Refreshing Your AI Acceptable Use Policy
August 18, 2025
An AI Acceptable Use Policy written once and filed away won’t keep pace with tools, assessments, and expectations in 2025–26. This guide reframes your AUP as a living “AI Use & Integrity Agreement” with an annual July/August refresh you can actually run. You’ll find a 12-point checklist, practical assessment boundaries, and data protection defaults that reduce risk by design. It also covers stakeholder sign-off, clear pupil and parent/carer communications, and a simple monitoring loop that supports learning without turning school into a surveillance project.
Back to School AI Toolkit 2025
August 11, 2025
A back-to-school AI plan succeeds when it is small, predictable and safe enough to run during busy weeks. This article sets out a ‘minimum viable’ toolkit for 2025: one assistant, one writing space, one image tool and one accessibility layer, with default privacy settings that reduce risk without blocking useful practice. You’ll also find procurement questions, role-based workflows, and a 30-day rollout checklist designed to prevent tool sprawl and protect staff workload.
Meta Llama 4 decision pack for schools
July 24, 2025
Meta’s Llama models have made “open” AI feel within reach for schools, but the practical decision is rarely about hype. It is about governance, safeguarding, data protection, and whether your team can operate a model safely over time. This decision pack helps school leaders choose between adopting a vendor-hosted Llama 4 service, commissioning a managed private instance, self-hosting, or waiting. It includes minimum-data patterns, total cost of ownership factors, classroom-safe use cases, a clear decision matrix against proprietary models, and a “Llama 4 watch” checklist if Llama 4 has not launched yet.
ECT/NQT AI First-Term Operating Manual
July 18, 2025
This guide is a practical first-term “operating manual” for ECTs/NQTs using AI safely and sustainably. You’ll set a small number of default micro-routines for planning, differentiation, feedback preparation and parent communication—each designed to take around ten minutes and reduce decision fatigue. You’ll also get clear red lines for data protection, safeguarding, assessment integrity and copyright, plus a week-by-week checklist to align with school policy. The aim is simple: protect pupils, protect your professionalism, and protect your workload and wellbeing.
Results Day Readiness Pack for Heads of Year
July 7, 2025
Results Day can feel like a flood of emotion, questions, and urgent decisions. This people-first readiness pack helps Heads of Year and Sixth Form teams set up a calm triage system for the first 90 minutes, with four clear queues: anxiety, practical next steps, complaints and appeals, and safeguarding. You’ll find copy-and-paste scripts for students and parents/carers, plus comms templates for common scenarios. It also includes a safe, minimal-data approach to using AI for scenario rehearsal and message drafting—without automating decisions or sharing pupil data.
Claude 4 Deep Dive for Schools
July 3, 2025
This classroom-first guide gives you two clear paths: what to do if Claude 4 is released today, and what to do if it is not. You’ll translate headline model changes into what teachers actually notice in planning, feedback and in-lesson support, then run a school-safe evaluation using no pupil data. You’ll also tighten data protection defaults, refresh assessment integrity boundaries, and choose a cautious rollout route from release day to week 4. Practical templates are included to copy and adapt.
Year 7 Transition Day AI Literacy Carousel
June 17, 2025
Transition Days are about belonging, confidence, and routines that reduce September anxiety. This timetable-ready “AI Literacy Carousel” adds a safe, low-stakes layer: pupils learn how to use AI with minimal data, recognise hallucinations and bias, and practise prompt hygiene without needing lots of devices. Six short stations (10–15 minutes each) are mostly paper-based, supported by clear staff scripts and safeguarding boundaries. The day ends with a pupil-friendly Safe AI Charter linked to your school values, signed and taken home—then revisited in tutor time to embed habits early.
Building AI Foundations for Next Year
June 13, 2025
A strong September start with AI rarely comes from a big launch. It comes from small, agreed foundations: clear rules, shared language, consistent routines, and a tool stack people can actually use. This six-week summer-term “AI foundations sprint” turns end-of-year audit findings into practical infrastructure: a one-page policy addendum, student norms, staff micro-routines, a governed prompt library, and a light-touch curriculum map showing where AI is permitted, taught, and assessed.
Results Day War Room: AI Scenario Planning
June 6, 2025
Results day is equal parts data, logistics and duty of care. This “war room” playbook shows how to use AI responsibly to turn historic attainment, grade distributions and operational constraints into three scenario plans: best, expected and worst. You’ll build a small, explainable indicator set, prepare staffing and communications runbooks, and set a mandatory human sign-off chain for any risk flag, intervention list or appeal recommendation.
WWDC AI: What Schools Do Next Week
June 3, 2025
Apple’s WWDC AI announcements sound exciting, but schools need a calm, practical translation. This briefing turns release-day headlines into three concrete decisions: what genuinely changes for managed Apple fleets, which classroom-facing capabilities are worth prioritising (especially accessibility and on-device features), and what to test and communicate next week without triggering risky roll-outs. Use it to align IT, safeguarding and teaching teams on sensible defaults, evidence to collect, and questions to put to Apple and your MDM provider.
AI event ops for Sports Day and trips
May 16, 2025
Sports Day and school trips are high-impact, high-risk events: lots of moving parts, tight timings, and many stakeholders. AI can help by generating first drafts of run sheets, staffing rotas, kit lists, accessibility adjustments and parent communications, saving hours of admin. But it cannot “know” your site, your pupils, or your policies, and it must never be allowed to automate safeguarding decisions. This article shares a copy-and-adapt workflow that keeps data minimal, builds in inclusion, and finishes with a structured human sign-off so nothing important is approved blindly.
KS1/KS2 Teacher-in-the-loop AI Playbook
May 13, 2025
AI can support primary teaching without becoming a pupil-facing chatbot. This playbook shows a “teacher-in-the-loop” approach for KS1/KS2, where AI stays behind the scenes as a planning and adaptation assistant. You’ll find five safe micro-routines for lesson planning, storytelling, vocabulary, feedback and SEND scaffolds, each with a ready-to-use prompt. It also includes a one-page pupil script, clear do/don’t rules, and copy-and-send parent/carer communication to keep safeguarding, privacy and trust central.
Post-exam AI Transition Studio
May 9, 2025
Post-exam time can drift into busywork or become a powerful bridge into what comes next. This ready-to-run, two-week “AI Transition Studio” gives Year 11 and Year 13 students five low-stakes project pathways: careers, research, creative portfolio, study skills, and next-step readiness. Each pathway uses tight time boxes, clear evidence-of-process expectations, and practical safeguarding scripts. You’ll also find device-light and offline variants so it works in mixed-access settings, plus templates you can copy for students and families.
Exam-Season AI Traffic Lights for Schools
May 2, 2025
Exam season is when AI rules most often unravel: different teachers say different things, students guess what’s allowed, and well-meaning support can tip into malpractice. This one-page “AI traffic-light” boundary system gives a shared language for revision, homework, coursework/NEA, controlled assessment and exams. You’ll get clear permitted/restricted/prohibited uses, quick ways to introduce the system in five minutes, ready-to-say scripts for staff, students and families, and integrity checks that work even when you can’t reliably “detect AI”.
Phase-banded AI ethics dilemmas toolkit
April 24, 2025
AI ethics can feel abstract, yet pupils meet its effects daily: recommendations, image filters, chatbots, and “too-good-to-be-true” videos. This phase-banded toolkit offers short, story-led dilemmas for Primary, KS3 and KS4, designed for tutor time, PSHE and computing without needing technical detail or real pupil data. Each scenario uses a consistent, safe discussion protocol that helps learners reason about fairness, privacy, consent, deepfakes and ownership.