Category: Technology | Published: 2026-07-28
Half of parents are worried that their children are leaning too heavily on artificial intelligence to get through their schoolwork. That is the headline finding from Deloitte's latest Back-to-School Survey, and it captures a tension that is becoming one of the more uncomfortable conversations in education right now.
AI tools are genuinely useful. They are also genuinely capable of doing a student's homework for them. The question parents, teachers, and employers are all circling around is whether children are learning to use AI as a tool, or whether the tool is doing the learning on their behalf.
What the Research Actually Found
The Deloitte survey puts some specific numbers behind concerns that have largely been anecdotal until now.
Fifty per cent of parents expressed concern that their children depend too much on AI for schoolwork. Nearly 30 per cent said their child already uses generative AI for school assignments on a regular basis. Only 22 per cent said their child's school currently provides approved AI tools, and just one in three parents said their school has established any clear guidance on how AI should be used.
That last figure is worth sitting with. Roughly 30 per cent of children are using AI for their schoolwork, but only 33 per cent of schools have policies in place to guide how that should happen. The technology has arrived. The frameworks have not kept pace.
At the same time, the survey found that more than a third of parents believe schools are not doing enough to prepare students to use AI effectively, and one in eight said they are considering paying privately for AI tutoring or specialist programmes outside school. Parents are not demanding that schools ban AI. They are asking for clearer direction.
Deloitte's own summary captures the situation well: parents are trying to balance concern about overreliance with recognition that AI literacy is fast becoming an essential skill for future success.
What Makes AI for Schoolwork Different
It is worth being specific about why AI for schoolwork raises different questions to earlier educational technologies.
A calculator replaced the manual arithmetic. A search engine replaced the trip to the library. Both changed what students needed to memorise and how they found information, but neither could produce a finished piece of work on demand.
Generative AI can. Ask it to write a 500-word essay on the causes of the First World War, and it will. Ask it to solve a set of simultaneous equations and show its working, and it will. Ask it to write the opening chapter of a short story with specific characters and themes, and it will do that too. The output is plausible, often accurate, and usually well presented.
The problem is not that the output exists. It is that producing the output involves none of the cognitive work that the assignment was designed to develop. A student who submits an AI-written essay may receive a mark. They will not have practised structuring an argument, weighing evidence, or expressing their own reasoning in writing. Those are exactly the skills the assignment was for.
Used differently, though, AI for schoolwork can genuinely support learning. Asking AI to explain a concept you are struggling to understand, to give feedback on a draft you have already written, or to suggest where your argument might be strengthened all involve the student staying actively engaged in the process. The distinction is whether the student is using AI as a thinking aid or as a replacement for thinking altogether.
Why Schools Are Finding This So Hard
Generative AI went from a novelty to a mainstream tool in under two years. Schools have been trying to develop sensible policies in real time while the technology itself keeps changing.
Some schools have responded by restricting AI access on school devices. Others have leaned into it, building AI tools into lessons and teaching students explicitly how to use them well. Many are still working out where they stand, which means students are left to navigate the question largely on their own.
The challenge is also not unique to secondary education. Brown University's Generative AI in Teaching and Learning Committee found that university students themselves expressed concerns about the long-term effects of relying on AI, worrying that it could reduce their capacity to think independently over time. Teaching staff raised parallel concerns about assessment integrity and cognitive development.
The committee's conclusion was not to prohibit AI use, but to develop clearer guidance, because some uses of AI genuinely do support learning in new and valuable ways. The goal is not to remove the tool but to ensure students know how to use it in ways that still require them to think.
That is easier said than done when the technology is evolving faster than curriculum frameworks, and when students have unrestricted access to AI tools on personal devices that schools cannot control.
The Skills That Still Need to Be Developed
The reason the AI for schoolwork debate matters beyond education is that students eventually become employees, and employers are watching.
AI is already transforming the workplace. Many of the tasks that made up entry-level roles in writing, research, coding, and analysis are now significantly faster to complete with AI assistance. That is not going to reverse. Students who leave education knowing how to work effectively with AI tools will have a genuine advantage.
But employers are also clear that AI cannot replace judgement, critical thinking, or the ability to question information rather than simply accept it. The capacity to assess whether an AI-generated answer is actually correct, relevant, or complete is itself a skill. So is knowing when a problem requires human reasoning that a language model is not well suited to provide.
Those capacities develop through practice. Reading, writing, working through problems, making mistakes, correcting them. If students routinely use AI for their schoolwork in ways that skip that process, they may arrive in the workplace able to prompt an AI effectively but less capable of the independent reasoning that makes someone genuinely useful when the AI gives the wrong answer.
A Question of Balance, Not a Ban
The Deloitte findings suggest parents already understand that the answer is not to remove AI from education. It is to use it thoughtfully.
That means schools developing explicit guidance about which uses of AI support learning and which bypass it. It means students understanding the difference between asking AI to do their work and asking AI to help them do their work better. And it means parents staying engaged in conversations about what their children are actually doing when they sit down with their homework and a laptop.
None of that is simple when the technology is moving this quickly. But the Deloitte survey is a useful reminder that the question is not whether AI belongs in education. It is whether education is adapting fast enough to make sure AI develops capable, independent thinkers rather than creating a generation that struggles without it.
What This Means for Businesses
If you are thinking about how AI is changing the skills your business will need over the next decade, the patterns showing up in education are worth paying attention to. The workforce coming through now will arrive with significant AI experience but potentially variable critical thinking skills, depending on how their schools and universities managed this transition.
Building a culture where AI is used as a genuine thinking aid rather than a shortcut is something businesses will need to be intentional about, from onboarding to ongoing development. Our AI Consultancy page covers how we help businesses use AI effectively, in ways that strengthen what their teams can do rather than substituting for it.