How School Staff Can Safely Use AI to Reduce Workload

Teaching Assistants: Supporting Inclusive Education

Teaching assistants play a vital role in supporting pupils’ learning and wellbeing across a range of subjects and activities. Depending on the age group and needs of the children, this support can vary from phonics and reading to maths, creative tasks, and emotional development. Generative AI tools can assist TAs by creating new content such as worksheets, visual aids, simplified texts, and social stories based on the prompts provided by the user.
It’s important to remember that AI is not a substitute for the professional judgement, experience, and care that TAs bring to the classroom. Any AI-generated content should be reviewed to ensure it is appropriate, accurate, and tailored to the specific needs of the pupils. AI can be a helpful tool to save time and spark ideas, but the human touch remains essential in delivering meaningful and inclusive support.

Bespoke Interests

If you are supporting a child who hates maths but has a special interest in trains, use AI to personalise all maths questions into a train context to help engage them with curriculum content. You could also use it to create your own bespoke reward system based on that special interest i.e. train specific reward chart to keep children focused.

Resource Creation

If you are supporting a child who regularly needs to revisit past topics to support their retention, ask the teacher to share the objective or the lesson plan, and AI can generate quizzes, flashcards or visual aids. You can even create colouring sheets with very specific scenarios that could be tailored to individual classes/children.

Language Support

If you have children with English as an Additional Language (EAL), AI can support by creating materials to either simplify language or create resources that help children learn new words. Whether this is in-class support, accessing learning or an out-of-class intervention, there are a range of ways this can support you in helping your students.

Social Stories

Generate personalised social stories to support emotional and behavioural development. Whether these stories are used to deal with a specific friendship issue, something that has arisen within the class or in the wider school or community, AI can personalise Social Stories to match the issue you are dealing with. 

Safe use tip: Choose tools that are GDPR-compliant and offer clear data usage policies.

Administrative Staff: Efficiency & Automation

Administrative staff play a key role in ensuring the smooth running of school operations, from managing communications and data to supporting staff and pupils behind the scenes. Generative AI tools can assist admin teams by helping to draft emails, create reports, summarise meeting notes, organise timetables, and generate templates for letters, forms, or newsletters.

It’s important to recognise that AI is not a replacement for the professional expertise, discretion, and attention to detail that admin staff bring to their roles. Any AI-generated content should be carefully reviewed to ensure it is accurate, appropriate, and aligned with school policies and tone. AI can be a valuable tool to save time and streamline tasks, but human oversight remains essential to maintain quality and consistency.

Email/Letter Templates

You can upload content as part of a prompt and ask AI to make an email in its likeness for a specific event. For example, if you have a template letter about nits but need it to be made more specific for Year 5 parents via email. AI can use the template to match the school’s tone and guidance and create an email in its likeness. The same could be said for school trip letters, photo permission slips ect.

Assess Data Trends

While we are not suggesting uploading personal data into open-source AI tools, if you have anonymised data, AI can be used to assess it for trends. For example, attendance data could be looked at more generally to identify which term sees the highest absence rate. It may then lead to you discovering patterns and trends that you can use to try and resolve that problem.

Newsletter Creation

Similar to the email and letter templates, Newsletters are frequently sent out by schools and have a similar structure. Uploading the template and the content can allow an AI tool to create the newsletter for you or support with streamlining its layout for how you distribute it. For example, if you send your newsletter by email, AI could support making its layout more user-friendly when viewing on a phone. It could also make suggestions that make it easier to read and more accessible for all parents.

Briefing Notes

If you are responsible for taking notes in staff briefings and sending round a follow-up email, you can simply upload your notes to your school’s chosen AI and ask it to summarise them for you. You could even ask it to list action points. 

Task Management

If you have a lot of tasks on the go and a range of looming deadlines, AI can help you prioritise your workload more effectively. It could also help with room bookings and timetable management to manage staff absence.

Safe use tip: Avoid over-reliance on automation—human oversight is essential for sensitive tasks.

The use of AI in classrooms and across school operations offers exciting possibilities but it must be approached with care. By choosing AI tools for teachers and staff that prioritise student safety, data privacy, and educational integrity, schools can reduce workload while enhancing learning. You must use the AI tools in line with your school policies and use your best judgment as professionals to assess whether AI is the most effective tool to complete the task.