A school's first AI policy is the wrong document to write first
Policies harden too early. A staff-facing framework and a small set of tested classroom workflows generate the evidence a policy can later codify.
Every senior leadership team I have spoken to in the past eighteen months has asked, at some point, should we write an AI policy? The honest answer is not yet, and possibly not first.
The order of operations matters
A policy is a hardened artefact. It is the codification of decisions a school has already made. If you write the policy before you know what you want to permit, what you want to prohibit, and what you want to actively teach, the policy will codify a guess.
The pattern I am seeing in schools that did this in 2024 is recognisable: they wrote a defensive policy in the first wave (mostly prohibition), then quietly stopped enforcing it, and then realised they had committed to a position they no longer held without ever publicly revisiting it. That is worse than no policy.
What to write instead
Before the policy, write three other things:
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A staff-facing framework. Not rules; principles. What do we believe student work should evidence? What are the assessment forms we trust? Where, in this curriculum, is generative AI a tool we want students to use fluently, and where is it a tool that bypasses learning we care about? The framework is internal.
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A small set of tested classroom workflows. Pick three subjects. Pilot a way of working in each — one where AI is openly used as a tool, one where AI is openly excluded as a tool, one where AI is the subject of the lesson. Document how each goes. Iterate.
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A handful of explicit assessment changes. If your essay-based assessment is now leaky, what is the new instrument? An oral defence component? A process portfolio? Run them. See what evidence they yield.
Then write the policy
After a term of doing the three things above, the policy almost writes itself. It is the codification of what already works, not a guess about what might. It will be defensible — to parents, to inspectors, to staff — because it will have evidence behind it.
The school I am working with at the moment is in month four of this cycle. The policy is now a four-page document with citations to specific lessons and specific assessment cycles. It will hold up.