Jenin Primary Boys School - State of Palestine

Jenin Basic Boys' School sits at the heart of one of the most volatile regions in the occupied West Bank. Its 550 students, aged 10 to 12, regularly arrive at school having witnessed military raids on their neighbourhood overnight. Power cuts, internet blackouts, and full school closures are routine. And yet, against this backdrop, this small Palestinian government school has become an unlikely pioneer in artificial intelligence education.

Led by technology and programming teacher Eyad Ahmad Ibrahim Alsouqi, the school has woven AI into every layer of its daily life — curriculum, pedagogy, teacher training, and community outreach. Mr Alsouqi has personally built a custom Arabic-language AI assistant called The Advanced Virtual Assistant, which students access through Microsoft Teams virtual classrooms. When Israeli incursions force the school to close, learning does not stop: pupils log in from home and continue their lessons with the AI tutor, their teacher, and one another.

Students work with Google Gemini, NotebookLM, Google AI Studio, and Scratch to tackle real problems in their community. They learn prompt engineering through age-appropriate games — writing "smart recipes" for AI — and critically evaluate the outputs they receive, learning to spot bias, hallucination, and misinformation. Ethics is taught alongside capability: pupils debate the social, environmental, and economic impact of AI and develop their own codes of responsible use.

The results speak for themselves. Internal assessments show that 70% of pupils now reach proficiency in core AI concepts, 45% have independently produced AI-powered projects, digital-literacy scores have risen by 40%, and problem-solving performance by 30%. Teachers across the school have been trained through in-house workshops since 2022, turning a solo initiative into a whole-school mission. The wider community is engaged through parent evenings, a digital newsletter, and partnerships with UNICEF and the European Union's Palestine programme.

Mr Alsouqi's work has been featured in Palestinian national media, and the school has accumulated trophies for its educational and technological achievements. But the most remarkable achievement is harder to measure: the school has turned a place of disruption into a place of imagination, where children who have lost homes build virtual ones, and children who have lost classrooms design the classrooms of the future.

Should the school win the Global Schools Prize, its plans are ambitious and grounded. Funds would upgrade the school's digital infrastructure with faster internet and dedicated AI labs; launch virtual learning rooms with augmented reality and robotics so education continues through any closure; and — most importantly — dedicate at least 40% of the prize to inclusion, building AI-powered accessibility programmes for students with disabilities, including real-time Arabic speech-to-text translation and assistive robotics. Mr Alsouqi also hopes to seed a "Cool Collaboration" network connecting Palestinian schools with peers abroad, so that children in Jenin can build and share open-source AI tools with the world.

In a place where the future itself is contested, this school is quietly, stubbornly, joyfully building one.