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Professionals · code 2352

Special needs teachers

AI can fill in the student records. It can't find the way a particular child learns best.

Student records and reports are the one task AI could take a fair chunk of. It barely touches five of the eleven, including building confidence and teaching practical skills.

What they actually do (and what else they get called)

Special needs teachers teach physically or mentally handicapped children, young persons or adults, or those with learning difficulties or other special needs. They promote the social, emotional, intellectual and physical development of their students. Tasks include - (a) assessing students’ abilities and limitations with regard to intellectual, physical, social and emotional impairments, exceptional intellectual gifts, or other special situations; (b) designing or modifying curricula and preparing and delivering programmes, lessons and activities adapted to students’ abilities and needs; (c) giving instruction on an individual or group basis using special techniques or aids appropriate to students’ needs; (d) employing special educational strategies and techniques during instruction to improve the development of sensory- and perceptual-motor skills, language, cognition and memory; (e) establishing and enforcing rules for behaviour and policies and procedures to maintain order among students; (f) teaching academic subjects and practical and self-help skills to students with hearing, sight and other impairments; (g) stimulating and developing students’ confidence, interests, abilities, manual skills and coordination; (h) conferring with other staff members to plan and schedule lessons for special needs students; (i) preparing and maintaining student data and other records and submitting reports; (j) administering various forms of assessment and evaluating progress of each student; (k) conferring with students, parents, head teachers and other relevant professionals involved in the students’ care to develop individual educational plans designed to promote students’ development. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Learning disabilities special education teacher - Learning support teacher - Remedial teacher - Teacher of gifted children - Teacher of the hearing impaired - Teacher of the sight impaired Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Vocational education teacher - 2320 - Secondary school teacher - 2330 - Primary school teacher - 2341

  • teacher of talented and gifted students
  • special educational needs teacher

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

72 / 100

Mostly holds up against AI

AI can take a few chores off your plate, but most of the day is still yours.

Not the odds you keep your job. It's how much of the everyday work still needs a person, out of 100.

← Robot's turf Human's turf →

The ILO's official verdict: Not Exposed

229 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 11 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 28.4 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 28.4 = 71.6.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Not Exposed”: None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count.

This job rates 33.5 out of 100 for how hands-on it is. The score above only looks at AI tools, not robots, but for work this far from the physical that matters less.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Special needs teachers 72

v

Go on, try your partner's job. Or your sibling's. We won't tell.

Man v Bot

Where the bot helps, and where the human wins

Bot

What AI takes

The routine stuff. You may not miss it.

  • Student records and reports.
  • Adapting lesson materials.
  • Assessment tracking.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Teaching with specialist techniques.
  • Building confidence in each child.
  • Working closely with families.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Assistive technology, including AI communication aids.
  • Personalised learning tools.
  • More children identified with additional needs.

Written by a human, from the ILO's task ratings below. Yes, we see the irony. Read it as one person's take.

Meet your two rivals

They're not the same machine. AI software can only reach the parts of a job done on a screen or in words. A chatbot can't climb a ladder. A robot might, one day, if it doesn't fall off.

The AI

Lives in a screen. Never had to fix a boiler.

Threat level: Medium

36 could do without you

It could take over some of the work, and help with more. It could help with 71 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Lower

34 how hands-on

Not much of this job needs hands, so the robot can sit this one out.

So could a robot do the physical part?

Less than half of this job is hands-on. Robots still matter, but for a smaller part of the work, so we don't sort it any further.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 17 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

34 How
hands-on
17 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Less than half hands-on

The small print

They aren't a robot score, and nothing on this page is. Nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to put a number on it. These are the closest thing we have: how hands-on the job is, and how much fiddly, cramped work it takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

From O*NET, averaged across 6 US jobs .

finger skill 18.4 · hand skill 18.8 · cramped spaces 13.8 · averaged · rule: hands-on under 50

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

The job, task by task

Every job is really a bundle of tasks. Here's this one unpacked, with how much of each AI could do, out of 100. The score is the average, and averages can hide a lot.

AI's favourite task here scores 57, against an average of 28. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 56

    Preparing and maintaining student data and other records and submitting reports

    Medium
  2. 34

    Administering various forms of assessment and evaluating progress of each student

    Low
  3. 32

    Designing or modifying curricula and preparing and delivering programmes, lessons and activities adapted to students’ abilities and needs

    Low
  4. 26

    Assessing students' abilities and limitations with regard to intellectual, physical, social and emotional impairments, exceptional intellectual gifts, or other specific problems

    Low
  5. 26

    Establishing and enforcing rules for behaviour and policies and procedures to maintain order among students

    Low
  6. 25

    Conferring with students, parents, head teacher and other relevant professionals involved in the students’ care to develop individual educational plans designed to promote students' development.

    Low
  7. 25

    Employing special educational strategies and techniques during instruction to improve the development of sensory- and perceptual-motor skills, language, cognition, and memory

    Very Low
  8. 24

    Conferring with other staff members to plan and schedule lessons for special needs students

    Very Low
  9. 24

    Giving instruction on an individual or group basis using special techniques or aids appropriate to students’ needs

    Very Low
  10. 23

    Stimulating and developing students’ confidence interests, abilities, manual skills and coordination

    Very Low
  11. 19

    Teaching academic subjects and practical and self-help skills to students with hearing, sight and other impairments

    Very Low

11 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Sidekick or replacement?

A tool that makes you faster is a very different thing from one that does the task while you watch. Jobs and Skills Australia measured the two separately, which is handy.

AI helps you
71
AI does it for you
36

Sidekick wins, by 35 points.

How good a match is this?

One Australian job matches, but only partly: not everyone in it does this job. Treat the numbers as a rough guide.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 2415

Meanwhile, in real life…

Everything else here is about what AI could do. This is what people actually did. When they asked Claude for help with this kind of work, did they hand the whole task over, or roll their sleeves up and work through it together?

Tiny sample alert This job makes up 0.01% of all the conversations: a tiny slice. People using AI for a job isn't the same as AI being able to do it.

Out of every 100 conversations

62
38

worked through it together handed it over

The small print

Anthropic publishes this about its own product, and it doesn't feed into any score here. These are people who use Claude, not workers in general, so little use here doesn't mean AI can't reach the job.

These two add up to 100. The bars elsewhere on the page don't, because each is scored on its own, so we don't put them side by side.

observed use Anthropic Economic Index release 2026-06-26, period beginning 2026-05-01 data 0.8-observed-use 2026-05-01 · Anthropic, about its own product

So, should special needs teachers be worried?

Short answer: not much. Some of the chores will change, and good riddance.

The paperwork is moving. Student data and reports are rated Medium, and assessments, adapting curricula and planning with families are Low; specialist teaching rates Very Low. AI could lighten the admin load; teaching children with additional needs stays deeply human.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing.

Where this job could lead

None of the new jobs we've written up start from here yet. Could be you're the first. See the jobs AI is creating →

How are the neighbours doing?

There are 92 jobs in the “Professionals” family, averaging 61. This one is above the family average.

Pit this against any other job →