How to write an AI policy for your school

Decide what the policy is about first

An AI policy tries to cover three different situations and goes wrong when it treats them as one. Pupils using AI in their own work is an academic-integrity question. Teachers using AI for planning, drafting and reports is a professional-practice and data-protection question. The school buying a system with AI inside it is a procurement and DPIA question.

Write the scope clause so a reader can tell which of the three a given rule applies to. A policy that says "AI must be used responsibly" applies to nothing in particular and will be cited in no actual conversation.

What the document needs to contain

• Purpose and scope — which tools, which people, which activities. Name tools where you can, and say what happens when a new one appears.
• Pupil use and academic integrity — what is permitted in work that is assessed, what has to be disclosed, and how that interacts with the school’s existing assessment and plagiarism rules.
• Staff use — what may be put into a tool and what may not. The clause that matters is the one about pupil personal data: no names, no SEN details, no medical or behavioural information in a general-purpose chatbot.
• Data protection — where the tool processes data, whether a DPIA was done, and who the controller and processor are. For a system bought by the school, this is procurement work, not a sentence.
• Accuracy and human review — that AI output is checked by a person before it reaches a pupil, a parent or a record. This is the clause that does the most work in practice.
• Accessibility and equity — how the school handles pupils who have access to tools at home and pupils who do not.
• Reporting — who a member of staff tells when something goes wrong, and what happens next.

Who should be in the room

A policy drafted by one deputy principal over a mid-term break will be accurate and will not be followed, because nobody else has argued with it. Consultation is not a formality here; it is how you find the clauses that cannot be complied with.

A workable group is small: someone from leadership, a teacher who uses the tools day to day, whoever looks after IT, and the DLP where pupil data is in scope. Pupil input is worth having for the academic-integrity half, and it tends to surface what is really happening rather than what staff assume is happening.

Where the school is part of an ETB or a patron body with a model policy, start from that rather than from a blank page, and record what you changed and why.

Adoption, acknowledgement and review

The policy is adopted by the Board of Management. Until that happens it is a draft, whatever is in it, and it will not help in a dispute with a parent about a pupil’s assessed work.

After adoption, two records matter and both are routinely missing: which version of the text is in force, and which members of staff have acknowledged it. "It is on the shared drive" answers neither.

Set a shorter review cycle than you would for other policies. The tools, and the Department of Education guidance around them, are moving fast enough that a two-year cycle will leave an inaccurate document in force for most of its life. Annual is defensible; a termly check on whether anything has changed costs very little.