School teacher

One rural district, one stationary robot bought as a teaching aid for a high-school robotics course — not a system that teaches a class. What stopped it was procurement, student-data agreements and union objection, not any limit on what the device can do.

Failure, rollback, regulation or cost is suppressing adoption. Can lower an assessment or widen its uncertainty.

Mainland China, document number 教科信〔2026〕1号, signed 2 April 2026, with 2030 as the target year. It is a requirement document: it says what must be done and contains nothing about what has been done — no training completion rate, no timetable for revising the teacher qualification exam, no measurement in classrooms. One thing needs saying plainly: the plan itself states that it will continue to refine the 2025 AI literacy guideline already recorded here, so the two come from one policy line rather than two unconnected institutions reaching the same conclusion; do not read them as two pieces of evidence confirming each other. The clauses that bear most directly on teaching are in section seven: lesson preparation is to be supported by automatic generation of multimodal teaching materials, plan optimisation and simulation of the teaching process, and homework handling is to move toward intelligent marking, answering and tutoring.

Regulation, subsidy or public procurement is requiring or funding adoption — the mirror of a constraint. It shows adoption is being required, not that it has happened, so one mandate is never enough on its own; two independent ones are.

One small country, grades 10–11, a three-year pilot; a Tartu/Stanford/OpenAI impact study is still pending. The student-facing tutor app (Estonian-language, built with OpenAI) only opened in late January 2026, and 47% of activated accounts used it weekly.

Small-scale trial in a real setting. Tells us the deployment conditions are being tested, not that they hold — so one pilot is never enough on its own; two independent ones are.

Mainland China, all primary and secondary schools, issued 12 May 2025. The ministry's own description: the education guideline builds a general AI education system centred on literacy, through a spiral curriculum running from early cognition to innovative practice; the use guideline covers generative-AI application scenarios in schools, sets usage norms for each stage, and holds data-security and ethical lines while the technology assists teaching and personalised learning. Two things this source does NOT establish, which earlier wording claimed: it does not describe a strengthened guidance role for teachers, and it does not set out the three named stages. It is a guideline, not an implementation record — it says what schools are to do, not what any school did, and there is no headcount, budget or timetable in it.

Regulation, subsidy or public procurement is requiring or funding adoption — the mirror of a constraint. It shows adoption is being required, not that it has happened, so one mandate is never enough on its own; two independent ones are.

Teaching is one of the lower-exposure occupations on this site, and that is a defensible conclusion rather than a comforting one: the classroom is a physical, relational job with legal responsibility, and the tools change the desk work around it. What is genuinely changing for a new teacher is the expectation of tool fluency and the pressure to teach honest use to students. The economics of the profession — pay, class sizes, workload — are a much bigger factor in whether to enter than automation is.

Your exposure is in the hours outside the classroom, and those are the hours you most want back. Used well, the tools return preparation and marking time; the risk is that the system absorbs that time into larger classes or more administration rather than returning it to you. Being the teacher who defines how tools are used in your department is a position worth taking before it is defined for you.

Stay and strengthen

Take back the desk hours, on purpose

The tools genuinely shorten preparation and marking. Whether that becomes your time or the school's depends on who notices first.

Reshape the role

Lead how your school uses the tools

Every school needs someone who understands both teaching and the tools well enough to write the policy and train colleagues. That person is usually promoted into it.

Adjacent move

Curriculum, assessment or learning design

Designing what is taught and how it is assessed is becoming more complex as tools change what students can do unaided. It uses classroom experience directly and is desk-based.

On the automation question specifically, yes — the classroom is one of the least exposed workplaces we assess, and the tools mostly remove the parts of the job teachers like least. The reasons people leave teaching are pay, workload, class size and respect, and none of those is a technology question. Decide based on those; on the automation axis alone, teaching is a defensible choice.

This occupation's exposure is low and the signal is not about your job disappearing. Watch instead whether the time returned by faster marking and planning shows up as your time or as more duties. That is a staffing decision your school makes, and it is the thing that actually changes your working life.

Marking and written feedback — the task marked automating. Running a room of thirty is not, and for most teachers it is the majority of the working day, which is why this occupation's overall exposure is among the lowest on the site. The tasks changing fastest are the ones teachers do at home.

That decision is above this site's pay grade, but the workload consequence is not: teaching students to use them honestly is new curriculum that arrives with no extra time. Where schools have brought tutoring systems into class, the teacher's role shifted towards designing how they are used and checking what they taught.