What Finland's national AI recommendations mean for schools

In spring 2025, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture and the Finnish National Agency for Education published national recommendations for the use of AI in education. The material brings together the obligations that follow from legislation and the recommendations that complement them. In May 2026, the agency added a set of training videos to support the recommendations.

We went through the material from the perspective of creating learning materials. Four points directly affect which tools teachers use for their materials.

1. Schools provide the tools

The starting point is clear. The education provider is responsible for the lawfulness of the AI systems used in teaching and provides the tools for its staff. A teacher cannot require students to register for an external service or pay for access. Staff are advised to use only AI systems approved by the provider.

Everyday reality often looks different. Teachers use their personal free accounts on general-purpose AI services because their employer has not offered an alternative. The recommendations move the responsibility where it belongs: the education provider selects the tools, assesses them and instructs the staff.

This does not mean individual teachers should stop trying new tools. What matters is what kind of service you try and what data you put into it. We return to this at the end.

2. Personal data does not belong in unverified services

The strictest obligation concerns data protection. Personal data and confidential information must not be entered into an AI system before the system’s lawfulness has been verified, and the verification must be documented. This covers, for example, students’ names, written assessments and pedagogical documents.

For a teacher, the rule is simple: if you don’t know where a service stores its data, don’t enter anything related to students. For a school, the same rule means the tool’s data protection is assessed before adoption, not after.

In Bruukki, this assessment has been prepared in advance. Teachers’ data and materials are stored in the EU (AWS Ireland). When a material is created, the text is processed by Anthropic’s Claude model under Zero Data Retention terms, meaning Anthropic neither stores the input nor uses it to train its models. Transfer Impact Assessments have been completed for our subprocessors, and we share them during contract discussions.

3. Assessment stays with the teacher

The recommendations draw a clear line on assessment. AI can support assessment, but assessment decisions must not be outsourced to AI. A human always makes the decision. The recommendations also advise agreeing on ground rules for AI use together with students and being open about when AI is used.

The same principle shapes how Bruukki is built: AI suggests, the teacher decides. No suggestion reaches a student before the teacher has reviewed it.

4. AI use must support the curriculum

The recommendations require that AI use is pedagogically justified and supports curriculum objectives. A general-purpose AI service does not know the curriculum, so the teacher has to write that connection into every prompt.

In Bruukki, the workspace selects its curricula: the Finnish national core curricula and over a thousand local curricula. The connection is made once, and every material after that builds on the same objectives.

Is it safe for a teacher to try Bruukki?

Recommendations like these can make an individual teacher cautious: is it safe to try any AI service at all? The difference lies in the service. A general-purpose AI service whose data protection has not been assessed for educational use is not the same thing as a service built for teachers’ work, with its data protection documented in advance.

Bruukki is a Finnish company. Together with Finnish educational institutions, we have verified that the service is safe for teachers to use, including the free version. The same data protection applies to every user: data is stored in the EU, and Bruukki does not use your content to train language models. That is not a given in AI services. We follow national and EU-level guidance and legislation continuously, so that you can go on using Bruukki with confidence as a teacher.

A free trial period for schools

If your school is choosing a tool for creating learning materials, you can evaluate and try Bruukki at no cost. As an individual teacher, you can create a free account and start right away. For schools, we offer a free trial period during which teachers get access to all features. We provide the data protection documentation to support the evaluation, and a demo takes about 30 minutes.

Get in touch at bruukki.com/en/contact/. We respond within the same week.

Read also: AI suggests, the teacher decides and what schools should pay for.