Ask five members of staff in your school what their AI policy is and you’ll likely get five different answers.
One says AI is fine for brainstorming, another bans it outright and the others may not have thought about it. As technology moves fast, many schools are scrambling to figure out what their stance on AI is.
Meanwhile, students are left guessing, assignment by assignment, whether using Copilot will get them praised or penalised.
Ultimately, this is a communication problem.
But, the good news is that there are several ways to fix it.
In this guide, we share our best tips for setting expectations around AI usage, including Microsoft 365’s built-in Student AI Guidelines tool.
Why does clarity around AI usage in assignments matter?
For school leaders juggling Ofsted readiness, safeguarding and budget pressures, “how are we handling AI?” is no longer a question you can avoid.
Ofsted, trust boards and parents increasingly expect schools to demonstrate that AI use is being actively managed, rather than just tolerated. A visible, consistent approach to AI on assignments is a simple, evidence-based way to show that governance is in place.
In the 2025 spring term, Ofsted investigated how 21 ‘early adopter’ schools and further education (FE) colleges were using artificial intelligence (AI).
In that report, one headteacher says:
“We’re only just at the start of this AI era and the biggest risk is doing nothing and assuming that you can just continue as is.”
For teachers already stretched thin, clarity here means fewer grey areas, fewer accusations of unfair marking, and fewer awkward conversations about whether a piece of work “feels AI-written.” Setting the expectation up front, inside the assignment itself, does a lot of that work automatically.
About Microsoft’s Student AI Guidelines
Student AI Guidelines let a teacher attach one of four preset expectation levels to an assignment in Microsoft Teams:
- Full AI use allowed: Students can use Copilot for any part of the task.
- AI for editing only: Students write their own work first, then use Copilot to polish, revise or check grammar.
- AI for brainstorming only: Students can use Copilot to generate ideas or explore a topic, but the final work has to be their own.
- No AI: The assignment is completed without AI assistance at all.
Whichever level is chosen, students see it clearly when they open the assignment, alongside a short description of what’s expected. For the levels that permit some AI use, students aged 13 and over get a direct button to launch Copilot Chat, provided your IT team has switched Copilot on for your tenant.
Warning: Student AI Guidelines are a communication tool, not a lock. They don’t technically prevent a student from opening ChatGPT in another tab. What they do is put the expectation in front of the student at the exact moment they need it, in the same place as the instructions and the rubric, rather than buried in a handbook nobody reads.
How to set an AI guideline on an assignment in Microsoft Teams
Here’s the process, step by step:
- Open your class team and go to Assignments.
- Select New assignment (or open an existing draft) and fill in the usual details – title, instructions, due date and rubric.
- Find the AI guidelines option on the right-hand side of the assignment builder and choose the level that fits the task: Full AI use, Editing only, Brainstorming only, or No AI.
- Edit the suggested wording if you need to. Each level comes with default text, but you can rewrite it to match your school’s own terminology or policy. a
- Check Student preview before you assign it. This shows you exactly what the student will see, including the guideline and the Copilot launch button (if applicable).
- Assign as usual. Every student on that assignment sees the same guideline and there’s no way to set different expectations for different students on one task.
See more on Microsoft’s Education blog.
Tip: If most of your assignments follow the same rule – for example, your department defaults to “No AI” for anything done in exam conditions – you can set that guideline as the default for all new assignments you create, and simply override it on the occasions you want to allow more.
Customise your own AI rules in Microsoft
The single most useful part of this feature is also the easiest to overlook: the suggested text for each level is editable.
Microsoft’s default wording is generic by design, because it has to work for every school. But yours doesn’t have to be.
If your school uses different language around AI use (or has its own framework), you can update the text to reflect that.
Making AI policies consistent across a school or Multi Academy Trust
It’s worth treating AI guidelines as part of a wider AI readiness exercise, not a one-off setting each teacher configures independently.
A few things worth putting in place before you roll this out school-wide:
- Agree your guideline wording centrally, so “AI for brainstorming only” means the same thing in Year 8 English as it does in Year 11 Computer Science.
- Decide your default level for new assignments, and who has permission to override it.
- Check Copilot is enabled for the relevant year groups.
- Pair the feature with staff training, so teachers understand it’s a communication tool rather than a technical restriction, and know what to do if a student ignores the guideline anyway.
This is exactly the kind of groundwork we help schools and Multi-Academy Trusts get right as part of our AI Readiness support, making sure the policies, permissions, and platform are properly aligned before staff start relying on AI tools day to day, whether that’s Copilot in Teams or AI features surfaced through your intranet., making sure the policies, permissions, and platform are properly aligned before staff start relying on AI tools day to day, whether that’s Copilot in Teams or AI features surfaced through your intranet.
It’s also worth treating your AI policy wording like any other governance document, rather than a one-off decision.
If you’re already using SharePoint to manage HR or safeguarding policies, the same approach works well here: assign an owner, set a review date, and get an automatic reminder before it’s outdated. We covered exactly how to set that up in our guide to automating your SharePoint document review process – it takes minutes to apply to an AI policy document, and it means nobody’s teaching from information that’s a year out of date.
Before you switch on Copilot for students
Remember that the Copilot launch button only appears on assignments for students aged 13 and over, and only once your IT team has enabled Copilot for your tenant. That’s a bigger decision than it sounds, and it’s worth getting right before students start clicking that button.
Copilot only ever works with content it already has permission to see, which means it’s only as safe as your existing SharePoint and OneDrive permissions are. If sharing links, staff permissions or old sites haven’t been tidied up, Copilot can just as easily surface something it shouldn’t.
We’ve written about this in more detail in our guide to securing Microsoft 365 for Copilot, which covers the risks in plain terms and what “properly secured” looks like., which covers the risks in plain terms and what “properly secured” looks like.
What’s more, before you flip the switch, it’s also worth running the SharePoint Copilot Readiness Assessment, a free, built-in tool in the SharePoint Admin Centre that scans your whole environment for oversharing, orphaned sites and broken permissions. It’s a quick way to catch the kind of hidden risks that would otherwise only surface once staff and students are already relying on Copilot day to day.
Setting a guideline on an assignment takes seconds. Getting the wording, the defaults, the staff understanding and the underlying Microsoft 365 security right across a whole school takes a bit more planning.
If your school or trust is thinking through what a joined-up approach to AI should look like, across Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365, get in touch with our team to talk through where to start.
