks, improve work-life balance, and free-up time to focus on teaching. Some educators (3%) are even using AI to save over ten hours a week,” commented Jonathan Park, Head of AI, Twinkl. “With excessive workloads and poor work-life balance often cited by teachers as their main reasons for leaving the profession, the uptake of AI can completely change the game - giving teachers back precious hours and allowing them to focus on teaching the next generation.”  

Training lags behind uptake 

Despite increasingly embracing AI, only 31% of teachers claim to have received training or substantial guidance from their school, with many respondents hoping to receive instruction on how to deploy the technology effectively and ethically. Meanwhile, only one-fifth of educators think AI is adequately regulated. Progress in these areas may improve overall confidence in AI having a positive impact on student education - with only 53% currently believing it will.

In terms of tools frequent AI users would like to have, the following topped teacher wish lists:

• 64% - an AI tool for lesson content creation (e.g. worksheets, slides)  
• 60% - an AI tool for lesson planning
• 54% - an AI tool for exam/test generation
• 47% - an AI assistant for quick training/professional development (PD) 
• 37% - an AI tool for report cards 
• 37% - an AI tool for grading 

“The good news for educators is that many of the AI programs they would like to use already exist. For example, 72,000 teachers have already made use of Twinkl’s AI Report Writer tool,” said Jonathan Park. “As an increasing number of offerings hit the market, what teachers clearly need is better guidance on what solutions to trust, as well as effective training on how best to make use of AI’s potential at school.”

To help teachers find efficiency gains, Twinkl has developed a suite of AI education solutions that have been used by over 170,000 teachers globally. This includes Ari - a chatbot-style assistant that helps with a wide variety of everyday teaching tasks, including lesson planning, report writing, quiz generation, and comprehension questions.

Further data from the AI teacher survey, as well as infographics of the key results, can be found on the Twinkl website here.

About Twinkl’s AI survey

Twinkl surveyed 3,777 U.S-based teachers between January 15th and January 22nd. The company also surveyed 6,501 teachers in the UK (these results are available on the Twinkl website).

Data described as belonging to “frequent” AI users is drawn from respondents who said they were using AI tools at work on a weekly basis or more. This was applied to questions where a level of AI use/experience was needed to provide a meaningful answer.