Picture a head with 140 pupils, no IT team and a Thursday evening, who has been told to "sort out AI". She does not need a list of tools. She needs to find out what is already switched on in her building.
That is the answer for a small primary school: audit before you adopt. In a school this size, much of the AI your staff and pupils meet this year will not arrive through a decision you make. It will arrive inside the email, documents and learning accounts you already use, and inside the apps your staff open on their own phones. The head's first job is to see it. The second is to name who answers for it.
What should the head of a small primary school do about AI first?
Find out what is already running, write down who answers for it, and only then look at anything new. The order matters because every other decision depends on it: you cannot approve a tool you do not know is there, and you cannot write a rule about a practice you have not asked about.
A larger school gets this knowledge as a by-product of having an IT team, whose week consists largely of knowing which accounts exist and which features are on. A small primary has to get it another way. In the US the same school is a small elementary with a part-time tech coordinator and a district help desk. The problem is identical, and so is the way in.
Where does AI actually enter a school with no IT team?
Through three doors, and the one most schools watch is the one that matters least. I call this The Three Doors, and I offer it as my suggested way of thinking, not as established research.
The Three Doors is how I suggest a school with no IT team finds where AI actually enters: through the tools the school already has (bundled), the tools staff bring in themselves (brought), and the tools the school decides to adopt (chosen), and a small school should give its limited attention to them in that order.
The bundled door. AI features arrive inside software you already use. In her May 2026 article for the Chartered College of Teaching's Impact journal, Karen Wespieser of Teacher Tapp reports that about four in five teachers use Outlook and more than one in five use Gmail, and notes that this means AI access often exists in schools without anyone having procured it. Nobody in the building decided to adopt anything. The feature is simply there, and nobody has been asked whether it should be.
The brought door. Staff carry AI in on their own devices. The same Teacher Tapp data, from 8,000 to 10,000 teachers surveyed in November and December 2025 and reweighted to the Department for Education's workforce census, found that by autumn 2025 a majority of teachers were using AI weekly for schoolwork. Only 12% had never used it, and non-use was lowest in Key Stage 2, at 8%. Among primary teachers who use it, the commonest tasks were lesson planning (61%), writing reports (55%) and creating images (55%).
Look at that middle figure. A report names a child. The Department for Education's generative AI policy paper states: "It is recommended that personal data is not used in generative AI tools." Over half the primary teachers who use AI are using it for the one task most likely to put a child's details into a box the school has never looked at.
The chosen door. The school selects a tool on purpose. This is where almost all published advice is aimed, including what to require before approving an AI tool, and it deserves the attention it gets. But it is the door a small school opens least often. Staff walk through the other two daily.
What does the evidence say about small schools in particular?
Very little, and what there is points one way. The Ofsted study, "The biggest risk is doing nothing", published on June 27, 2025, interviewed leaders at 21 schools and further education colleges in England that had piloted generative AI early. It found that structures bringing together data, IT and curriculum leads were harder to develop in standalone primary and secondary schools, and that leaders there often set up staff working groups to pool what they knew.
Hold that finding at its true size. The study is small, its schools chose to be early, and Ofsted spoke only to leaders, not to teachers or pupils. It cannot tell you what the typical small primary should do. It can tell you that the schools without a ready-made team built one out of people.
The Department's own support for school and college leaders, updated on May 19, 2026 for the 2026 to 2027 year, includes how to audit current AI use. The page does not address small schools or limited capacity. So the audit is the one move the sources agree on, and no source says how a school with no IT team carries it out. That gap is where the next section sits.
What is the one-email audit?
Send one email to whoever keeps your accounts running, with five questions in it. That might be a managed IT provider, your trust's central team, the local authority, or whoever holds the administrator passwords. These questions are mine, not a statutory checklist.
- Which AI features are switched on in the email, document and learning accounts we already have, for staff and for pupils?
- Can they be switched on or off by group, such as staff only or particular year groups, and who makes the change?
