Leading artificial intelligence amid uncertainty: Principals’ sensemaking in Irish primary schools

Abstract

This paper examines how primary school principals in Ireland make sense of artificial intelligence (AI) as an emerging issue for educational leadership. While AI has been widely discussed in relation to teaching, learning and assessment, its implications for school leadership remain less developed. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 primary school principals, the study uses sensemaking theory to explore how leaders interpret AI within the everyday realities of school life and within a policy context that remains provisional and evolving.

The central finding is that AI leadership is not yet a coherent or established field of practice. Principals’ engagement with AI is cautious, uneven and strongly shaped by uncertainty. AI is understood variously as an opportunity, a risk, an inevitability and, for some, as a development that may sit uneasily with the human and relational purposes of education. Engagement is most evident in relation to administrative work, where AI is associated with potential efficiencies. By contrast, its role in pedagogy, curriculum and pupil use remains limited and contested. Principals’ responses are mediated by ethical and policy concerns, including data protection, safeguarding, commercialisation, bias and professional judgement.

The paper contributes to the emerging literature on AI and educational leadership by showing that principals are not simply adopting or resisting AI. Rather, they are engaged in sensemaking as they attempt to determine what forms of AI use are educationally worthwhile, ethically defensible and practically possible. The paper concludes that system-level policy, guidance and professional learning must support critical deliberation, not merely accelerate adoption.