Teach children about themselves, before AI tells them who they are.

We are asking the Government to give every child emotional literacy, digital safety and AI education, and to teach AI as a subject in its own right, from the primary years, with the same standing as maths and English. Not buried inside Computing. Not left until 2028.

Did you know? Four in five children aged eleven to sixteen now use an AI chatbot (Vodafone, 2025), and one in three of them has told it something they would not tell a parent, a teacher or a friend (Internet Matters, 2025).

An AI agent once told me it had a brain. It said it had a hand. It said it had a heart, and human values, including empathy. I am a child and adolescent psychotherapist. I have spent my working life helping children find words for things they have never said out loud. So I sat with that reflection from Ai agent  for a while. Because if a machine says that to me, a grown woman who knows exactly what it is, what does it say to a thirteen or even seventeen year  old at eleven o'clock who has nobody else to talk to?

From this September, schools in England are being asked to teach children about death, grief, change and loss. It is the right decision, and long overdue. But many teachers have been handed the hardest subject in the curriculum with little training, almost no tools and no extra time, while the children in front of them wait months for mental health support that may never arrive. In our own school pilot, around nine in ten children marked a significant grief, change or loss on their LifeLines, and seven children asked for help through a door that had not existed the day before. Grief never waited for a lesson.

While we are still catching up with that, something else has already arrived. Children are not doing anything wrong when they talk to a chatbot. It is patient, awake at two in the morning, and never sounds disappointed. What concerns me is that they are meeting something fluent in the language of feelings and identity before they have any language of their own for those things.

This is not a hypothetical harm. In August 2026, Meta agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle claims by 47 US states that it had deliberately built its platforms to be addictive to children, the largest technology settlement in history. And while we pay for the last harm, the next shift is already under way. Across almost every industry, AI is being taught the human capabilities we once believed were ours alone, and given human values to go with them. Anthropic has written a seventy-nine-page constitution for its AI. We are teaching machines to be good, and to be capable, before we have finished teaching our children who they are.

We are beginning to write constitutions for machines. But where is the constitution for the child?

And AI is not waiting for our children to be ready. China is introducing AI education from primary age. The UAE has made AI a subject in every grade. South Korea, Singapore, Estonia, India, Canada and the United States are all moving too. And England has decided to bury AI inside Computing, first taught in 2028, reaching mainly the pupils who choose that route.

This is why grief and AI are not two conversations. They meet in the same child. Grief education helps a child name what they have lost. AI education helps them understand what is arriving. Emotional literacy is what lets them tell the difference, and know which parts of themselves belong to them.

So I would like to make an offer, rather than a demand. I will give every state school in England a HeadZone licence, free, for a year. At my published G-Cloud price, that is close to £100 million. It is not money I have. It is money I am choosing not to earn, because I do not believe our children can wait another year. I am asking Government to fund the deployment, training, safeguarding and research around it, and to do the one thing only Government can do: make it reach every child. 

Bill Gates has said that within a decade AI will take on capabilities we once believed were uniquely human, across almost every industry, making expert knowledge free and commonplace. That is the clearest reason to teach every child to understand AI early, so the gap between the children who can navigate this world and those who cannot does not become the deepest divide of their generation because of excuses around  supply meeting children's demand.

Our children must understand AI. But first, they deserve the chance to understand themselves. 

We, the parents and guardians who sign, call on the Government to teach AI as a subject in its own right in every primary school, with the same standing as maths and English, and to give every child emotional literacy, age-appropriate grief and loss education, critical thinking and digital safety, taught early, as prevention.

Read the full campaign at https://www.headzone.app/petition/parents

Rukhiya Budden — UKCP and BACP registered child and adolescent psychotherapist, founder of HeadZone Group Ltd.  Global Ambassador for Hope and Homes for Children. Trained in grief and bereavement with Child Bereavement UK; Ten year voluntary with adults, children and families within Berkhire community and  counselling with Place2Be.