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"This is all great, but what do I do?" Schools ask MPs for clearer AI rules

Qurexa Editorial Team12 September 20266 min read 0 0
"This is all great, but what do I do?" Schools ask MPs for clearer AI rules

What happened

On 9 September 2026, school leaders gave evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee about artificial intelligence in schools. Their message was blunt: they are struggling to keep up, and the guidance they have been given is not clear enough. A select committee is a group of MPs from different parties that examines a particular area of government. It calls in people who know the subject, questions them, and publishes findings. It is one of the main ways Parliament checks what government departments are doing. Pip Sanderson, director of teacher development at the National Institute of Teaching, told the committee that school leaders were struggling with the pace of change. She described the reaction leaders often have after AI training sessions: "This is all great and really interesting, but what do I do?" That sentence captures the problem neatly. There is plenty of enthusiasm and plenty of explanation. What is missing is instruction. Darren Northcott, national officer at the teaching union NASUWT, was more direct about the Department for Education. He said its guidance had been "quite laissez-faire", a phrase meaning hands-off, and that schools want "much clearer rules of the road" on how AI should be used in teaching and learning. The backdrop is that AI is already in schools whether or not anyone has decided how it should be used. The 2026 edition of Keeping Children Safe in Education, which came into force on 1 September 2026, treats generative AI within existing online safety and filtering duties.

Why this matters

When national guidance is vague, schools do not stop. They improvise. That produces a patchwork. One school bans AI tools outright. The next builds them into lessons. A third has no policy at all and leaves it to individual teachers. Children in neighbouring schools end up with very different experiences, and families cannot easily work out what is expected. It also creates unfairness in a more direct way. If a pupil at one school can use an AI tool for homework research and a pupil at another cannot, that is a difference in how they are being assessed that nobody chose deliberately. Teachers are exposed too. Without clear rules, a teacher who uses an AI tool to help plan a lesson or draft a report has to work out on their own whether that is acceptable, whether pupil data can be entered into it, and what happens if the output is wrong. That is a lot of professional risk to carry personally. There is a genuine tension underneath all this. Guidance issued too early can lock schools into rules that make no sense in a year. Guidance issued too late leaves a vacuum. The people giving evidence were arguing that we are now firmly on the wrong side of that balance. And the practical uses are already real. AI tools are being used for lesson planning, marking support and reducing administrative work, at a time when teacher workload is one of the biggest drivers of people leaving the profession.

What the evidence actually says

It is worth being precise about what this event was. This was oral evidence to a select committee. It is not a report, not a policy, and not a decision. Witnesses were giving their professional views and describing what they see. That is valuable, but it is testimony rather than measurement. The witnesses represented particular organisations. NASUWT is a teaching union, and the National Institute of Teaching works on teacher development. Both are well placed to know what schools are experiencing, and both have their own perspectives, as any organisation does. So the fair summary is that experienced people told MPs that current guidance is insufficient. That is not the same as a survey showing how many schools feel that way, or research showing what effect AI is having on learning. On that last point, the honest position is that the evidence is thin. AI tools have moved into education faster than research can evaluate them. There is not yet a strong body of evidence showing whether they improve learning outcomes, and anyone claiming otherwise with confidence is running ahead of what is known. What happens next is reasonably predictable. Select committees usually gather evidence across several sessions, then publish a report with recommendations. The government must respond, normally within two months. It is a slow process, and it does not always change policy, but it does put issues on the record and create public pressure.

Practical advice

For parents and carers, the most useful thing is simply to ask. Ask your child's school what its position on AI is. A reasonable question is whether pupils are allowed to use AI tools for homework, and if so, how they should say they have. Schools are generally happy to explain, and the question itself is useful, because it prompts schools that have not settled a position to think about it. Talk to your child about what these tools actually do. Chatbots produce text that sounds confident whether or not it is correct. Children often assume a fluent answer is a true one. Checking a claim against a second source is a habit worth building early, and it is useful well beyond schoolwork. Be careful about personal information. Anything typed into a chatbot may be stored and used. Names, addresses, schools, health details and photographs should not go in. If your child uses AI for revision, encourage them to use it to test themselves rather than to produce answers. Asking a tool to quiz you works with how memory forms. Asking it to write your essay does not. And if something concerns you, such as AI-generated images of pupils or AI used in a way that feels unfair, raise it with the school. Schools have safeguarding duties covering this, and the 2026 Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance explicitly covers generative AI.

What to know

On 9 September 2026, school leaders told the Commons Education Select Committee that they are struggling to respond to the growth of AI in schools and that Department for Education guidance has been too hands-off. NASUWT's Darren Northcott called for "much clearer rules of the road"; the National Institute of Teaching's Pip Sanderson described leaders asking, after training, "what do I do?" Without clear national guidance, schools are making their own rules, which produces inconsistency between schools and leaves individual teachers carrying professional risk. This was oral evidence rather than a report or a policy change. The committee will normally gather more evidence before publishing recommendations, to which the government must respond. The evidence on whether AI helps learning is still thin. In the meantime, the most useful thing families can do is ask their school what its position is, and teach children to check what a confident-sounding answer actually says. Sources: Tes, 'Schools "desperate" for clearer AI guidance', 9 September 2026, https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/schools-desperate-clearer-ai-guidance; Commons Education Select Committee, oral evidence session, 9 September 2026, https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/; Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 (in force 1 September 2026), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-in-education--2 This article is for general information and does not replace advice from your child's school, local authority, or a qualified professional.

#artificial intelligence#schools#education policy#Ofsted#parliament#safeguarding

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