AI strategist, author and keynote speaker
Dan Fitzpatrick helps leaders and organisations make confident decisions about AI strategy, readiness, governance and organisational change. He writes for Forbes and is the author of The Educators' AI Guide 2026, The AI Classroom and Infinite Education.
Drawing on 21 years in education as a teacher, senior leader and strategist, he advises leadership teams in the UK and internationally and founded aieducator.tools.
He works with schools as an AI keynote speaker for schools, through school AI strategy consulting and with AI training for schools.
Your biggest AI readiness gap is wherever people already use AI faster than your school has prepared them to. Here is a way to find it, ranked by harm, using 2025 and 2026 survey evidence.
Employers are posting fewer jobs that ask for basic AI skills, and teachers use AI least where a wrong answer lands on a pupil. Here is how to find where your staff stop, and what to train there.
Most new AI leads get a title and no authority, then spend the term answering questions as the school's help desk. Here are four lines to agree in writing first, and a first-term order of work that gives the role something to stand on.
Parents who demand an AI ban usually want an answer to the worry underneath it. Here is the Ten-Day Reply, an answer, a concession and a date, with a template a principal can adapt this week.
A school AI policy that staff can read in one sitting is more likely to be followed than a long one. What to put in it, what to leave to other documents, and the test that tells you whether it works.
Ofqual's AI coursework pack mentions heads of department once and gives them no tasks. Five lines, written before the next deadline, settle what is allowed, what to keep and when a teacher must speak up.
A small primary has no IT team to tell the head what is switched on. Start by finding the three doors AI comes through, send one five-question email, and name who answers for what you find.
Guidance reported in May 2026 lets SENCOs use AI to draft SEND support plans but not to decide a child's needs. The Stranger Test is three questions that sort what a machine can draft from what only the SENCO can write.
A strategy is as much the list of things you decline as the list you pursue. Here are five AI commitments school leaders should say no to this year, a four-question test for deciding, and a one-page register to share.
Only two of the ten sections in a US district AI policy are settled by federal law. Here is which ones, why the best state model policies leave the harder half unwritten, and a ten-section template you can copy.
Every AI policy template hands you finished prose for decisions your school has not made. This one is the complete policy, published in full, with each section marked Settled by law or Yours to decide, and the second set left deliberately unfinished.
Thirty-nine percent of teachers already use AI on pupil reports, and most schools have no rule for it. AI may write the sentences. It may not supply the particulars. Here is the test, and the six lines to settle before this term's reports go home.
