Starting your AI Journey: AI Awareness Day

With over 700 schools already signed up, AI Awareness Dayon 4th June 2026 is building momentum around AI literacy in schools across England. If your school has been wondering where to begin with AI, this is a brilliant opportunity to take that first step.

AI Awareness Day asks schools to commit to just one activity - one assembly, one tutor-time discussion, one lesson starter. Our own experience is that for many schools the challenge with AI isn't a lack of interest, it's knowing where to start. There's a real risk of either doing nothing or jumping straight to tool adoption without the foundational understanding to use them well. AI Awareness Day addresses this by prioritising understanding over implementation.

This is exactly the approach we advocate through our AiEd Certified programme. The first element of our framework is AI Literacy, deliberately placed as the foundation for everything that follows. You can't write meaningful AI policies, select appropriate tools, or redesign pedagogy if leaders, staff and students don't first understand what AI is, how it works, and where its limitations lie. Taking part in AI Awareness Day is a natural way to start building that foundation.

The display board: ready-made evidence

One tangible feature of the campaign is the display board activity, where schools create a physical display bringing together the five principles with student responses, key questions, and QR codes linking to school AI policies. When students write about how to ensure AI tools are fair, or discuss what AI does well compared to humans, they're demonstrating exactly the critical understanding at the heart of our framework's first element. When staff curate the content and facilitate those conversations, they're evidencing their own developing AI literacy too.

For schools already enrolled on AiEd Certified, the display board can be captured and uploaded to your PebblePad portfolio as evidence of progress. For schools not yet enrolled, it's a perfect taster of the kind of work our certification process supports and celebrates.

Get involved

There's still time to register. Head to www.aiawarenessday.co.uk to sign up andchoose an activity that works for your context. And if AI Awareness Day sparks something bigger - a recognition that your school is ready for a structured approach to AI - book a discovery call to find out how AiEd Certified can help.

‍