Pupils who write with artificial intelligence (AI) tend to hand in better work. That finding has now appeared often enough that it is hard to argue with. What is far harder to find is anyone checking whether those pupils can write any better the next day, without the tool beside them. Two new papers make that gap the main story about AI and writing this autumn.

The short version: A systematic review published in October 2026 found that all six comparisons of AI-supported writing with ordinary writing instruction favoured AI, yet not one study tested pupils writing without AI afterwards. A separate experiment in China found that primary pupils writing with AI scored highest and felt more confident than pupils writing alone, but reported the lowest sense of absorption in the task. The sensible reading is that AI can improve a text. Whether it improves the writer is still unknown, so teachers should protect the thinking that makes writing worth teaching.

What the research says about AI and writing

The review appeared in Acta Psychologica in October 2026. The authors searched seven databases for 2020 to 2026 studies of generative AI in creative writing for school-age pupils. Seventeen studies met their criteria, covering 736 pupils in total. Six comparisons set AI-supported teaching against teaching without AI, and every one favoured AI on text quality or creativity.

That sounds like a clear win until you read on. In every study, the texts that were scored had been produced with AI to hand, or under conditions the researchers did not report. None of the studies asked pupils to write without AI afterwards, and none checked their writing again after a delay. No intervention planned to withdraw the support gradually, and none ran for longer than six weeks. No study was rated at low risk of bias, and the authors rate the certainty of the evidence as very low.

Their own summary is the sentence I would put on the staffroom wall: the evidence “describes what students produce with AI rather than what they learn to do without it”.

Scaffolding or substitution?

Where pupils kept control, they used AI suggestions to develop their own ideas. Where they did not, the tool could steer the story or supply text that pupils adopted with little reworking. The same software can act as a scaffold or a substitute, depending on how the task is set. That echoes our look at cognitive offloading and AI, where AI editing a pupil’s own draft was treated very differently from AI writing the draft.

A small experiment with a telling detail

The second paper is a study in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, published on 2 October 2026. It is small: 78 primary pupils in China, split into three conditions. Twenty wrote with generative AI, 38 worked in pairs (19 pairs) and 20 wrote alone.

The AI group produced the highest creative writing scores. They also reported more confidence in their writing than the pupils who wrote alone, though not significantly more than the pairs. Writing self-efficacy, meaning a pupil’s belief that they can write well, was also positively linked with scores.

The detail I keep returning to is that the AI group reported the lowest flow state, the feeling of being absorbed in the task. The researchers found no link between flow and scores in this sample, so I would not make too much of it. Still, any teacher who has watched a pupil lose themselves in a story knows that absorption is part of what we hope writing gives children.

Pupils mainly used the tool to generate and expand ideas. Where researchers could see what happened to a response, adapting or choosing parts of it was more common than copying it directly, and no complete response was reproduced word for word. That is encouraging for one task, but it says nothing about what those pupils could do the following week.

A better text made with AI is not the same thing as a better writer.

What teachers and writers in the field are saying

On 2 November 2026, The Educator reported on the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning paper and asked two Australian experts where AI belongs in writing lessons. Professor Mary Ryan of Monash University described a “performance paradox”, in which generative AI “can improve short-term writing performance while potentially undermining durable learning and knowledge construction”. She argued that schools should preserve idea generation, purposeful language choice and building a logical argument, while seeing a place for AI in feedback on grammar or in surface-level editing once pupils can edit independently.

Kathleen Killick, chief executive of Seven Steps to Writing Success, said planning and drafting skills need to be taught step by step, because pupils need them to judge whether anything AI produces is any good. Her test for school leaders was simple: “who is doing the thinking”. Where AI takes over the thinking, she said, learning stalls.

What young people say they do

The National Literacy Trust’s 2026 report, published in August from a survey of 40,543 young people aged 13 to 18, puts numbers on the habit. Some 79.0% had used generative AI, and 45.6% had used it to get feedback on their writing, up from 20.7% in 2025. More now check what it gives them (52.3%, up from 42.8%) and add their own ideas (56.5%, up from 48.9%). Yet 24.1% said they simply copied AI output when doing homework, rising to 31.6% among pupils who receive free school meals. Our post on AI and homework covers the learning penalty that copying can bring.

In England, the Education Endowment Foundation has launched a tender in 2026 for up to four projects on how generative AI affects the thinking of pupils aged 13 to 15. It is especially interested in pupils offloading recall, planning, reasoning or drafting onto AI tools, and expects to finalise commissioning from autumn 2026. Evidence from English classrooms is therefore some way off.

How to use AI in writing lessons without losing the learning

Until researchers test pupils on unaided writing, the careful route is to let AI respond to pupils’ work rather than produce it. A few practical steps follow:

• Keep planning and the first paragraph unaided. Ask for the pupil’s own plan and opening in their book before any tool is allowed.
• Use AI for questions, not sentences. A prompt such as “what would a sceptical reader ask about my story?” keeps the writing with the pupil.
• Teach the skills AI cannot judge for them. Pupils who have never practised a strong opening struggle to spot a weak one.
• Build in an unaided check. Set a short, cold writing task a week or two later and compare it with the AI-supported piece.
• Ask pupils to say what they changed. A two-line note on which suggestions they used and which they rejected shows you who did the thinking.
• Fade the support over a unit, so that the last piece is written without help.

Imagine a Year 7 class writing a short adventure story. On day one, pupils plan and write their opening paragraph by hand, with no devices. On day two, they type it up and ask an AI tool one question about it, such as where a reader might lose interest. They then redraft by hand, noting in the margin what they accepted and why. Two weeks later, the teacher sets a fifteen-minute unaided piece on a new prompt. If the second piece shows the same habits as the supported one, the AI is working as a scaffold. If it falls apart, you have learned something useful well before the exam years.

There are limits to all of this. The review covers creative writing, not essays or exam answers, and the experiment is small and measures a single task. The review authors themselves call for more studies with AI-free post-tests and planned fading. This also connects to our post on AI marking, where pupils said that knowing a human had read their work mattered to them.

Frequently asked questions

Have you let pupils use AI at any stage of writing, and have you tested what they can do without it? Tell us what you have seen in the comments.