Abstract

This chapter advances an Equity-by-Design framework for governing institutional uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in schools and universities. It responds to a persistent gap between high-level “ethical AI” principles and the concrete governance, procurement and monitoring practices needed to protect equity, accessibility and privacy in educational settings. It draws on international policy instruments, emerging regulation and research on AI in education, learning analytics and digital accessibility to construct an institutional architecture for responsible AI adoption. The framework is structured as a multi-stage lifecycle encompassing problem framing, risk triage, procurement and contracting, piloting and acceptance testing, deployment, monitoring and incident response, and periodic review and decommissioning. The chapter concludes that ethical AI in education is fundamentally a problem of institutional design: building organisations that can systematically resist harmful uses of AI, foreground inclusion and rights, and revise or withdraw systems when they cannot be made just.