Does your school need an AI policy?
Templates for school AI policies, plus a roundup of handy AI resources and a multilingual give it a try
What’s been happening
Information about generative AI in education has come thick and fast in the past few weeks. Examples of how schools and teachers have been experimenting with AI since the start of the new school year dominate social media discussions about digital technology.
However, schools are also understandably anxious to start to codify such use given the multiplicity of risks involved, from privacy to plagiarism.
Sarah recently interviewed Lex Lang, deputy headteacher and head of innovation at Caterham School, as part of a panel discussion with headteacher Tom Rogerson at the IAPS headteacher conference. During the Q+A the audience of headteachers were keen to know more about policy and how to make sure they have covered all the angles, such as data safeguarding, age permissions and academic integrity.
Lex described how his school had initially produced a long AI policy document but had realised it would be much more useful if they adapted it to become one page of essentials everyone in the school understands and implements. You can read it here.
Thanks to Lex and Caterham for sharing their policy. Please give the school credit if you want to use and adapt their policy.
There are other good resources for schools looking to write or review their AI policies. Both Dan Fitzpatrick (the AI Educator) and Laura Knight with Mark Anderson (ICT Evangelist) have recently shared AI policy examples / templates.
Here’s Dan's AI policy and here’s Laura and Mark's template. Leon Furze has also shared some advice on creating an AI policy. Bear in mind that these all offer a good starting point but should be adapted for your own school’s context and, ideally, taken as a catalyst for a wider discussion about AI in school.
If you have any other examples to share, please let us know and we’ll do another roundup in a future newsletter.
AI roundup
AI in Education
The new cross-sector body, from Anthony Seldon and other luminaries, including the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees plus AI specialists from Google, Cambridge University and the Alan Turing Institute, has launched its website of resources for educators. It’s somewhat idiosyncratic, especially the language in the ‘purpose’ section – we’re not convinced that, of all the possible risks of AI, “the greatest threat for teachers and pupils alike is infantilisation” – but there are some useful resources and it looks likely to grow.
The Bottom Line
Worth a listen: Deep Mind's Demis Habbabis talks to Evan Davis about rethinking careers in the age of AI. The curriculum has focused on programming skills in the past 10 years but, now, being a creative prompter of AI will increasingly be an important skill. Demis suggests that meta skills will be more important – learning how to learn, as well as practical skills of tasks AI can't do.
Identifying AI-generated content
Adobe has created a symbol to encourage tagging AI-generated content. It can be added via Adobe’s photo and video editing platforms and to the metadata of images, videos and PDFs to announce who owns and created the data. As Verge describes, when viewers look at a photo online, they can hover over the mark and it will open a dropdown that includes information about its ownership, the AI tool used to make it and other details about the media’s production.
It’s a promising step towards transparency, says Tom Barrett of the excellent Promptcraft newsletter, but “provenance is more than labelling – it is an opportunity to build digital, media and AI literacy skills and foster responsible innovation.
Students need opportunities to analyse online content critically, question its origins, and assess if bias is baked into the AI models generating it. Understanding provenance allows scrutiny of how training data was sourced. Educators should model evaluating content credibility, not just consuming it passively.
Rather than seeing provenance as a burden, educators can reframe it as an opportunity to cultivate critical thinking. As learners encounter increasingly sophisticated AI, provenance equips them to trace content origins, assess biases, and balance benefits and risks.”
Make a deep fake…in class?
We were thinking of highlighting this tool as a ‘give it a try’ but it does raise a lot of ethical questions. In this LinkedIn post Darren Coxon shows how easy it is to create face swap deep fake videos and, while acknowledging the concerns, suggests ways of using the technology in class more positively – for example, by narrating moments in history or literature as famous people, characters and authors. While the thought of teaching students the nuts and bolts of this technology may make many of us feel uneasy, it’s a very powerful insight into how easily misinformation can be created and what to look out for. As Darren says, “I wanted to…show you how to do it yourself, so you have knowledge before students have it. It is free, open source, and right now is unregulated. So let's learn all we can as at least we're on the front foot.”
Extra AI news in brief:
Read the Ada Lovelace Institute's response to the government consultation on AI in education
The UK’s AI Standards Hub is boosting the UK’s global standing
Quick links
Digital GCSEs: AQA has set a timetable for the move from pen and paper to screens, with Italian and Polish starting in 2026 and large-entry subjects in 2030. Students’ devices will be offline in the exam hall but teachers have concerns about digital infrastructure. More on this from Schools Week
The Children’s Commissioner’s latest survey is called The Big Ambition and is open to all children and young people between 6 and 18 years old. Rachel de Souza will use it to take children and young people’s views to the Government.
Useful resource from Parentzone about dealing with upsetting news and media online.
Last week Sarah attended the launch of Drama at the Heart of English: Transforming Practice in the Secondary Classroom by Theo Bryer, Maggie Pitfield and Jane Coles, which explores drama’s potential to revitalise secondary English teaching. Digital is key to the authors' practice and approach.The book is available from Routledge at a 20% discount with the following code: AFL03
Give it a try
HeyGen
This tool allows you to upload a video of yourself speaking in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Hindi or Japanese. The requirements are pretty basic so you don’t need any fancy cameras, microphones or software. The clip has to be at least 30 seconds long and should ideally feature just one person. But other than that, you just upload your video and in a single click HeyGen can translate what you’re saying.
Connected Learning is by Sarah Horrocks and Michelle Pauli
Illustration by @mycketverkstad on Instagram