It's seven in the evening and your child shuts the laptop: "Done, homework's finished." And out comes the usual question, the one that almost never leads anywhere good: "Did you do it, or did the AI?" They shrug, you're left wondering, and that's the end of the conversation.
I know what you're thinking: the school should have this sorted out by now. Well, something is moving. In September, Spain's National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training (INTEF), which reports to the Ministry of Education, published version 2.0 of its Guide on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Education (in Spanish). It runs to 105 pages written for teachers and schools, but there's plenty in it for families. And it starts by changing the question.
How Spain does it: who is INTEF, and why does a "national" guide only advise?
Spain is one of the most decentralised countries in Europe when it comes to schools. The Ministry of Education in Madrid sets the basic framework (the core curriculum, the stages, the qualifications), but the day-to-day running of education belongs to the 17 autonomous communities, Spain's regions: they employ the teachers, fund the schools, choose the platforms and devices, and decide most classroom rules. That is why the big decisions about phones in schools were taken region by region, and why even the government's new national AI plan, Plan IA360, presented in September 2026, schedules its classroom measures as a "negotiation with the autonomous communities" in the first quarter of 2027.
INTEF sits inside the Ministry. Its job is not to legislate but to train teachers and produce open resources that every region can use. So when INTEF publishes a guide, it is the central government's best advice, not an order. Its influence comes from being the shared reference that regional departments, teacher-training centres and schools across the country end up working from.
From "Do They Use It or Not?" to "How, What For and Under What Conditions?"
The first version of the guide dates from 2024. Since then, the document itself admits, AI "has gone from being seen mainly as a technological novelty to becoming an established reality in everyday life." Our kids use it every day, often inside apps that don't advertise it as such.
Spanish students are a striking case. According to PISA 2025, as the government's own Plan IA360 points out, they are the heaviest users of AI for studying in the entire developed world: 54% use it to study every week, against an OECD average of 46%. And yet the public debate in Spain over the past few years has been almost entirely about restriction. Phones have been banned or limited in schools across most regions, and the region of Catalonia announced in 2025 that it would withdraw tablets from early-years classrooms. The conversation about teaching kids to use these tools well has lagged far behind the conversation about taking them away.
That's why the new version doesn't waste time on the ban-or-allow debate. It says so plainly: "The central question, therefore, should not be whether AI is used or not, but how, what for and under what conditions." And it makes clear from the start that AI "does not replace the role of the teacher."
It isn't a law or a binding regulation: these are guidelines. They rest on the EU's AI Act, on the new European digital competence framework (DigComp 3.0), and on the AI literacy framework that the OECD and the European Commission published this year for primary and secondary schools. In other words, Spain is not inventing its own approach here; it is translating a European one into classroom practice. The guide can be downloaded for free (in Spanish) and carries an open licence.
The guide doesn't ask you to choose between AI and the exercise book: it asks for judgement.
Learning For, With and About AI
The heart of the guide is an easy idea to remember. There are three ways to learn when AI is involved:
Learning for AI: developing the judgement to decide when, how and what to use it for, always keeping a human in control. In the early stages, it proposes "guided curiosity and safe simulations" before students get to use the tools on their own.
Learning with AI: using it as support for studying, creating or practising, not as a shortcut.
Learning about AI: understanding what it is, how it learns from data and why it can make mistakes or be biased.
Within those approaches, the guide distinguishes four areas of what it calls AI literacy: interacting with it, creating with it, managing it and "modelling" it, that is, understanding how it's built. The most useful way to get a feel for it is through the classroom examples in the appendix. In Infantil and Primaria (in Spain, the early-years stage from 3 to 6 and primary school from 6 to 12), for example, the teacher projects two answers to a question the class has worked on: one correct, and another generated by AI with mistakes in it. In pairs, the children mark in colours what's right, what's doubtful and what's false, and explain why. In another activity, "The Robot Translator", one student plays a machine translator that can only follow literal rules, and the class discovers why translating word for word doesn't work.
Neither one needs a screen. And both teach something any parent would want for their children: not to believe what a machine says at first glance. If you want ideas for starting that conversation with younger kids, we've already written at Papitek about how to explain artificial intelligence to young children (in Spanish).
The Risks, Called by Their Name
What we liked most about the guide is that it doesn't stop at a generic "be careful with AI". It puts names to what many parents sense at home. In the document's words, "the real danger lies not in the technology itself, but in 'blind delegation'." And it breaks that down:
Illusion of competence: believing you've understood something because the AI gave you a clear, well-written answer, without having made the effort to build it yourself.
The convenience trap: because it's fast and easy, it ends up being the only source, and you stop searching, comparing and checking.
Cognitive sedentarism: using it continuously as a substitute for effort can weaken memory, comprehension, writing or reasoning.
Equity gap: the student who knows how to use it with judgement gets a lot out of it; the one who doesn't uses it superficially. AI can widen differences instead of narrowing them.
There's one risk on the guide's list that will sound particularly Spanish to outside readers: AI tools can flatten linguistic and cultural diversity, including Spain's co-official languages. Millions of Spanish children go to school in Catalan, Basque or Galician as well as Castilian Spanish, and AI tools are trained on far more Castilian Spanish, and far more English, than on any of those languages.
The measures it proposes are very concrete: make the process visible and not just the result, ask for short oral defences, design tasks with productive friction (tasks that force students to argue and compare sources) and guarantee "deliberate and frequent practice without AI assistance on key tasks, especially during the initial stages of learning." It's the same idea we saw when we explained that the AI that makes your kids better in class is the same one that makes them worse: it depends on whether it thinks for them or helps them think.