- When staff type into them, where does the text go, and is it kept or used to train anything?
- Which AI sites do our filters allow or block today, and what happens to a site that fits no category?
- Who tells us when a supplier changes what a product does with our data?
Put the answers on one page. If the replies are "we don't know", that is also an answer, and it tells you which door to close first.
Then walk the brought door, by asking rather than policing. At your next staff briefing, ask one question: what have you used AI for since September? Ask for tasks, not tool names. You will learn more in four minutes of honest answers than from a month of blocking, and you will find out whether reports, emails to parents or notes about individual children are going through a chatbot. If you want to understand why staff go round the approved route in the first place, what to do when staff use unapproved tools takes that apart.
What I See in Practice
The person who knows which accounts exist is rarely the head and rarely a teacher. In the small schools I talk with, it is usually the school business manager or the office manager, because they hold the passwords, run the management information system and field the supplier emails. They are also rarely in the room when AI is discussed.
The mistake I see most often is a head giving the autumn to evaluating chatbots for pupils while staff already use assistants to draft reports. It is a natural mistake, because the chosen door is the glamorous one. It leaves the other two open.
I was a Director of Digital Strategy in further education, so I know what a full technology team does for a school day to day: mostly it knows what is switched on. A small primary does not have that team, which is the argument for borrowing its habit rather than its headcount.
How do you build a working group of three?
Three people is enough: the head, the most curious classroom teacher, and the office manager. Ofsted found leaders in standalone schools forming working groups where a fuller structure was hard to build. Yours can be that small. Meet for thirty minutes each half term and look at four lines: what is on in the bundled accounts, what staff say they are bringing, anything you have chosen, and what changed since last time. Name an outside contact, whether the trust's IT lead or your provider, whom the group is allowed to ask.
Someone also has to answer when something goes wrong. In a school this size that is almost always the head, and it helps to say so out loud. Who owns AI strategy explains why the decision cannot be handed to a lead, and how little of the job can.
Do you need an AI policy first?
Not before the audit. A policy written before you know what is switched on describes a school you imagine. The Ofsted study found no consensus among its leaders on whether AI needed a separate policy or belonged inside existing ones such as safeguarding and acceptable use. For a school with no IT team, folding half a page into the documents you already have is a sound place to start, and it is easier to write once you know what the half page has to cover.
This advice has limits. If your school is part of a trust with central IT, your job is to ask the trust the five questions and insist on an answer, not to answer them yourself. And if you have only one hour this month, give it to the staff question about reports, which is where a child's details are most likely to go. Start with whether staff can put student data into ChatGPT, then read where to draw the line on AI-written school reports.
What should a head do before the end of this half term?
Do four things, in this order. Send the five-question email. Ask staff the four-minute question at the next briefing. Invite the office manager to a first thirty-minute meeting. Then write down, on one page, the answers to what is on, what is brought, what is chosen and who answers.
The head from the opening does not need a bigger team. She needs one page that says which doors are open, and a name beside each. If your leadership team is working through how to turn that page into a plan staff will follow, this is the kind of work I support through AI strategy sessions for school leaders. I also write about these questions for more than 44,000 subscribers, and you can join the newsletter.
Sources and further reading
- Karen Wespieser, Teacher Tapp, "From novelty to normal: How teachers are using AI in 2026", Impact, Chartered College of Teaching, May 18, 2026 (survey of 8,000 to 10,000 teachers, November and December 2025).
- Ofsted, "The biggest risk is doing nothing": insights from early adopters of artificial intelligence in schools and further education colleges, June 27, 2025.
- Department for Education, Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, policy paper, first published October 26, 2023, updated August 12, 2025.
- Department for Education, Using AI in education: support for school and college leaders, first published June 10, 2025, updated May 19, 2026.
Dan Fitzpatrick is the founder of The AI Educator, a Forbes contributor and a bestselling author on AI in education. More about Dan.
