Policy mandateCognitive automation2026-04-02
Five Chinese ministries issue an AI-plus-Education action plan requiring AI to be written into the teacher qualification exam and certification, with tiered training to reach every teacher
School teacheroccupation page →
Event date / reported
2026-04-02 · reported 2026-04-08
Evidence stage
Policy mandateRegulation, 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.
Tasks this bears on
Preparing lessons and materials
Planning the sequence, writing worksheets, finding examples, differentiating for three ability levels.
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backed
Marking and written feedback
Grading a stack of essays or problem sets and writing a comment on each that the student will actually read.
Automating≈ Platform inference
Where this applies
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.
What this means
For teachers in mainland China, what this document changes first is not the classroom but the entry requirement: AI is to be written into the teacher qualification examination and certification, alongside a teacher AI-literacy standard and tiered training. Knowing how to use these tools is moving from a personal choice to a condition of the job. Lesson preparation and marking are named as the first two places the tools go — the two parts of a teacher's week that are longest and most batchable.
What it does not yet show
It establishes that nothing has yet happened. No training completion rate, no timetable for revising the qualification exam, no lesson measured. A policy requiring adoption and adoption actually happening are two different layers — this site records it at the policy layer, where a single record changes no task judgement on its own. Note also that it shares a policy line with the 2025 ministry guideline already recorded here (the plan itself says it will continue refining that guideline), so the two should not be read as independent confirmation of each other.
What you can check
If you teach in a Chinese primary or secondary school, two things will answer themselves within the year. First, whether your province has issued its own AI curriculum guideline and whether it specifies class hours — the plan delegates that to provincial authorities. Second, whether AI actually showed up in your most recent training or qualification exam. Whether those two reach you says more about the pace than any discussion of whether teachers get replaced.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. Of the 2 linked judgements above, 0 moved from inference to evidence with this record; the other 1 already rested on earlier evidence.
Source
教育部等五部门《关于印发「人工智能+教育」行动计划的通知》教科信〔2026〕1号(教育部政府门户网站) · verified 2026-09-11 · Claude (CTO) · interpreted 2026-09-11 · Claude (CTO)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.