Department for Education (DfE)
Distributed toolkit to discuss AI in schools
We are working with DfE to develop a creative engagement toolkit to support participatory sessions with children and young people (ages 10–18) in schools, colleges, youth groups, and community settings. The toolkit will help facilitators gather youth perspectives on generative AI in education, with a focus on what they want technology companies to consider.
See more at https://connectedbydata.org/ai-in-education/
Resources
Between 1st November and 15th December 2025, over 1000 students shared their views through a distributed dialogue on how schools, government and AI firms should be approaching the use of generative AI in education.
The ‘Generative AI in Education: Have your Say’ Workshop in a Box provides adaptable resources for holding discussions with students aged 10 - 18 on benefits and problems of AI in education, supporting deliberation on the issues it raises, and suggesting a range of ways to express feedback.
Between November 3rd and December 15th 2025 a feedback platform is available to submit the outcomes of workshop sessions as an input to the DfE AI in Education Summit taking place in early 2026.
Opinion
Alongside the Generative AI for Education summit in London yesterday, the DfE updated their ‘Product Safety Expectations’ for EdTech developers, and for schools to consider when deciding which tools are safe to use.
Many of the updates reflect discussions from the GenAI in Education: Have Your Say process - offering a powerful mandate from students for these expectations. Check out what students had to say in the video here https://connectedbydata.org/ai-in-education/ or the full report.
“I want to offer another vision of human compatibility in AI: one that embraces a thick and demanding world of human capacity, social complexity, and local politics in place of the thin, pliable, universalizing world of individual preferences.”
Jacob G. Foster; From Thin to Thick: Toward a Politics of Human-Compatible AI. Public Culture 1 September 2023; 35 (3 (101)): 417–430. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742593
The distinction between “thick” and “thin” modes of involving communities around (data and) AI is useful. “Thin” involvement skims off surface-level instincts and data from frictionless transactions, while “thick” involvement demands thoughtful, complex, nuanced and stretching engagement. In reality we need both.
We’ve been creating a small toolkit to help schools, colleges and informal education settings to discuss Generative AI in Education. This blog post reflects on elements of the development process.