AI and ChatGPT training for school staff

Why a course rather than a circular

An email telling staff to be careful with ChatGPT changes very little, because the people it is aimed at are not being careless. They are using a tool they were never shown, on work they are behind on, with no sense of where the line is.

The questions that come up are specific and a circular cannot answer them. Can I paste a pupil's report into it. Can I use it to write a letter to a parent. What do I do when a piece of submitted work is obviously not the pupil's. Is the free version different from the paid one. Who in the school do I ask.

Those have answers, and they are the same answers for everybody in the building — which is what makes this training rather than individual advice.

What the training covers

Ark Academy's AI course is written for everybody working in a school rather than for the digital learning team, and it works through the ground a staff team needs in common:

• What these tools are and how they produce an answer — enough to understand why a confident wrong answer is a normal output rather than a malfunction.
• Writing a usable prompt, and recognising when the output needs checking rather than sending.
• Where AI helps with planning, differentiation, reports and correspondence, and where it does not.
• Pupil work and originality: what to look for, and the difference between a suspicion and a finding.
• Bias in generated content, and what that means for material going in front of a mixed class.
• Data privacy: what must not be typed into a general-purpose tool, which is the part with legal consequences attached.
• Guidelines for pupil use, so the staff position and what pupils are told match.

Who in the school needs it

Wider than schools usually assume. Teaching staff are the obvious group, but the administrator drafting correspondence, the SNA writing up observations, and the deputy principal preparing Board papers are all handling personal data in a tool that may be sending it somewhere.

The practical test is not someone's role. It is whether they type anything about a named pupil, parent or colleague into a web tool. If they do, the training applies.

Leadership has a second reason to sit through it. The AI policy has to be approved by people who understand what they are approving, and a Board asked to adopt a policy about a technology nobody in the room has used is being asked to rubber-stamp it.

What training does not do

A completed course is not an AI policy, and a school that has done the training still has nothing written down. They are two separate pieces of work and they are owned by different parts of the school year.

Training gives the staff a shared understanding and leaves a completion record — which is the bit that matters when somebody asks what the school did. The policy states what the school permits, who approved it, and when it gets reviewed. Neither substitutes for the other, and a school with only one of them has a visible gap.

The order that works: train first, draft second. A policy written before the staff understand the tools describes a school that does not exist, and gets quietly ignored by the people it governs.