What 200 school leaders in Ghana taught me about AI readiness
“How many of you have a written AI policy for your school?”
I asked this to a room of 200 school principals and senior leaders at Cambridge International Schools Day in Accra, Ghana. A handful of hands went up. Maybe ten. In a room of 200.
That ratio is not unusual. In a 2023 UNESCO survey of over 450 schools and universities, fewer than 10% had developed institutional policies or formal guidance on generative AI. The numbers have likely improved since, but not by much. Meanwhile, RAND’s 2025 survey of US schools found that more than half of teachers are now using AI for planning, feedback, and content. College Board research puts the figure even higher for students: 84% of high school students reported using generative AI for schoolwork by mid-2025.
The gap between what we have planned for and what is already happening. That’s what this session was about.
The speed of change
I opened with three numbers.
A 91% cost reduction in software development over eight months using AI coding assistants. A 5x increase in AI agent capability in a single year. And a ChatGPT subscription that pays for itself in half a day of productivity gains. The first and third figures come from ARK Invest’s Big Ideas 2026 report. The second from METR’s research on AI agent benchmarks.
These are not education statistics. That’s the point. The changes reshaping how software gets built, how businesses operate, how knowledge work gets done, those changes arrive at your school whether you have a plan for them or not. They arrive through your students’ phones, through your teachers’ lesson planning, through the parents who are already using AI at work and wondering why the school isn’t talking about it.
Hype, fear, and a third option
Most of what school leaders hear about AI falls into two camps. The hype: “AI will transform everything, every school needs it now, buy this platform.” The fear: “AI is cheating, it’s dangerous, ban it, restrict it, wait for someone to tell us what to do.”
Neither is useful for you as a school leader.
The hype sells tools. The fear delays decisions. Both leave you reactive. What school leaders actually need is a way to assess where they are, figure out what matters most in their context, and take deliberate steps forward.
That reframe is at the heart of what I presented in Accra. The question is not which AI tools should we buy. It is: are we ready to make good decisions about AI?
Five dimensions of readiness
To answer that question, I introduced a framework built from five dimensions of AI readiness (adapted from UNESCO frameworks and others), shaped by what I’ve seen working with schools across the Middle East, East Africa, and Southern Africa.
Leadership and governance. Who is actually responsible for AI decisions? In most schools, these decisions happen by default, not by design. What good looks like: a named AI lead, AI as a standing agenda item, and a clear process for evaluating new tools.
Policy and ethics. What are your rules, written down and shared with everyone? A student submits AI-generated coursework. A teacher uses AI to write report comments. A parent asks what data AI tools are accessing. Can you answer these today?
Infrastructure and resources. What decisions have you made deliberately, not by default? This is not about having the latest devices. A school with 20 shared devices and a clear plan beats 200 devices with no strategy.
Staff capacity. How are you building confidence, not just compliance? You can buy every AI tool on the market, but if teachers are not confident using or questioning them, it does not matter.
Curriculum and pedagogy. Where are students learning about AI, learning with AI, and learning to evaluate AI? That third one, critical thinking about AI outputs, is the skill students need most and get taught least.
Three things you can do this term
Frameworks are only useful if they lead somewhere. I closed with three moves any school can make before the end of term. No budget required.
Start with governance. Designate an AI lead, even part-time. Add AI to your leadership meeting agenda. Create a simple decision flowchart for evaluating new tools. Cost: nothing. Time: one week.
Choose curiosity before curriculum. Resist the urge to jump straight to a formal training programme. Start a voluntary AI exploration group. Share one tool per staff meeting. Give teachers permission to play, not perform. Build confidence, not compliance.
Redesign one assessment. Pick one assessment in one subject. Ask: “If students have AI, what’s meaningful here?” Pilot it. Learn. Share what you learn.
What I found on the classroom wall
After the keynote, I walked through the corridors of International Community School, the Cambridge school hosting the event. On the wall of a classroom, I found a laminated poster: a MagicSchool AI Student Agreement.
Six sections covering responsible use, privacy, ethical AI use, and communication between students and teachers. Not a draft sitting in someone’s inbox. A live agreement, deployed across the whole school, in language students can actually understand.
ICS had already answered the readiness question. They chose a tool. They built the governance around it. They made expectations visible and shared.
That poster was a more comprehensive AI agreement than most schools I’ve visited anywhere in the world. And it was pinned to a classroom wall in Accra.
We consistently underestimate where AI adoption is actually happening in education. For many schools across Africa and the Global South, this is not a conversation about catching up. It’s a conversation about what comes next.
Niall McNulty is AI Product Lead at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, where he builds AI-powered solutions for international education. He is currently pursuing an MEd in Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. The slides from this keynote are available as a PDF below.