British Teachers: Students Losing Critical Thinking Skills to AI

Two-thirds of British secondary school teachers say their students' critical thinking has declined since artificial intelligence became part of everyday classroom use. That is the finding of the annual survey by the National Education Union (NEU), the UK's largest teachers' union, which also shows that teachers themselves are using AI at work more than ever before.

The survey results, cited among others by the British newspaper The Guardian, strike two different areas at once. On one hand, they show a sharp rise in AI use by teachers themselves, mainly for creating teaching materials, planning lessons and administrative work. On the other, they reveal growing concern within the same profession about what AI is doing to students' skills.

What worries teachers most

Teachers who took part in the survey pointed to specific symptoms, not just a general sense of decline. They spoke of a fading ability to formulate ideas from scratch, a drop in the quality of handwriting, and difficulty holding a conversation without the help of generative tools. Some responses also touched on basic spelling, since speech-to-text conversion and autocorrect in AI tools remove students' need to remember how words are spelled.

Students are losing basic skills: thinking, creativity, writing, and even how to hold a conversation - teacher who took part in the NEU survey

Students need to be able to think for themselves. That is the essence of learning, but our survey shows that reliance on AI is affecting students' ability to think critically - Daniel Kebede, NEU general secretary

Dispute over AI tutors for poorer students

The second front in the dispute is the government's plan to introduce AI tools as tutors for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who lack access to private tutoring. According to earlier government statements, the program could cover as many as 450,000 students. The NEU is demanding that such efforts be regulated and based on credible evidence of effectiveness before being rolled out widely in classrooms.

49 percent of teachers say they oppose the plan, while just 14 percent support it. Some respondents flatly called the idea a cost-cutting tool rather than genuine educational support. Others noted that an AI tutor cannot motivate a student from a difficult background or build a relationship with them the way a human can, and that it is precisely students from such backgrounds who need that the most.

Teachers using AI more than ever

Paradoxically, the same survey shows that resistance to AI in students' hands does not translate into resistance to AI in teachers' own hands. 76 percent of teachers say they use AI tools daily, mainly for creating teaching materials (61 percent), planning lessons (41 percent) and administrative work (38 percent). That is up from 53 percent a year earlier, showing how quickly these tools have entered everyday work in schools.

This contrast is key to understanding the dispute. Teachers are not rejecting AI as such, they are worried about a specific scenario in which students use it to replace independent cognitive effort instead of treating it as a supporting tool, the way adults themselves do.

What this means for Poland

Polish schools are going through their own, though less advanced, transformation at the same time. AI labs funded by the Krajowy Plan Odbudowy (KPO, Poland's EU-backed National Recovery Plan) are set to reach thousands of schools across the country, and teachers are only just learning how to incorporate these tools into lessons. The British survey shows the risk this can carry if implementation does not go hand in hand with clear rules for student use, since as many as two-thirds of English schools still lack such rules.

For Polish school principals and regional education authorities, this is a signal that simply having the equipment and access to language models in the classroom does not solve the problem. Without a policy defining when and how students can use AI for homework and tests, the risk is similar to that in England, where the tool was meant to help but, according to teachers themselves, more often weakens independent thinking than supports it.