How reliable is it?

What it is reliable for

• Drafts built from what you give it: a letter or newsletter from your facts, a summary of a paper you paste, a survey write-up from your figures, a classroom resource from your content, notes and procedures from your notes.
• A consistent shape. Every job sets out what the draft must contain and the checks the model runs before it hands it over.
• Marking gaps instead of guessing. Missing facts come back as [NEED: ...], and anything that depends on guidance you did not paste comes back as [CHECK GUIDANCE] or [CHECK SPEC].
• Flagging the jobs that can become a pupil, staff or legal record, so they stay in a tool your school controls.

What it is not reliable for

Check these yourself, every time:

• Facts the model has to remember: statutory deadlines, attendance codes, exam specifications, dates and weekdays, case studies.
• Figures. A model can invent a number even when told not to, and asking it to check its own work does not reliably catch it. Check every figure against your source.
• Names, owners, dates and promises the school has not agreed.
• Decisions. It never decides an exclusion, a safeguarding referral, a capability outcome or a grade. The person who owns that decision does.

How it was tested

• Jobs drawn at random from every shelf were filled in for two fictional schools and run on a small, free model on an ordinary desktop computer, with nothing sent anywhere. That is a harder test than the larger tools most schools use.
• Each draft was read against what its own prompt asked for, and every fault was traced to its cause. Faults in the prompts were fixed and the jobs run again, forty drafts in all.
• After the fixes every draft was usable, most after some editing, and none needed starting again. The errors that remained are the ones listed above, which is why the rules below exist.
• The guidance named in the prompts was checked against published sources on 20 October 2026. Each job links to the publisher's page, so you always fetch the current edition.

Use it safely

1. Use the AI tool your school has approved, for the purposes it approved. Public chats are only for work with no personal data in it.
2. Run jobs marked Record only in that approved tool. The person who owns the record decides what it says.
3. Paste the source: the guidance named on the job, the specification, your notes or data. A draft is only as good as what you give it.
4. Keep names out where you can. Initials and roles are enough for a draft.
5. Resolve every [NEED] and [CHECK] mark before the draft goes anywhere.
6. Check every figure, date, name and rule against your source yourself.
7. A person with the right role reads and signs off the draft before it is sent, published, filed or used in a meeting.

Signs a draft is not ready

• It states a deadline, code or rule you did not paste.
• It contains a figure you cannot find in your source.
• It names a person, owner or date nobody agreed.
• It uses American terms, or refers to the rules in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
• It decides something a person must decide.

For leaders and data protection officers

Before staff use it:

• Decide which AI tool staff may use and for what, and whether that tool needs a data protection impact assessment.
• Decide where Record jobs may be run, and tell your DSL and HR lead.
• Give staff the seven rules above. They take two minutes to read.
• Review it once a year. Statutory guidance changes, most years in September.

Free-SchoolAI is free, provided as is, with no warranty and no support. Your school decides whether and how to use it.