Staff AI Inquiry

An inquiry into how a school uses AI, carried out with its staff: where AI is strengthening learning, and where it is bypassing it.

An inquiry into how a school uses AI, carried out with its staff, not an inquiry into staff. It starts from the school’s own philosophy and AI policy, then asks one question at every level: where is AI strengthening learning here, and where is it bypassing it?

The aim is hard evidence of how AI is used now, organised by level and by who can see it, so that a school solves the problems it actually has, not ones it assumes.

How it works

Five levels, starting with staff:

1. Senior leaders: strategy, policy, procurement.
2. Middle leaders: curriculum and department practice.
3. Teachers: planning, resources and marking.
4. Lessons: supervised pupil use.
5. Pupils’ own use, declared or hidden.

• Staff only. Short interviews with leaders, two or three optional focus groups and a ten-minute survey. Staff hold the space for pupil voice as far as they can see it. Nothing identifying a pupil is collected.
• The edge of what the school can see. What staff don’t know about pupils’ use is recorded as a finding in its own right.
• Grounded in recognised frameworks. Each level is read against a published scale: the Jisc AI maturity model, Cukurova’s replacement-to-complementarity levels for teachers, and the AI Assessment Scale for pupil use.

What a school gets

• A picture of AI use at every level, set against its own policy.
• The gaps between what is said, permitted and practised.
• A short foresight report on the risks and opportunities AI brings for continuing to improve teaching and learning.

Where it is now

A first inquiry is proposed with a UK secondary school for 2027.