From Dan Fitzpatrick, The AI Educator
Independent thinking on AI leadership, strategy, readiness and organisational change. Grounded in research and the realities of working with leaders.
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Most school AI groups are assembled from job titles and goodwill. The ones that decide anything are seated from the decisions the school owes an answer to. Five seats, a test to run before the second meeting, and terms of reference you can write in five lines.
Most schools answer this with a sentence staff cannot apply. Here is the test that decides whether a particular sentence may go into a particular tool, and the four lines to put in front of every member of staff this term.
AI does not create a new accountable person. It detaches the checking step that used to be automatic. Here is who answers when a school's AI tool gets something wrong, in what order to put it right, and the seven lines your incident log needs.
No tool can prove a student used AI, and the schools that handle an accusation well have decided how they behave under uncertainty long before the first case reaches them. Here is the process, and the three questions that come before it.
Suppliers say 13: OpenAI requires it for ChatGPT, and Google opened Gemini in Classroom to all ages in August 2026. But your school holds two more age limits, set by the task and by what an adult can actually see. How to set a line you can defend.
The model behind an approved tool can be retired on sixty days' notice, and your governing body may not meet that often. Approval, the way most schools write it, is a photograph. The product is a film. Here is how to decide when a change means a tool needs approving again.
Most AI champions programs do not fail. They stop, at the point where the next thing needed is a decision rather than a demonstration. The Champion's Ceiling names the four things no champion can do for you, and what a leadership team should do when the program reaches it.
Most new AI leads start with a policy or a training day. Both answer questions the organization has not asked yet. Here is what your first 90 days should actually produce, and the order that makes it hold.
Every AI restriction this term came with a promise of AI literacy instead, and almost none of them said what it means. It is not a syllabus. It is three leadership decisions, and the third one settles the other two.
The question every board asks about AI is how the school compares with others. It is the wrong place to start: a benchmark measures the field, not the job, and the field is not ready either. Here is what to compare instead.
Weekly AI use among teachers has doubled while working hours have not moved. The answer is not a second training day. It is three decisions only a leader can make: a subtraction, a destination and a second attempt.
Entry-level work is being hollowed out rather than abolished. The risk is not that you stop hiring juniors, but that you keep hiring them into jobs that no longer teach them anything. A three-question filter for deciding what to automate.
