AI in education: what a principal needs to decide

The five decisions

• What staff may use, and for what. Silence is not neutrality — it means everyone decides individually and nobody is wrong.
• What may never be entered into a general-purpose tool. Pupil names, SEN and IEP detail, medical and behavioural information, child-protection content. This is the clause that prevents the thing most likely to happen.
• How assessment changes. Unsupervised written work now carries uncertainty about authorship, and detection software does not resolve it.
• What the systems you already bought are doing. AI features arrive by update, inside the MIS and the platforms, without anybody choosing them.
• Who notices when this changes. The tools and the Department guidance move faster than a two-year policy review cycle.

What not to do

Do not ban it outright. The usage moves to personal phones, the school loses all visibility, and the staff who would have asked permission stop asking.

Do not wait for perfect guidance before saying anything. An interim position — here is what is permitted today, we will revisit it in the spring — is far better than a vacuum, and it is easier to revise than to introduce late.

Do not let it sit with one enthusiastic teacher. It becomes their project rather than a school position, and it leaves with them.

A workable order

Find out what is already happening — ask, without consequences attached, and expect more use than you assumed. Then write the short list of never-dos and tell every member of staff. Then give people a tool that is safe for everything else, because a prohibition without an alternative gets worked around.

Then take a policy to the Board, record who has acknowledged it, and put a review date on it that is months rather than years away.