Every student needs a minimum AI requirement

This blog was kindly authored by Roney Lima do Nascimento, an IB Diploma Programme mathematics teacher.

Under my last HEPI blog, a reader asked the right question: where can universities find the time to teach students to evaluate artificial intelligence as well as use it? If AI literacy becomes another optional workshop then the students already best served will attend, and the students most at risk of being left behind will miss it. The sector should stop treating AI capability as enrichment and start treating it as an equality-of-opportunity issue.

Universal use can still produce unequal benefit

HEPI and Kortext’s Student Generative AI Survey 2026 found that 95 per cent of undergraduates use AI in at least one way and 94 per cent use it to help with assessed work. Yet only 48 per cent feel their teaching staff are helping them develop the AI skills needed for their future careers. The survey also found statistically significant social-grade differences in the use of text-generation, coding and data-analysis tools.

Near-universal use has not abolished the digital divide. It has moved it. The old question was whether a student could get online. The new question is whether they can expose a false citation, recognise when a model is merely agreeing with them, distinguish evidence from fluent invention and know when not to use the tool at all. A free account does not supply those capabilities, and a university licence does not guarantee them.

A minimum AI learning entitlement

Every student should receive a minimum AI learning entitlement by the end of their first term. It should not be a generic certificate in prompting. It should guarantee four things:

• equal access to an institutionally supported tool, or a genuinely equivalent no-cost route where the tool is required or advantageous;
• discipline-specific teaching on verification, disclosure, data protection and the limits of the systems used in that field;
• low-stakes practice before students are assessed either with AI or under AI-free conditions; and
• clear, assessment-specific rules, alongside human review when a student is suspected of misuse.

The test of success should not be whether a student can produce a polished output. It should be whether they can explain why they accepted, rejected or modified what the system produced. That is the point at which access becomes capability.

Put AI capability where equality commitments already live

In England, access and participation plans already require providers to identify risks to equality of opportunity, set out interventions and evaluate their impact. The Office for Students’ Equality of Opportunity Risk Register identifies unequal knowledge and skills and insufficient academic support as sector-wide risks. Uneven AI capability now sits across both.

Providers should therefore examine whether students’ ability to use and question AI varies by social background, entry route, disability, age, subject or mode of study. Where the evidence shows a risk, the intervention should appear in the access and participation plan: supported access, discipline-level teaching, staff development and a way to measure whether students can verify rather than merely generate.

The Office for Students should also name AI capability explicitly in the guidance attached to Risk 1 on knowledge and skills and Risk 6 on insufficient academic support. This would not create a new regulatory bureaucracy. It would make visible a new mechanism through which existing inequalities can be reproduced.

The divide universities can still close

The next AI divide will not be between students who use a chatbot and students who do not. It will be between students who can ask a system for an answer and students who can decide whether that answer deserves to be trusted.

Universities can close that divide. But they will do so only when AI literacy stops being an optional innovation project and becomes part of the promise that students from different backgrounds should have an equal opportunity to succeed and progress.