The DfE's New AI Guidance Is Now Live: 5 Things Every School Needs This Term

Schools went back this term under a quietly different set of rules. Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 — the DfE's core safeguarding guidance — came into force on 1 September 2026, and for the first time it says something explicit about AI, not just data protection in general terms.

If you haven't looked at it yet, here's what's actually changed, what the DfE now expects schools to have in place, and — separately — what Ofsted has said it will and won't look at.

What actually changed in KCSIE 2026

The new guidance, "Using AI in education settings," was developed with the Chiltern Learning Trust and the Chartered College for Teaching. It sits inside the online safety section of KCSIE, and it names generative AI specifically as a risk factor when schools are assessing contact and conduct concerns — alongside the more familiar online safety categories.

The underlying principle is straightforward: AI use in a school should stay teacher-led. Staff are expected to verify the accuracy of anything AI produces before it's used with pupils, and normal data protection discipline applies to any AI tool in the building, the same as it would to any other system handling pupil data.

The five things the DfE says schools need

Strip away the detail and the guidance comes down to five concrete requirements:

1. A written position on AI — a standalone policy, or a clear section within an existing policy. Not a verbal understanding among staff.

2. Evidence that staff have been trained — a record that training happened, not just an assumption that it did.

3. A decided and communicated stance on pupil use — what's allowed, what isn't, and for which year groups, written down and shared.

4. Confirmation from your filtering and monitoring provider on how they handle AI-related content and traffic.

5. Normal data protection discipline, applied specifically to whichever AI tools are actually in use across the school.

None of these are complicated on their own. But most schools will find they've got one or two in reasonable shape and a couple that haven't been touched at all.

Where most schools will fall down: the training evidence

A policy is the easy part — it can be adapted from a template in an afternoon. The part that actually gets tested is evidence: can you show that training genuinely happened, who attended, what it covered, and when.

In practice, most schools have done one of two things: nothing formal at all, or a brief mention in a staff meeting that wouldn't hold up as "evidence" if anyone asked to see it. That's the gap that tends to surface first — not because schools haven't thought about AI, but because training has stayed informal while the expectation around it has just become explicit and written down.

Ofsted is a separate question — don't conflate the two

It's worth being clear-eyed here: Ofsted has said directly that it is not inspecting AI use as a standalone item. There's no box to tick and no requirement to demonstrate AI use during an inspection.

What inspectors do look at is impact — whether curriculum is being delivered with intent and consistency, whether decisions are being made in pupils' interests, and whether staff workload is being managed in a way that supports retention and wellbeing. If AI is in use somewhere in that picture, inspectors may consider its effect on those outcomes — but it's the outcome being judged, not the tool.

So there are genuinely two separate questions for this term. "Are we compliant with the DfE's AI guidance" is about paperwork and training evidence, and it has a term-start deadline attached to it in all but name. "Will Ofsted flag our AI use" is a different question entirely, and the honest answer is: only if it's getting in the way of the things Ofsted was always going to look at anyway.

What this looks like in practice this term

A short, practical list, rather than another policy document nobody reads:

• Put the AI position in writing — even one page — and name an owner for it, typically the DSL or a digital lead.

• Book and document a staff training session specifically on safe, effective AI use. Keep a simple record: date, attendees, what was covered.

• Decide the pupil-use stance and publish it somewhere staff and parents can actually find it.

• Email your filtering and monitoring provider directly and ask how they handle AI-related content. Keep the reply on file.

• Review which AI tools are genuinely in use across the school, and check each one sits within your existing data protection arrangements.

The training evidence point is usually the one that's hardest to manufacture after the fact — it has to have actually happened, with a record to show for it.

If staff training evidence is the item on this list you can't tick off yet, that's exactly where we help. Orion Forge runs practical AI training sessions for school staff — the kind that leaves you with a genuine record to point to, not just a policy document.

The short version

KCSIE 2026 has made five things explicit that most schools were treating as optional. None of them are hard individually, but training evidence is where the paper trail usually runs out. Ofsted isn't inspecting AI directly — so this term's real task is simpler than it looks: get the five things in writing, with evidence behind them, and let the rest follow from that.