AI isn't the problem. The problem is that we stop thinking because it does it for us.
What the Guide Says About Families
Although it's written for teachers, the guide gives families a clear role: that of "trusted adults" who accompany and guide, and who can reinforce at home what's done in class through conversations about the use of AI, including on issues that perhaps can't be dealt with at school.
There are also three details worth knowing:
1. Age 14. It points out that, under Spain's data protection law, a minor can only consent to the processing of their own data from the age of 14. Below that age, signing up to an AI tool requires the family's explicit consent.
How Spain does it: why 14? The EU's GDPR lets each member state set the age of digital consent anywhere between 13 and 16. Spain chose 14 in its 2018 data protection law (the LOPDGDD). That line may move: a separate bill on protecting minors in digital environments, which would set a minimum age of 16 for social media and require real age verification, is still working its way through the Spanish Parliament as of October 2026. In schools, the rules are enforced by Spain's data protection authority, the AEPD, which in March 2026, together with the regional authorities of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Andalusia, published a ten-point code for how schools should contract educational platforms, and which has already fined schools over their use of mainstream classroom platforms.
2. No personal data. It warns that any detail shared with these tools can be stored or reused, so "entering personal or sensitive data should be avoided." And it recommends using tools "that have the backing of educational institutions", not the first app that comes along.
3. The school's strategy should be known. The guide proposes that every school build AI into its Plan Digital de Centro (its School Digital Plan) and considers it "advisable that this strategy be accessible to and known by the whole school community", so that families understand its objectives, criteria and conditions.
How Spain does it: the School Digital Plan. Since Spain's national push to digitise its education system, every school is expected to have a Plan Digital de Centro: a document setting out which devices and platforms it uses, how it trains its staff and how it teaches digital skills. It sits alongside a national scheme that certifies teachers' digital competence on a scale from A1 to C2, like language levels. By November 2023, 262,116 teachers had been accredited, 46.8% of the target of 560,000. In practice, many families have never heard of their school's plan, which is exactly why the guide's suggestion matters.
That third point is, for us, the most important: it gives you an opening to ask.
Three Tools Worth Knowing About (and Asking For)
The guide's appendices include ready-to-use materials. It's worth knowing they exist:
A model AI use declaration. Before handing in a piece of work, the student explains honestly whether they've used AI and what for. For the teacher, it's a basis for asking for clarification or an oral defence; for the student, a way to reflect on their own effort. The guide suggests always asking for it, as a way of building "a framework of mutual trust."
A reflection questionnaire for students. It asks how often they use AI and what for: looking for ideas, organising their work, checking spelling... or "asking it to generate the text, the summary or the answers, and copying it to hand in." Answering it honestly is already an exercise in self-awareness.
Learning situations by stage, like the ones we've seen, which any teacher can adapt.
By the way, the declaration works just as well at home. When homework's done, instead of "Did you do it, or did the AI?", try: "What did the AI help you with, and which part did you do yourself?" The first question sounds like an interrogation; the second, like a conversation.
Five Questions for Your Next Tutoría
How Spain does it: the tutoría and the class WhatsApp group. In Spanish schools, every class group has a tutor, a teacher who is responsible for that group and is the family's first point of contact. Parents can ask for a one-to-one meeting with them, the tutoría, at any point in the school year, and schools set aside regular hours for it. Running in parallel there is almost always a parents' WhatsApp group for the class, a famously lively institution where everything from lost jumpers to school policy gets debated.
If you want to make use of the guide without becoming the annoying parent in the class WhatsApp group, these questions are concrete and hard to answer with a "we're looking into it":
A. Does the school's digital plan already include AI? Can we see which uses are allowed and which aren't?
B. Which AI tools does my child use in class, or at home on the school's instructions? Are they backed by the education authority?
C. How is a piece of work assessed now? Do you ask for an AI use declaration, or assess the process, for example through oral explanations?
D. Are there times for learning without AI? Especially when starting a new topic, as the guide recommends.
E. Is AI literacy being taught? That is, are students taught how it works, why it gets things wrong and how to check what it says?
The school doesn't need to have every answer yet: the guide itself insists that the strategy should be reviewed and improved over time. But asking helps get the topic onto the agenda. And if you don't live in Spain, the questions travel well: swap "School Digital Plan" for whatever your school calls its technology policy.
From "Did You Do It?" to "How Did You Do It?"
INTEF's new guide doesn't answer every question, and it doesn't claim to. But it offers something that was missing: a common language so that teachers and families mean the same thing when we talk about AI in class. Illusion of competence, productive friction, use declaration. Words that work as well in a parent-teacher meeting as they do at the kitchen table.
For a country whose debate has been dominated by what to ban, that shift matters. It doesn't change the rules in any classroom by itself, since in Spain that is up to the regions and to each school. But it gives every school in the country the same starting point, and it gives families the vocabulary to ask about it.
In the end, the goal is the same in the classroom and at home: that our children use AI without ever stopping thinking for themselves. Technology shouldn't be a wall between us and them, but a bridge for walking alongside them as they grow.
Do you already know what your children's school digital plan says about AI?
This is the English version of La nueva guía del Ministerio sobre IA en clase, originally published in Spanish, expanded with context for readers outside Spain. Quotations from the INTEF guide are our own translations from the Spanish original. Sources: INTEF, "Guía sobre el uso de la inteligencia artificial en el ámbito educativo", version 2.0 (September 2026); Plan IA360 (Government of Spain, September 2026); AEPD and regional data protection authorities, decálogo on educational platforms (March 2026); Ministry of Education, teacher digital competence figures (November 2023).