How do you design an AI curriculum for six-year-olds?

How do you design an AI curriculum for six-year-olds?
Five lessons from building a NextGen Curriculum

When conversations about artificial intelligence enter education, they usually begin in secondary schools. The discussion tends to centre on computing qualifications, coding skills, or the kinds of careers that might exist in the future.

Yet when we began exploring AI literacy across our trust, we found ourselves asking a different question. Rather than beginning with teenagers, we asked something much simpler and, in many ways, more challenging: what should a six-year-old understand about artificial intelligence?

At Three Spires Trust, a growing multi-academy trust serving communities across the West Midlands, this question emerged as part of a broader effort to develop what we describe as our NextGen Curriculum. Our ambition is not only to secure strong academic outcomes for pupils, but to ensure that the education they experience prepares them thoughtfully for the world they inhabit.

That world is increasingly shaped by digital infrastructure and intelligent systems. Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant technological prospect; it already underpins the search engines pupils use, the recommendation systems that shape online content, and many of the digital platforms woven into everyday life.

If these technologies are already present in the environments our pupils navigate, then waiting until the later years of schooling to explain them feels increasingly inadequate. The foundations of understanding must begin much earlier.