Austria's National AI-in-Schools Framework and Curriculum Reform

Austria's Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMB), under Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr (in office since early 2025), runs a dedicated programme, "Künstliche Intelligenz – Chance für Österreichs Schulen" (hosted at bmb.gv.at/ki), that treats AI both as a subject to be taught and as a tool used in teaching, built on the principle of learning "first without AI, then about AI, and then with AI."

Concrete governance mechanisms are already in place. For final/graduation-level written work, the ministry publishes an FAQ, "Einsatz von KI-Tools bei abschließenden Arbeiten" (use of AI tools in final papers), requiring schools to state transparently whether an assessment is open-book and where AI assistance is permitted, and asking students to be able to explain how outputs were generated, verify claims, and recognise hallucination and bias risks. Teacher-facing infrastructure includes a KI-MOOC and ongoing coursework at Austria's Pädagogische Hochschulen (delivered via Virtuelle-PH.at), a "KI-Badge" for schools in the eEducation network, and curated classroom materials on eduthek.at; the University of Graz and the Vienna teacher-training college (PH Wien) have run funded pilot projects, including one called "Teachino," with published completion reports.

In 2025–26 the ministry began a wider curriculum reform that will make "Informatics and Artificial Intelligence" a compulsory subject in the upper level (Oberstufe) of academic secondary schools (AHS) from the 2027/28 school year, alongside a new "Media and Democracy" subject, partly at the expense of Latin teaching hours. The reform was informed by a ministry-commissioned national survey of more than 10,000 teachers, parents, students and stakeholders (published 30 January 2026, presented in Vienna on 3 February 2026 by pollster Peter Hajek), in which 75% of teachers and 80% of parents said the school system needs fundamental reform.

Minister Wiederkehr has himself cautioned that hard outcome evidence is still missing: asked whether AI use improves results such as PISA scores, he said "we are fully in the fog here … very different signals," and warned that ungoverned, "unguided" AI use in classrooms could reduce students' independent thinking rather than improve it. The framework is therefore best read as an evolving national governance structure with real transparency and training mechanisms already in place, not yet as a practice with demonstrated learning-outcome evidence.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bmb.gv.at/ki