The Digital Transformation Unit of the Education and Higher Education Department of the Council of Europe invited Parents International to contribute to a Policy Lab on Artificial Intelligence in  Education. The event that took place on 22-24 June 2026 in the inspiring environment of the Budapest European Youth Centre was part of our collaboration on a growing number of topics.

The aim of the event was to pilot and test a policy tool that will be part of a toolkit to be further tested together and published later in the year. The tool uses a combination of the futures literacy lab methodology – that has long been used by experts of UNESCO, the OECD, and other organisations – and new, AI assisted tools that help the creation of policy experiments.

The event used the premise that AI is already being used by people, including school students and their families, and also to a growing extent by school professionals. It was also based on the Council of Europe’s core belief that AI should be human-centred, and needs to be explored from this perspective.

The event gathered government representatives, civil society actors, researchers, and stakeholder representatives. This combination has already created interesting discussions on the necessity of school and whether school systems have served their purpose, outlived their usefulness, and should be abolished. It was interesting to hear arguments that are very similar to the ones we hear from the growing number of parents who have already taken their children out of the system or are considering leaving school.

On the first day, there were opportunities to get to know each other, and to establish the frame of the coming days.

On the second day, participants were encouraged to imagine probable,  desirable and also weird futures without the aim of reaching a consensus. This helped everybody to understand the present better with surprisingly convergent views on what the future may bring, and especially on what it should bring.

On the third day, participants were assigned roles, mostly ones that were very different from their actual role. Through various iterations, using the tools the Council of Europe wanted to test, the outcome was a refreshingly unique policy experimentation proposal that was building on some key factors related to AI and education:

• The landscape is evolving so fast, that traditional policy making informed by peer reviewed research is not suitable anymore.
• If we want to close the growing gap between what happens at school and the real life that is basically outside of school, we need to abandon the ideas of bans and restrictions on what can and cannot be used, but need to embrace the fact that people, including children are using AI tools they fancy, including ones that are now formally forbidden or becoming unreachable in Europe without a VPN.
• That the presence of AI made a whole school and whole community approach even more important, the active collaboration of education professionals, policy makers, non-formal and informal educators, tech companies, and other actors.
• While many professional educators are actively experimenting with AI, they need support and strong scaffolding to become impactful educators in the AI-penetrated reality. It means a wide range of scaffolding elements from competence development trainings to detailed recommendations of endorsed tools that can be used in the classroom and school contexts for various tasks.
• As a result, they can also provide their colleagues and students – and if requested, also the parents – with good scaffolding for their individual choices and encounters with AI.

The result is a dummy policy proposal and pilot project plan with the very suggestive title Before the Landscape Changes: A Rapid Probe into What Schools Actually Need to Learn with AI. From our own perspective, we must celebrate its scaffolding and non-prescriptive approach that has been shared by the participants.

The tools piloted did not only provide a wide playing field for brainstorming, learning, and building new relations, but they will also serve our team when developing tailored trainings.    

Eszter Salamon