Buying, governing and evaluating AI in schools
Headteachers, trust and college leaders, governors, ministry directors
The cost of building software has collapsed. Nothing in how schools buy, govern or evaluate it has adjusted. The deciding variable this decade is not capability but governance: who owns the data, who can audit the model, who holds the evidence, and who is able to say no.
The learning evidence points the same way. A 2026 rapid review of research on young people and generative AI concludes that outcomes are set less by whether AI is used than by how everything around its use is configured: the learner, the tool design, the task, the role of teachers and peers, and the assessment. Used well it can support reflection and revision. Used carelessly it invites answer-seeking, dependence and unchecked output.
Schools are not naive buyers. They are structurally disadvantaged. Procurement precedes evidence, and by the time evidence arrives the contract has renewed. If institutions respond to cheap software by buying and building more without a shared governance layer, fragmentation does not improve. It compounds.
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