In the first week of September, New York City told roughly 600,000 pupils, two thirds of its roll, that they would not be using generative AI in school this year. Los Angeles, the second largest district in the United States, did the same for every student on a district device within days. In the same week, the Royal Society published a survey of more than 9,000 teachers in England in which only 14% said they were confident across the elements of AI literacy, and only 15% said their school had whole-school guidance.
Put those three stories together and the temptation is obvious. If most staff are not ready and the biggest school systems in the world are pulling back, restriction looks like the safe move. Since the announcements, almost every school leader I have spoken to has asked me some version of the same question: should we?
Maybe. But a restriction is a decision, and it deserves to be made like one. This article is about how.
A ban is a decision, not a default
Restricting pupils' use of AI is a leadership decision with consequences, and it should be made with the same rigour you would apply to introducing it. The uncomfortable truth is that most of the bans I come across in schools are not decisions at all. Nobody chose to restrict. The filter was never opened, the policy was never written, and the school drifted into prohibition because prohibition is what happens when no one decides.
The difference matters because a default cannot be defended. When a parent asks why their child cannot use at school a tool they use every evening at home, "we have not got round to it" is not an answer. Neither is "New York did it."
New York, in fact, has been here before. It blocked ChatGPT on school networks in January 2023 and reversed the decision within four months, as the Brookings Institution documented at the time. What is different in 2026 is that the restriction has been made in the open: with stated reasons, with an exemption for teachers, with five limited pilots in high schools, with twice-yearly AI literacy modules for older students, and with a coalition tasked with reviewing the whole thing during the year. You can disagree with the decision. You cannot say it was not made as one.
Los Angeles is the cautionary contrast. Its moratorium was enacted by senior administrators, and one board member told Education Week she had assumed the district was still operating under last year's policy. Whatever the merits of the restriction, a board learning about it from the press is a governance failure, and the first lesson for anyone watching from a distance.
The three positions a school can take
There are three positions available, not two, and the mistake most leadership teams make is to argue about "ban or allow" when the real choice is between the second and the third.
Prohibition. Pupils may not use generative AI for schoolwork, indefinitely, with no review date. Described plainly, this is a hope that the question will go away. It will not.
A moratorium with an end. Pupils may not use it for a defined period while the school does named work: staff training, safeguarding checks, tool vetting, assessment redesign. There is a date on which the decision is revisited and a body responsible for revisiting it. Both New York and Los Angeles sit here, with committees due to report by the end of the school year.
Staged permission. Pupils may use a short list of approved tools, for named purposes, from a named age or year group, and the list widens as evidence accumulates. This is where Los Angeles was until last week: students aged 13 and over could use approved platforms after completing digital citizenship training.
A prohibition answers the question "may they?". A moratorium answers "not yet, until what?". Staged permission answers "who, for what, and how will we know?". Only the last two are leadership positions, because only the last two commit the school to doing something.
When restricting AI is the right call
Restriction is the right call when the thing you are protecting is specific, the school cannot yet protect it any other way, and you can say when that will change.
The strongest case is with younger children. I have written before about the Handover Question, the one test I ask school leaders to put to every task children are set: if a machine did this for them, what would they lose? For a seven-year-old learning to compose a paragraph or hold a number in their head, the answer is the learning itself. Protecting that is not technophobia. It is knowing what the task is for. New York's decision to draw its line at the end of middle school, and to exempt assistive technology and multilingual learners, is a recognisable version of that logic.
The second case is safeguarding. New York's restriction names companion chatbots specifically, and the UK government has spent this year moving towards restrictions on romantic and companion chatbots for under-18s. A school that has not yet worked out which tools children are talking to, and what those tools say back, has a reason to pause.
The third case is capacity. The Royal Society's survey found that 23% of teachers in England receive no AI support of any kind, and that where both training and guidance exist, teachers are around three times as likely to report full confidence. If your staff cannot yet supervise pupil use well, a moratorium that buys time to change that is defensible. A moratorium that buys time and then wastes it is not.
Restriction is the wrong call when the reason is a headline, when the reason is cheating, or when the reason is that the leadership team cannot agree. Bans do not stop cheating; they move it home, where you cannot see it and cannot teach through it. And a ban adopted to postpone an argument is the worst kind, because the argument is still waiting when the ban is lifted.
The Restriction Test
The Restriction Test is three questions a leadership team must be able to answer before it restricts pupils' use of AI: What exactly are we protecting? What are we giving up to protect it? And what would we need to see before we lifted it? A restriction with three answers is a decision. A restriction without them is a mood.
What exactly are we protecting? The weak answer is "children". The strong answer names the thing: independent composition and handwriting fluency in the early years; the habit of asking an adult rather than a chatbot; pupils' data, which the school has not yet confirmed is safe with the tools in question. If you cannot name it, you cannot tell when it is safe.
What are we giving up to protect it? The weak answer is "nothing". There is always something. Older pupils will leave without supervised practice in a skill their next school, college or employer will assume. The pupils whose parents pay for tools at home will get that practice anyway. Digital Promise's chief executive, Jean-Claude Brizard, put the objection bluntly to Education Week: children of better-off parents will have access regardless, and it is the poorest children who will lose out. The Royal Society found the same gradient in England, where 42% of teachers in schools with the highest proportion of pupils on free school meals said AI was absent from teaching altogether. Write the loss down, so that the restriction is a trade you have chosen rather than a loss you have ignored.
What would we need to see before we lifted it? The weak answer is "we will review it". The strong answer is a date and a list: staff trained and guidance issued; a short approved-tools list agreed; assessment in the affected year groups redesigned so that process and live performance count, not just the product; safeguarding checks on any tool a pupil will talk to. This is the same discipline as the Exit Question I ask of every pilot. A pause with no exit is not a pause. It is a habit.
What Good Looks Like
A restriction done well is short, written down, dated, and accompanied by the work the school will do while it is in force.
As a trustee, I have sat on the other side of this table, and the version of a restriction that a board can support has a consistent shape. It distinguishes pupils from staff: both New York and Los Angeles kept AI in teachers' hands while removing it from students', and the Royal Society's figures show why, because staff need the practice more than anyone. It names its end, or at least its review. It says what the school will do in the meantime, and who owns each piece. It reaches parents and governors before it is announced, not after; one of the loudest complaints in New York came from parents who received the policy after the decision had been made. And it keeps teaching about AI while restricting the use of it. A ban on use is not a ban on learning, and a school that confuses the two ends up with children who have never used AI at school and never understood it either.
Having trained educators in more than 30 countries, I have watched this cycle more than once: the ban, the quiet workaround, the reversal. The schools that come out of it well are not the ones that chose the right side. They are the ones that could explain their choice, and changed it when the evidence said to.
What to do this term
The first move is to write down the three answers, because a leadership team that can produce them in a page has already done most of the work.
Then separate staff from pupils, and make sure any restriction on the second is not accidentally a restriction on the first. Put the review date in the diary and name who owns it. Tell governors and parents before you announce, and give them the three answers rather than the headline. And if you choose a moratorium, spend it: the Royal Society's finding that training plus guidance triples staff confidence is the clearest description I have seen of what the time is for.
Above all, notice that whichever position you take, you are still left with the strategy question. A restriction only prevents; it does not tell anyone what AI is for in your school. That answer still has to be written, and the schools that use a pause to write it will be the ones that lift the pause well.
If your leadership team or board is working through this decision now, this is the kind of question I help schools and trusts settle through governance and strategy sessions: not which side to take, but how to take a side you can defend.
Dan Fitzpatrick is the founder of The AI Educator, a school trustee, and has trained more than 150,000 educators across 30 countries. More about Dan.
